I've learned that keeping any rights to commercially developed software is unlikely unless you have some kind of weight in the business community.
If you're being paid to develop that software, then that seems fair enough to me.
The trouble is when employers go beyond that. In employment relationships, and only IME of course, a lot of employers' lawyers default to inserting clauses into the employment contract that say the company owns everything you do. Often, there is nothing limiting this to things you do as part of your job, so it includes the blockbuster movie script and novel you wrote in your spare time as well, and certainly programming-related things like any work you'd like to contribute to an OSS project. Obviously this covers the employer unambiguously in the event of any dispute, but screws the employee.
The interesting thing is that, again IME, many employers will accept that this isn't a fair deal and will be willing to adjust the wording to something more balanced, if you challenge the deal before signing. A few won't change their standard contract, but there is such a strong correlation between those I would/wouldn't be comfortable working for and those who are/aren't willing to make such a change that this is now one of my two "acid tests" when interviewing for a programming job. (The other, if anyone is curious, is whether they are willing to show me their code and that code looks respectable. Again, places that decline to do this or where the existing code quality is poor tend to have other weaknesses as well.)
But in any case, that may or may not apply here, and I strongly agree with those who say that if this is in doubt and may become relevant then the OP should get a real lawyer to look at the exact contract being offerred.
I keep hearing how FOSS is the way all software is heading. However the problem is it does not address niche markets.
I disagree. I would argue that substantial, high quality FOSS — good enough to rival traditional commercial software — has only developed in certain niche markets.
It's not hard to see why: lots of geeks want programming tools and media players and basic office software and communications tools and an OS to run it all on. You can build up a critical mass of skilled volunteers to get such projects up to a decent level in a reasonable period of time.
However, in either markets that aren't really geek niches (such as the boring business software that companies rely on for their administration) or markets that require substantial resources other than just geeks hacking away (such as game development), there is neither a significant body of useful FOSS at present, nor any indication that such will appear any time before the sun runs out of power. In the first case, there is no particular incentive for geeks to give up their time to build boring stuff if they're not being paid to do it, and in the latter case most geeks don't have either the time or the skills required to do a good job without collaborating with other professionals (who will expect to be paid for their own contribution).
So, since FOSS doesn't look like being a particularly useful model for commercial development in these areas, and in the geek niches software is already being given away for free by others so there isn't much scope for making money developing competing FOSS products, I tend to agree with the article's premise: FOSS just isn't particularly useful as a basis for building a business.
I had a similar reaction to you. The MVC idea came about when Smalltalkers wanted to bring some structure to programming interactive UIs, and the separation of concerns matched the way their interactions worked. Web applications have different requirements, particularly because of the performance/safety/security trade-offs inherent in the server/browser separation. Why should an architecture such as MVC be expected to hold up in its original form? It's designed to solve a different problem.
I was also somewhat surprised by article's fairly black-and-white position that using multiple languages when developing a large-scale project is a bad thing. Sure, using multiple general-purpose programming languages when each has similar characteristics is a bit pointless, and other things being equal it would be better if we didn't have to. But I don't think the problem is using one language on the server and another on the client; it's just that as web development gets more serious, web developers are discovering the same things that desktop and server-side developers learned a while ago: most programming languages are far from ideal in one respect or another, and make it surprisingly difficult to do your job efficiently while still generating correct, fast, safe code. For example, adopting languages that emphasize lightweight syntax and dynamic typing can help you to build quickly on a simple prototype. However, it also means you're also going to take the hit on things like not converting strings properly, where a language with a stronger, static type system would have provided tools to prevent such errors ever reaching production and showing garbage in your client's browser.
Nothing has more bugs than stuff written in the 'web languages'. The current slashdot home page has 91 SGML parser errors and 1 warning, 225 HTMLTidy warnings, and 40 errors via the W3C markup validation service.
And yet it works. Were it written in C/C++, it would generate a segmentation violation or a buffer overflow for each of these errors. That's another reason to use web programming languages: they help mitigate the damage caused by incompetent programmers.
While I take your point, I think perhaps you are missing the GP's. Saying that Slashdot "works" despite the bugs is rather generous: of the web sites I visit with significant frequency, Slashdot is borked to the point of being unusable more than all of the others combined: either the page display is so broken that it is unreadable, or it just returns an error code to my browser when I try to visit a page. Many other web sites I use, including such illustrious and high volume sites as the BBC News pages, also fail with irritating regularity. In contrast, despite all the bitching about segfaults and memory leaks and all that jazz, exactly one of the desktop applications I use on a regular basis crashes often enough that I can remember the last time it happened. Ironically, that's the one with a pseudo-webby UI.:-)
Of course, these things don't take out the whole computer, but in most browsers Javascript screw-ups can take out the whole browser (or leave you vulnerable to pranks like the endless dialog box trick, which is effectively the same thing). This is a royal PITA if you've got multiple tabs open on multiple sites. A browser typically doesn't have the kind of fine control and failure handling of a full-blown OS, yet by developing web applications one inherently assumes that the reliability of the browser as delivery vehicle will be sufficient.
and you'd pay no taxes if the UK (sorry, Ingerlund) left the EU?
I'd pay significantly less tax.
What "arbitrary legal restrictions"? Is the UK still a democracy? If it is then the populations have given their consent. You disagree with the decision of the majority, that's your problem, not ours.
The UK is not a democracy, and hasn't been for a long time. The population hasn't even had a vote on the current administration, never mind given its consent. The party with an absolute majority in Parliament received the support of only 22% of voters at the last general election, and lost the popular vote in England. Major policy decisions that affect England only have been pushed through using MPs from the other nations who have devolved the issue concerned to their regional government. The majority of people have never agreed with things like the weights and measures regulations, so much so that the government had to get special arrangements made for things like pints of beer and milk. In short, I don't know where you get this idea that our government is representative and has a popular mandate. These things are patently not true.
So you don't want to pay taxes, I should cry?
You seem to start from the premise that paying taxes at all is ethical. That's odd: if anyone else came and took thousands of pounds of your money under threat of force, I'm pretty sure most people would consider that theft.
Taxes may (or may not) be a necessary evil, but they are certainly not the natural way of things, and the old saying "no taxation without representation" that made at least some moral case for using taxes seems to be overlooked in your argument. I'm as charitable as the next guy (actually, I discovered that statistically speaking I'm considerably more charitable than the average citizen) but I'm quite capable of deciding which causes to support with my hard-earned cash without unelected bureaucrats doing it for me, thanks.
I find it strange that you so strongly defend an inherently corrupt regime (the EU) and challenge anyone who is being forced to support it against their will (but without actually providing a single objective argument in its favour anywhere in this discussion). I can only assume that you are either someone who does very well out of EU rules and/or subsidies but lacks any practical or moral argument to justify that support, or a troll.
"Happy if subsidies I get > taxes I pay" is a stupid way of deciding whether you're winning on a deal, whether it's the UK or the EU.
Why? It seems like a pretty reasonable starting point to me. If it comes out the wrong way around, then clearly the deal isn't worth it unless it offers something more valuable as well.
Remember that a great deal of the policies affected here are simply compulsory redistribution of wealth, and many of the others impose rather arbitrary legal restrictions on populations without their consent. Why should any taxpayer give up their hard-earned money to support such things?
I didn't vote for union with Scotland, and frankly, I wish they'd take their separation to its logical conclusion. That way the English can stop subsidising their economy so their devolved regional government can give out all kinds of benefits to their own people that the rest of us don't enjoy, and Scottish MPs can stop voting for our undemocratic government's unpopular policies on England-only issues in Parliament, knowing that their own constituents won't have to feel the consequences.
And as for your "citation needed": just go and look up the amount of net subsidy the UK gives to the EU each year (it's second only to Germany) on any news site you like, and watch how the figures have changed over the years, particularly when you take into account TB giving up our rebate deal (I love that term, as if it wasn't a small fraction of our own money they were so generously giving back to us) and therefore effectively multiplying up the subsidy we give substantially. You can find current figures on sources as obvious as Wikipedia, or historical data on the UK government's web site by looking up past budget information.
I'm not sure. Maybe I missed voting for it, or maybe it was just the explanation of why a closer union always seems to cost more money for me and my fellow taxpayers...
Actually most of the European directives go in the direction of ensuring free trade, freedom and democracy.
I don't really see how freedom and free trade are helped by rules that require local shops in my country to give up labelling using well-understood units that have been common since forever and instead use metric units that neither the shopkeepers nor many of their customers understand. (They're still allowed to use the old-fashioned units, but only very small labels, and they must use the metricised ones prominently.)
Nor do I see how regulations that require throwing away large amounts of perfectly good food because it is the "wrong shape" are helpful for your stated goals. Even the EU has worked this out now and is working to change the rules, but it's taken decades of madness and a world food shortage to drive the point home.
All these directives need to go before the European parliament which is democratically elected.
The European Parliament is an impotent pretense, and pretty much always has been. It's the Council/Commissioners who have most of the real power, and they aren't directly elected. In fact, your next statement...
The European council is indeed made of national ministers which are not necessarily elected, however they represent the majority in their country of origin.
...couldn't be more wrong. My own country's national government has no popular mandate, and the current executive were not even elected to their current offices. The people we send to Europe are those who, even in this local undemocratic system, still couldn't manage to get themselves elected, and the rules they impose on us in return are those which, even in the local undemocratic system, the national government could not force through.
The proposed constitution would have given more weight to the parliament and less to the council, which is probably good. This is not the reason it was rejected.
I'm not commenting on the Constitution/Reform Treaty, rather on the undemocratic process by which adoption was proposed in each case, and the telling fact that after the former was rejected too many times by the people, the people were denied any say on the matter in the latter case (except for the Irish, whose own Constitution prevented their government from abusing them the way everyone else's did).
Your post illustrates the fact that in Europe member states like to blame Europe for all the ills of their economy.
I think you misunderstand. It is not what Europe does that I was commenting on here. It was the fact that my own country gives several billion to the unaudited European slush fund each year, much of which is effectively claimed by certain other large EU countries who have their own sources of income. What do we get in return for spending more on them than on several entire government departments' annual budgets?
However in crisis times everyone thinks the Euro and its stability is grand and the necessity to harmonize financial policies is a definite bonus.
Which might be a more compelling argument to me if my country used the Euro, but we don't.
Without the European framework it would be a free-for-all, fuck-your-neighbour disaster.
It may have escaped your attention, but despite all the political handshaking and nice press conferences, many countries both within and outside the EU have been screwing their neighbours in recent months if they thought it would improve the situation at home, and the moderately successful agreements that are starting to overcome that tendency have nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with multilateral discussions between the most economically powerful nations, whom everyone else essentially has to follow if the big players agree.
OK, but if you're going to play that card, you have to accept that to have a work to copy that way in the first place, it has to have got into someone's home. If they bought a legitimate copy, then personally I think however they use it themselves and privately should constitute fair use (and, to varying degrees in different jurisdictions, the law often works this way already). However, what we're talking about here is making illegal copies over the Internet. That's hardly private, particularly on the part of the person providing the copy to people they've never met before who connect to their computer and ask for a copy of something. The fact that copies can grow exponentially this way, independent of any compensation for the people who did all the work, is exactly the problem here.
You seem awfully sure of which rights are important, which aren't, and what order everything goes in. That's remarkable, considering that lawyers and philosophers have spent centuries debating such points, and to this day there are fundamentally opposed points of view with widespread support.
As for the state granting artificial monopolies: that is the entire point of copyright. It's very easy to condemn that, but such evidence as we have suggests that without that incentive, a lot of that "culture" wouldn't be there for people to enjoy in the first place. It's not as though copyright is worth anything to those who don't create and share useful works, nor restricting anyone who doesn't have that work to copy in the first place.
So I guess we should just legalise printing counterfeit money, then?
That's the funny thing about these simplistic arguments about enforcement: when you start to consider things like ethics and consequences, most people will act responsibly voluntarily, and you can concentrate any enforcement efforts on those who act selfishly at the expense of others. So it goes with any law, and this area is no different.
The problem with copyright is that right now, because effective action hasn't been taken against abusive Big Media companies who were themselves breaking rules on things like price fixing and competitive behaviour with apparent impunity, a lot of people feel no sympathy and shaft those companies in return. This has the unfortunate side effect that the little guys who rely on the same laws to pay the rent and who haven't been abusing customers en masse also get screwed.
It would be better if the copyright laws were rewritten with a more realistic fair use (or whatever your local version is called) concept, and people were educated about the economic realities of content production so they actually had a clue about when they were being screwed and when they were paying a fair price. As legal downloads have demonstrated, given such information, most people will play fair and be honest, as long as the people they are dealing with do likewise.
The EU doesn't have jurisdiction over every elements of members' law, but safekeeping democracy and liberties in all of its member states is part of its charter.
Which is ironic, given that the big decisions made at EU level are made by politicians who are not directly elected to those posts (and not infrequently, they are those who could not credibly remain in government in their own countries after the mess they made of things back home). Because of this, the EU is often used by national governments who want to push an unpopular agenda that they can't credibly do locally, by driving it through in Europe where there is no popular vote, and then claiming back home that they have to implement things because "European rules say so". Moreover, the EU takes a staggering amount of money from some of its member states to subsidise the others, but this direct financial support does not seem to result in any greater bargaining power for those states, and the EU hasn't managed to get its accounts audited and signed off for 14 years.
In other words, if you think the EU has anything to do with democracy, I'm afraid you're completely delusional. It happens to have produced one or two useful sets of rules on areas like human rights, but it's produced a whole heap of bad laws on just about everything else, and charged us a pretty penny for the privilege. It was never supposed to be a United States of Europe, just an economic agreement for mutual benefit, but the vested interests and empire builders at its heart have turned it into far more than that. The fact that the only thing that stopped the EU Constitution^WReform Treaty going through was the Irish no vote in a referendum, because no other member states' national governments would actually allow their people a referendum with the negative (for them) outcome so clearly predictable, tells us all we need to know of European democracy.
In some parts of the UK, especially in rural areas, BT is indeed the only provider.
I think you should post some evidence to back up that claim. They may be the only guys who will run the hardware to your home, but is there some reason the usual local loop unbundling set-up doesn't apply and other ISPs can't provide the access over BT lines?
For what it's worth, I left BT for PlusNet a few years ago, but then left PlusNet a couple of years ago when their formerly quite decent service had started to suck. Unless they've got very much better again — and you're the first satisfied customer I've found in recent months, while several of my office colleagues have also left them — there are better offers out there.
Also, as far as I'm aware, it's the ISP part of BT who are messing around with Phorm. Other ISPs who happen to be using a BT line as the carrier for their broadband service shouldn't be affected AFAICS.
If they were actually serving up content with ads inserted (which, as far I can see, isn't actually what's happening here, so this is hypothetical) then there are arguments on grounds of both copyright infringement through creating derivative works and the moral right of the author not to have their work subject to derogatory treatment. This question has also been raised in the context of sites that take Usenet posts and republish them with, for example, those irritating in-line ads inserted. As far as I'm aware, there has been no test case in the UK as yet to determine for sure whether the arguments are sound.
While what you write is true to some extent, that doesn't make it a good thing or something to be supported. Evolution of a language over time is one thing; just plain getting it wrong and saying something you don't mean is another, and there comes a point where the errors are sufficiently misleading that you are no longer communicating effectively.
See also the current tendency, particularly from our friends in the US, to drop the word "not" and thus reverse the meaning of a sentence. I've seen businesses fail over that sort of mistake...
I've met plenty of people that are unwilling to listen to a good answer from a young person because the young person is young and by extension inexperienced.
There are such people around, and yes, they are fools.
But that young person is closer to school, meaning they learned from not just your mistakes but the mistakes of the industry over the past 30 years and very likely the youngsters were playing with real-world code long before they ever could have counted it experience. [...] Plenty of kids getting out of school now have been writing stuff since I started, have no "professional" experience, but have been cutting their teeth on open source for years.
You've made several interesting (but bad) assumptions there. You have assumed that theoretical knowledge from school is more valuable than practical knowledge from industry; this is not necessarily so, particularly in a field such as programming. You also implicitly assume that the youngsters had real-world experience playing with code from before their formal careers started — but for some reason the older, more experienced programmers didn't? Finally, you have assumed that experience gained working on an OSS project directly translates to value in a workplace, though each requires different skills beyond the basic programming stuff. Ironically, as someone who was like you a few years ago but is older and hopefully a little wiser now, I would say these sorts of assumptions are typical of the mistakes caused by a lack of professional experience.:-)
See also the psychology of assessing your own ability: almost everyone would think they are better than they really are in the absence of more objective data from other sources, and worse, the more confident you are in your own superiority, the more likely it is that you are mistaken. You might also like to look up the old paper from IBM about how productive software developers of certain ages typically are when considered on merit. It makes painful reading, whatever your age, but it's an eye-opener.
If posting pictures of an automobile that I own is infringement does that mean Toyota can sue municipalities who use red light cameras for copyright infringement?
Or every used car magazine, web site and newspaper listings page in history, for that matter?
That could be quite fun to watch, actually. I'm betting on the entire western world's media. Any takers?
Respectfully, I believe you are missing the point.
You can try to be as objective as possible in your experimentation, by eliminating potential sources of error where you see them. But that does not mean you can ever find an absolute truth. By definition, the scientific method is based on the premise of falsifiability: your theories are only ever as sound as your latest experiment, and no matter how many times you may repeat that experiment and get consistent results, you never know in absolute terms that your theory is complete and correct such that future experiments will always yield the same result. Deities, stealthy aliens or undetected cosmic rays may be manipulating your experiment every time and one day not be there any more, for all you know, or can ever know. The only absolute truths are those axioms that we can define to be true, such that no experimental validation is required; this is what separates mathematics from science.
I'm not really sure what all this has to do with game piracy, though. I would have said the use (or otherwise) of DRM was more a question of ethics, as is how to deal with people who copy games illegally. Any legal system based on the use of courts is ultimately just trying to make the best informed decision it can under the circumstances, which is why we have standards of evidence to guide how much uncertainty is considered acceptable given the implications of the possible outcomes of a case.
Fair use is not very useful when media companies do not respect it before making takedown requests and legal accusations.
OK, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm betting there are several orders of magnitude more infringing copies, with a significant proportion of them actually damaging, than there are inappropriate takedown requests.
The average person can't afford the legal process to defend their use of 15 seconds of a Beatles tune in their home movie.
And if there were a pattern of abuses of this legal dilemma to take down 15 second clips of Beatles tunes, that would be a concern, but as far as I can tell no such pattern has been observed. People around here are quick to highlight the occasional absurd case, and of course the legal system should deal with those fairly (which is not to say that it always does at present), but people around here are also very quick to make very lawyer-esque arguments in defence of people who are almost certainly breaking the law (which might be a reasonable principle in a specific court case, but turns a blind eye to the entire problem as a generalisation).
I think that there will always be plenty of people wanting to create, and there will be plenty of creative ways to market and profit off of those creations regardless of copyright law. But nobody knows for sure.
No-one knows for sure, but given that nothing is stopping such people from adopting other models at the moment, we can certainly have a hunch. Compare the field of OSS to what the commercial, copyright-driven world has produced. Compare singalongs on YouTube to even heavily produced pop records, never mind serious music. Compare the writing of the average blogger to even the worst professionally edited textbooks. Compare hobbyist TV to Hollywood blockbusters and major TV shows. There simply isn't any evidence that the freebie, hobbyist, not-paying-the-rent kind of creativity can generate even close to the same volume or quality of material that you can get when people can do it as their day job, and there are to my knowledge no alternative business models that represent more than a statistical blip in any of these fields.
I am quite open to evidence to the contrary, but I seem to wind up posing this question quite frequently in these discussions, and the best anyone seems to come up with is that a small number of very high profile OSS projects made a bit of money (though, as a recent article demonstrated, all of them put together earned less in a year than various major software houses make alone in a single day).
For what it's worth, I quite like the idea that creative people could make a decent living without relying on old-fashioned, copyright-based models. I would love for you to prove me wrong and cite some evidence of some creative underground that is building up the same kind of strength that the old school outfits have. But right now, I just don't see it.
I could say your post was just a "the world is changing, now we need copyright to be defended or culture will suffocate" diatribe, of the sort that also shows up in every Slashdot discussion.
Yes it is, but mine is consistent with basic ethics (considering the result if everyone acts the same way, rather than one group supporting another), empirical evidence (such as the observation above), and following the arguments to their logical conclusion (not conveniently overlooking the implications for future incentives to create and share works, if works that are available now are taken out of the copyright that was promised when the works were released). A naive "everything should be free" argument does not seem to be consistent with any of these things.
I can predict the response to this on Slashdot, but I'm going to say it anyway: I didn't think this piece was particularly clear and thoughtful. In fact, I found it remarkably naive and ill-considered.
For one thing, it makes no distinction between the principle of copyright and the current application in US law. I would agree that several of the current aspects of US law are broken (the absurd statutory damages being perhaps the most obvious example, with the anti-circumvention provisions the neutralise fair use a close second; failing to prosecute Big Media for either its effective price fixing behaviour or its effective barratry is a related failing). But that doesn't undermine the basic principle of copyright.
Speaking of fair use... Oh, no, he didn't. In fact, the term wasn't even mentioned in the article. Almost all of the casual and non-damaging copying that most people consider reasonable should just be classes as fair use (or your jurisdiction's local equivalent) in any sensible implementation of copyright. Personally, I rather like the simple fair use principle that once you've got a legitimate copy of a work, you are free to do with that work as you wish yourself, but the right to duplicate and share it is what is restricted by copyright law. I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable alternative approaches. None of these was considered by the article, either to the extent that this is already the situation (particularly in the US, which actually has more liberal fair use provisions than most places) or as a potential improvement to the copyright framework.
Then there is the small matter of the Internet, YouTube, etc. While this may be a "perfect storm" for copyright infringers, the article gives absolutely no thought to the people who create the works, some of whom are being ripped off on an unprecedented scale as a result of those same facilities. Other artists are trying to take advantage of the Internet to establish business models where for once the artist gets most of the benefit from their work rather than the middlemen, which of course is completely undermined in a system where everyone is sharing the work and never paying anything for it. There is no constructive suggestion in the article for how to ensure fair compensation for those artists producing work that others apparently enjoy, nor any acknowledgement that legitimising ripping off the artists by adjusting copyright law might have a negative effect on rate of production and quality in future. These problems will just magically disappear and the rent for the artists' homes will grow on trees in Doctorowland, presumably.
There was a rather strong claim in there about the majority of people on the Internet illegally sharing files, too, but it cites no supporting evidence, and conflicts with various real research that has been cited in previous Slashdot discussions on the subject.
As for killing off YouTube and such, there is again no consideration that such a service might be run for mutual benefit by all concerned, by collaborating with content producers rather than openly ripping them off. Heck, this already happens to some extent: even various Big Media outlets acknowledge the advertising benefits they can potentially gain from supporting such services in a constructive way, and you now see them posting music videos and such on YouTube in exchange for some level of advertising and/or royalties in return. Everyone wins, everyone knows what the deal is, and no-one gets ripped off, despite all the supposed problems with reconciling copyright and the on-line world.
Basically, this post was just a "the world is changing, and now everything should be free because I want it to be" diatribe, and it was no more thought through or clearly expressed than a dozen other such posts in every Slashdot discussion on the subject.
They're already making plans to sneak it in. First they are coming for the foreign students. Then they are coming for the airside workers. Then they are coming for the under-21s.
Fortunately, it's all but certain that they will be kicked out before it can go any further than that. The last thing the Tories, who are all but certain to replace them, will want is to support "Europe said we had to do this (because your predecessors conveniently asked them to)" arguments. I imagine "The US said we had to do this" will cut similarly little ice with the incoming administration, and friend-building Obama will presumably want to ease off on the "the rest of the world should do it because our security theatre requires it" act. In any case, the Tories have repeatedly made very clear statements that they will get rid of the whole ID cards mess, and unless they want to be the first one-term government in recent UK history, they won't go back on things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I've learned that keeping any rights to commercially developed software is unlikely unless you have some kind of weight in the business community.
If you're being paid to develop that software, then that seems fair enough to me.
The trouble is when employers go beyond that. In employment relationships, and only IME of course, a lot of employers' lawyers default to inserting clauses into the employment contract that say the company owns everything you do. Often, there is nothing limiting this to things you do as part of your job, so it includes the blockbuster movie script and novel you wrote in your spare time as well, and certainly programming-related things like any work you'd like to contribute to an OSS project. Obviously this covers the employer unambiguously in the event of any dispute, but screws the employee.
The interesting thing is that, again IME, many employers will accept that this isn't a fair deal and will be willing to adjust the wording to something more balanced, if you challenge the deal before signing. A few won't change their standard contract, but there is such a strong correlation between those I would/wouldn't be comfortable working for and those who are/aren't willing to make such a change that this is now one of my two "acid tests" when interviewing for a programming job. (The other, if anyone is curious, is whether they are willing to show me their code and that code looks respectable. Again, places that decline to do this or where the existing code quality is poor tend to have other weaknesses as well.)
But in any case, that may or may not apply here, and I strongly agree with those who say that if this is in doubt and may become relevant then the OP should get a real lawyer to look at the exact contract being offerred.
I keep hearing how FOSS is the way all software is heading. However the problem is it does not address niche markets.
I disagree. I would argue that substantial, high quality FOSS — good enough to rival traditional commercial software — has only developed in certain niche markets.
It's not hard to see why: lots of geeks want programming tools and media players and basic office software and communications tools and an OS to run it all on. You can build up a critical mass of skilled volunteers to get such projects up to a decent level in a reasonable period of time.
However, in either markets that aren't really geek niches (such as the boring business software that companies rely on for their administration) or markets that require substantial resources other than just geeks hacking away (such as game development), there is neither a significant body of useful FOSS at present, nor any indication that such will appear any time before the sun runs out of power. In the first case, there is no particular incentive for geeks to give up their time to build boring stuff if they're not being paid to do it, and in the latter case most geeks don't have either the time or the skills required to do a good job without collaborating with other professionals (who will expect to be paid for their own contribution).
So, since FOSS doesn't look like being a particularly useful model for commercial development in these areas, and in the geek niches software is already being given away for free by others so there isn't much scope for making money developing competing FOSS products, I tend to agree with the article's premise: FOSS just isn't particularly useful as a basis for building a business.
I don't know. What's wrong with recursion?
I had a similar reaction to you. The MVC idea came about when Smalltalkers wanted to bring some structure to programming interactive UIs, and the separation of concerns matched the way their interactions worked. Web applications have different requirements, particularly because of the performance/safety/security trade-offs inherent in the server/browser separation. Why should an architecture such as MVC be expected to hold up in its original form? It's designed to solve a different problem.
I was also somewhat surprised by article's fairly black-and-white position that using multiple languages when developing a large-scale project is a bad thing. Sure, using multiple general-purpose programming languages when each has similar characteristics is a bit pointless, and other things being equal it would be better if we didn't have to. But I don't think the problem is using one language on the server and another on the client; it's just that as web development gets more serious, web developers are discovering the same things that desktop and server-side developers learned a while ago: most programming languages are far from ideal in one respect or another, and make it surprisingly difficult to do your job efficiently while still generating correct, fast, safe code. For example, adopting languages that emphasize lightweight syntax and dynamic typing can help you to build quickly on a simple prototype. However, it also means you're also going to take the hit on things like not converting strings properly, where a language with a stronger, static type system would have provided tools to prevent such errors ever reaching production and showing garbage in your client's browser.
Nothing has more bugs than stuff written in the 'web languages'. The current slashdot home page has 91 SGML parser errors and 1 warning, 225 HTMLTidy warnings, and 40 errors via the W3C markup validation service.
And yet it works. Were it written in C/C++, it would generate a segmentation violation or a buffer overflow for each of these errors. That's another reason to use web programming languages: they help mitigate the damage caused by incompetent programmers.
While I take your point, I think perhaps you are missing the GP's. Saying that Slashdot "works" despite the bugs is rather generous: of the web sites I visit with significant frequency, Slashdot is borked to the point of being unusable more than all of the others combined: either the page display is so broken that it is unreadable, or it just returns an error code to my browser when I try to visit a page. Many other web sites I use, including such illustrious and high volume sites as the BBC News pages, also fail with irritating regularity. In contrast, despite all the bitching about segfaults and memory leaks and all that jazz, exactly one of the desktop applications I use on a regular basis crashes often enough that I can remember the last time it happened. Ironically, that's the one with a pseudo-webby UI. :-)
Of course, these things don't take out the whole computer, but in most browsers Javascript screw-ups can take out the whole browser (or leave you vulnerable to pranks like the endless dialog box trick, which is effectively the same thing). This is a royal PITA if you've got multiple tabs open on multiple sites. A browser typically doesn't have the kind of fine control and failure handling of a full-blown OS, yet by developing web applications one inherently assumes that the reliability of the browser as delivery vehicle will be sufficient.
and you'd pay no taxes if the UK (sorry, Ingerlund) left the EU?
I'd pay significantly less tax.
What "arbitrary legal restrictions"? Is the UK still a democracy? If it is then the populations have given their consent. You disagree with the decision of the majority, that's your problem, not ours.
The UK is not a democracy, and hasn't been for a long time. The population hasn't even had a vote on the current administration, never mind given its consent. The party with an absolute majority in Parliament received the support of only 22% of voters at the last general election, and lost the popular vote in England. Major policy decisions that affect England only have been pushed through using MPs from the other nations who have devolved the issue concerned to their regional government. The majority of people have never agreed with things like the weights and measures regulations, so much so that the government had to get special arrangements made for things like pints of beer and milk. In short, I don't know where you get this idea that our government is representative and has a popular mandate. These things are patently not true.
So you don't want to pay taxes, I should cry?
You seem to start from the premise that paying taxes at all is ethical. That's odd: if anyone else came and took thousands of pounds of your money under threat of force, I'm pretty sure most people would consider that theft.
Taxes may (or may not) be a necessary evil, but they are certainly not the natural way of things, and the old saying "no taxation without representation" that made at least some moral case for using taxes seems to be overlooked in your argument. I'm as charitable as the next guy (actually, I discovered that statistically speaking I'm considerably more charitable than the average citizen) but I'm quite capable of deciding which causes to support with my hard-earned cash without unelected bureaucrats doing it for me, thanks.
I find it strange that you so strongly defend an inherently corrupt regime (the EU) and challenge anyone who is being forced to support it against their will (but without actually providing a single objective argument in its favour anywhere in this discussion). I can only assume that you are either someone who does very well out of EU rules and/or subsidies but lacks any practical or moral argument to justify that support, or a troll.
"Happy if subsidies I get > taxes I pay" is a stupid way of deciding whether you're winning on a deal, whether it's the UK or the EU.
Why? It seems like a pretty reasonable starting point to me. If it comes out the wrong way around, then clearly the deal isn't worth it unless it offers something more valuable as well.
Remember that a great deal of the policies affected here are simply compulsory redistribution of wealth, and many of the others impose rather arbitrary legal restrictions on populations without their consent. Why should any taxpayer give up their hard-earned money to support such things?
I didn't vote for union with Scotland, and frankly, I wish they'd take their separation to its logical conclusion. That way the English can stop subsidising their economy so their devolved regional government can give out all kinds of benefits to their own people that the rest of us don't enjoy, and Scottish MPs can stop voting for our undemocratic government's unpopular policies on England-only issues in Parliament, knowing that their own constituents won't have to feel the consequences.
And as for your "citation needed": just go and look up the amount of net subsidy the UK gives to the EU each year (it's second only to Germany) on any news site you like, and watch how the figures have changed over the years, particularly when you take into account TB giving up our rebate deal (I love that term, as if it wasn't a small fraction of our own money they were so generously giving back to us) and therefore effectively multiplying up the subsidy we give substantially. You can find current figures on sources as obvious as Wikipedia, or historical data on the UK government's web site by looking up past budget information.
I'm not sure. Maybe I missed voting for it, or maybe it was just the explanation of why a closer union always seems to cost more money for me and my fellow taxpayers...
Actually most of the European directives go in the direction of ensuring free trade, freedom and democracy.
I don't really see how freedom and free trade are helped by rules that require local shops in my country to give up labelling using well-understood units that have been common since forever and instead use metric units that neither the shopkeepers nor many of their customers understand. (They're still allowed to use the old-fashioned units, but only very small labels, and they must use the metricised ones prominently.)
Nor do I see how regulations that require throwing away large amounts of perfectly good food because it is the "wrong shape" are helpful for your stated goals. Even the EU has worked this out now and is working to change the rules, but it's taken decades of madness and a world food shortage to drive the point home.
All these directives need to go before the European parliament which is democratically elected.
The European Parliament is an impotent pretense, and pretty much always has been. It's the Council/Commissioners who have most of the real power, and they aren't directly elected. In fact, your next statement...
The European council is indeed made of national ministers which are not necessarily elected, however they represent the majority in their country of origin.
...couldn't be more wrong. My own country's national government has no popular mandate, and the current executive were not even elected to their current offices. The people we send to Europe are those who, even in this local undemocratic system, still couldn't manage to get themselves elected, and the rules they impose on us in return are those which, even in the local undemocratic system, the national government could not force through.
The proposed constitution would have given more weight to the parliament and less to the council, which is probably good. This is not the reason it was rejected.
I'm not commenting on the Constitution/Reform Treaty, rather on the undemocratic process by which adoption was proposed in each case, and the telling fact that after the former was rejected too many times by the people, the people were denied any say on the matter in the latter case (except for the Irish, whose own Constitution prevented their government from abusing them the way everyone else's did).
Your post illustrates the fact that in Europe member states like to blame Europe for all the ills of their economy.
I think you misunderstand. It is not what Europe does that I was commenting on here. It was the fact that my own country gives several billion to the unaudited European slush fund each year, much of which is effectively claimed by certain other large EU countries who have their own sources of income. What do we get in return for spending more on them than on several entire government departments' annual budgets?
However in crisis times everyone thinks the Euro and its stability is grand and the necessity to harmonize financial policies is a definite bonus.
Which might be a more compelling argument to me if my country used the Euro, but we don't.
Without the European framework it would be a free-for-all, fuck-your-neighbour disaster.
It may have escaped your attention, but despite all the political handshaking and nice press conferences, many countries both within and outside the EU have been screwing their neighbours in recent months if they thought it would improve the situation at home, and the moderately successful agreements that are starting to overcome that tendency have nothing to do with the EU and everything to do with multilateral discussions between the most economically powerful nations, whom everyone else essentially has to follow if the big players agree.
OK, but if you're going to play that card, you have to accept that to have a work to copy that way in the first place, it has to have got into someone's home. If they bought a legitimate copy, then personally I think however they use it themselves and privately should constitute fair use (and, to varying degrees in different jurisdictions, the law often works this way already). However, what we're talking about here is making illegal copies over the Internet. That's hardly private, particularly on the part of the person providing the copy to people they've never met before who connect to their computer and ask for a copy of something. The fact that copies can grow exponentially this way, independent of any compensation for the people who did all the work, is exactly the problem here.
You seem awfully sure of which rights are important, which aren't, and what order everything goes in. That's remarkable, considering that lawyers and philosophers have spent centuries debating such points, and to this day there are fundamentally opposed points of view with widespread support.
As for the state granting artificial monopolies: that is the entire point of copyright. It's very easy to condemn that, but such evidence as we have suggests that without that incentive, a lot of that "culture" wouldn't be there for people to enjoy in the first place. It's not as though copyright is worth anything to those who don't create and share useful works, nor restricting anyone who doesn't have that work to copy in the first place.
So I guess we should just legalise printing counterfeit money, then?
That's the funny thing about these simplistic arguments about enforcement: when you start to consider things like ethics and consequences, most people will act responsibly voluntarily, and you can concentrate any enforcement efforts on those who act selfishly at the expense of others. So it goes with any law, and this area is no different.
The problem with copyright is that right now, because effective action hasn't been taken against abusive Big Media companies who were themselves breaking rules on things like price fixing and competitive behaviour with apparent impunity, a lot of people feel no sympathy and shaft those companies in return. This has the unfortunate side effect that the little guys who rely on the same laws to pay the rent and who haven't been abusing customers en masse also get screwed.
It would be better if the copyright laws were rewritten with a more realistic fair use (or whatever your local version is called) concept, and people were educated about the economic realities of content production so they actually had a clue about when they were being screwed and when they were paying a fair price. As legal downloads have demonstrated, given such information, most people will play fair and be honest, as long as the people they are dealing with do likewise.
The EU doesn't have jurisdiction over every elements of members' law, but safekeeping democracy and liberties in all of its member states is part of its charter.
Which is ironic, given that the big decisions made at EU level are made by politicians who are not directly elected to those posts (and not infrequently, they are those who could not credibly remain in government in their own countries after the mess they made of things back home). Because of this, the EU is often used by national governments who want to push an unpopular agenda that they can't credibly do locally, by driving it through in Europe where there is no popular vote, and then claiming back home that they have to implement things because "European rules say so". Moreover, the EU takes a staggering amount of money from some of its member states to subsidise the others, but this direct financial support does not seem to result in any greater bargaining power for those states, and the EU hasn't managed to get its accounts audited and signed off for 14 years.
In other words, if you think the EU has anything to do with democracy, I'm afraid you're completely delusional. It happens to have produced one or two useful sets of rules on areas like human rights, but it's produced a whole heap of bad laws on just about everything else, and charged us a pretty penny for the privilege. It was never supposed to be a United States of Europe, just an economic agreement for mutual benefit, but the vested interests and empire builders at its heart have turned it into far more than that. The fact that the only thing that stopped the EU Constitution^WReform Treaty going through was the Irish no vote in a referendum, because no other member states' national governments would actually allow their people a referendum with the negative (for them) outcome so clearly predictable, tells us all we need to know of European democracy.
In some parts of the UK, especially in rural areas, BT is indeed the only provider.
I think you should post some evidence to back up that claim. They may be the only guys who will run the hardware to your home, but is there some reason the usual local loop unbundling set-up doesn't apply and other ISPs can't provide the access over BT lines?
For what it's worth, I left BT for PlusNet a few years ago, but then left PlusNet a couple of years ago when their formerly quite decent service had started to suck. Unless they've got very much better again — and you're the first satisfied customer I've found in recent months, while several of my office colleagues have also left them — there are better offers out there.
Also, as far as I'm aware, it's the ISP part of BT who are messing around with Phorm. Other ISPs who happen to be using a BT line as the carrier for their broadband service shouldn't be affected AFAICS.
If they were actually serving up content with ads inserted (which, as far I can see, isn't actually what's happening here, so this is hypothetical) then there are arguments on grounds of both copyright infringement through creating derivative works and the moral right of the author not to have their work subject to derogatory treatment. This question has also been raised in the context of sites that take Usenet posts and republish them with, for example, those irritating in-line ads inserted. As far as I'm aware, there has been no test case in the UK as yet to determine for sure whether the arguments are sound.
While what you write is true to some extent, that doesn't make it a good thing or something to be supported. Evolution of a language over time is one thing; just plain getting it wrong and saying something you don't mean is another, and there comes a point where the errors are sufficiently misleading that you are no longer communicating effectively.
See also the current tendency, particularly from our friends in the US, to drop the word "not" and thus reverse the meaning of a sentence. I've seen businesses fail over that sort of mistake...
I've met plenty of people that are unwilling to listen to a good answer from a young person because the young person is young and by extension inexperienced.
There are such people around, and yes, they are fools.
But that young person is closer to school, meaning they learned from not just your mistakes but the mistakes of the industry over the past 30 years and very likely the youngsters were playing with real-world code long before they ever could have counted it experience. [...] Plenty of kids getting out of school now have been writing stuff since I started, have no "professional" experience, but have been cutting their teeth on open source for years.
You've made several interesting (but bad) assumptions there. You have assumed that theoretical knowledge from school is more valuable than practical knowledge from industry; this is not necessarily so, particularly in a field such as programming. You also implicitly assume that the youngsters had real-world experience playing with code from before their formal careers started — but for some reason the older, more experienced programmers didn't? Finally, you have assumed that experience gained working on an OSS project directly translates to value in a workplace, though each requires different skills beyond the basic programming stuff. Ironically, as someone who was like you a few years ago but is older and hopefully a little wiser now, I would say these sorts of assumptions are typical of the mistakes caused by a lack of professional experience. :-)
See also the psychology of assessing your own ability: almost everyone would think they are better than they really are in the absence of more objective data from other sources, and worse, the more confident you are in your own superiority, the more likely it is that you are mistaken. You might also like to look up the old paper from IBM about how productive software developers of certain ages typically are when considered on merit. It makes painful reading, whatever your age, but it's an eye-opener.
Well, I've only got one of those degrees, but I'm sure I'd agree with you if I could remember what you just wrote!
If posting pictures of an automobile that I own is infringement does that mean Toyota can sue municipalities who use red light cameras for copyright infringement?
Or every used car magazine, web site and newspaper listings page in history, for that matter?
That could be quite fun to watch, actually. I'm betting on the entire western world's media. Any takers?
Respectfully, I believe you are missing the point.
You can try to be as objective as possible in your experimentation, by eliminating potential sources of error where you see them. But that does not mean you can ever find an absolute truth. By definition, the scientific method is based on the premise of falsifiability: your theories are only ever as sound as your latest experiment, and no matter how many times you may repeat that experiment and get consistent results, you never know in absolute terms that your theory is complete and correct such that future experiments will always yield the same result. Deities, stealthy aliens or undetected cosmic rays may be manipulating your experiment every time and one day not be there any more, for all you know, or can ever know. The only absolute truths are those axioms that we can define to be true, such that no experimental validation is required; this is what separates mathematics from science.
I'm not really sure what all this has to do with game piracy, though. I would have said the use (or otherwise) of DRM was more a question of ethics, as is how to deal with people who copy games illegally. Any legal system based on the use of courts is ultimately just trying to make the best informed decision it can under the circumstances, which is why we have standards of evidence to guide how much uncertainty is considered acceptable given the implications of the possible outcomes of a case.
Fair use is not very useful when media companies do not respect it before making takedown requests and legal accusations.
OK, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm betting there are several orders of magnitude more infringing copies, with a significant proportion of them actually damaging, than there are inappropriate takedown requests.
The average person can't afford the legal process to defend their use of 15 seconds of a Beatles tune in their home movie.
And if there were a pattern of abuses of this legal dilemma to take down 15 second clips of Beatles tunes, that would be a concern, but as far as I can tell no such pattern has been observed. People around here are quick to highlight the occasional absurd case, and of course the legal system should deal with those fairly (which is not to say that it always does at present), but people around here are also very quick to make very lawyer-esque arguments in defence of people who are almost certainly breaking the law (which might be a reasonable principle in a specific court case, but turns a blind eye to the entire problem as a generalisation).
I think that there will always be plenty of people wanting to create, and there will be plenty of creative ways to market and profit off of those creations regardless of copyright law. But nobody knows for sure.
No-one knows for sure, but given that nothing is stopping such people from adopting other models at the moment, we can certainly have a hunch. Compare the field of OSS to what the commercial, copyright-driven world has produced. Compare singalongs on YouTube to even heavily produced pop records, never mind serious music. Compare the writing of the average blogger to even the worst professionally edited textbooks. Compare hobbyist TV to Hollywood blockbusters and major TV shows. There simply isn't any evidence that the freebie, hobbyist, not-paying-the-rent kind of creativity can generate even close to the same volume or quality of material that you can get when people can do it as their day job, and there are to my knowledge no alternative business models that represent more than a statistical blip in any of these fields.
I am quite open to evidence to the contrary, but I seem to wind up posing this question quite frequently in these discussions, and the best anyone seems to come up with is that a small number of very high profile OSS projects made a bit of money (though, as a recent article demonstrated, all of them put together earned less in a year than various major software houses make alone in a single day).
For what it's worth, I quite like the idea that creative people could make a decent living without relying on old-fashioned, copyright-based models. I would love for you to prove me wrong and cite some evidence of some creative underground that is building up the same kind of strength that the old school outfits have. But right now, I just don't see it.
I could say your post was just a "the world is changing, now we need copyright to be defended or culture will suffocate" diatribe, of the sort that also shows up in every Slashdot discussion.
Yes it is, but mine is consistent with basic ethics (considering the result if everyone acts the same way, rather than one group supporting another), empirical evidence (such as the observation above), and following the arguments to their logical conclusion (not conveniently overlooking the implications for future incentives to create and share works, if works that are available now are taken out of the copyright that was promised when the works were released). A naive "everything should be free" argument does not seem to be consistent with any of these things.
I can predict the response to this on Slashdot, but I'm going to say it anyway: I didn't think this piece was particularly clear and thoughtful. In fact, I found it remarkably naive and ill-considered.
For one thing, it makes no distinction between the principle of copyright and the current application in US law. I would agree that several of the current aspects of US law are broken (the absurd statutory damages being perhaps the most obvious example, with the anti-circumvention provisions the neutralise fair use a close second; failing to prosecute Big Media for either its effective price fixing behaviour or its effective barratry is a related failing). But that doesn't undermine the basic principle of copyright.
Speaking of fair use... Oh, no, he didn't. In fact, the term wasn't even mentioned in the article. Almost all of the casual and non-damaging copying that most people consider reasonable should just be classes as fair use (or your jurisdiction's local equivalent) in any sensible implementation of copyright. Personally, I rather like the simple fair use principle that once you've got a legitimate copy of a work, you are free to do with that work as you wish yourself, but the right to duplicate and share it is what is restricted by copyright law. I'm sure there are plenty of reasonable alternative approaches. None of these was considered by the article, either to the extent that this is already the situation (particularly in the US, which actually has more liberal fair use provisions than most places) or as a potential improvement to the copyright framework.
Then there is the small matter of the Internet, YouTube, etc. While this may be a "perfect storm" for copyright infringers, the article gives absolutely no thought to the people who create the works, some of whom are being ripped off on an unprecedented scale as a result of those same facilities. Other artists are trying to take advantage of the Internet to establish business models where for once the artist gets most of the benefit from their work rather than the middlemen, which of course is completely undermined in a system where everyone is sharing the work and never paying anything for it. There is no constructive suggestion in the article for how to ensure fair compensation for those artists producing work that others apparently enjoy, nor any acknowledgement that legitimising ripping off the artists by adjusting copyright law might have a negative effect on rate of production and quality in future. These problems will just magically disappear and the rent for the artists' homes will grow on trees in Doctorowland, presumably.
There was a rather strong claim in there about the majority of people on the Internet illegally sharing files, too, but it cites no supporting evidence, and conflicts with various real research that has been cited in previous Slashdot discussions on the subject.
As for killing off YouTube and such, there is again no consideration that such a service might be run for mutual benefit by all concerned, by collaborating with content producers rather than openly ripping them off. Heck, this already happens to some extent: even various Big Media outlets acknowledge the advertising benefits they can potentially gain from supporting such services in a constructive way, and you now see them posting music videos and such on YouTube in exchange for some level of advertising and/or royalties in return. Everyone wins, everyone knows what the deal is, and no-one gets ripped off, despite all the supposed problems with reconciling copyright and the on-line world.
Basically, this post was just a "the world is changing, and now everything should be free because I want it to be" diatribe, and it was no more thought through or clearly expressed than a dozen other such posts in every Slashdot discussion on the subject.
They're already making plans to sneak it in. First they are coming for the foreign students. Then they are coming for the airside workers. Then they are coming for the under-21s.
Fortunately, it's all but certain that they will be kicked out before it can go any further than that. The last thing the Tories, who are all but certain to replace them, will want is to support "Europe said we had to do this (because your predecessors conveniently asked them to)" arguments. I imagine "The US said we had to do this" will cut similarly little ice with the incoming administration, and friend-building Obama will presumably want to ease off on the "the rest of the world should do it because our security theatre requires it" act. In any case, the Tories have repeatedly made very clear statements that they will get rid of the whole ID cards mess, and unless they want to be the first one-term government in recent UK history, they won't go back on things like that.
Here's hoping...