You can try to rationalise your behaviour as much as you like, but you still fail the basic ethics test: if everyone behaved as you do, everyone would lose.
If you had no free riders, you'd have no publicity. Your game would be unknown to the world. People just don't get that.
That's because it's clearly not true. Word-of-mouth publicity is a very powerful thing, and it worked just fine before computer games or music or movies could be cheaply and quickly reproduced. The big games shops and movie studios and record labels and book publishers spend a lot of money on marketing to raise awareness of their new products as well.
Also, the minute you sell the game to ANYONE, it can be given to ANYONE else. It's called right of first sale.
No, if you have a product you bought legitimately, you can give it to one other person instead.
Also, people can make illegal copies whether you like it or not. That's not called piracy, it's called sharing.
No, it's called piracy, and if you bothered to consult an etymological dictionary, you'd find that it had been called that for a very, very long time.
In any case, your argument is naive. I could drive my car through a city at 100mph. I could run through the streets hacking at anyone in range with a kitchen knife. Realistically, it is unlikely that anything would physically stop me before serious damage was done. That doesn't mean society should condone such inconsiderate and dangerous behaviour, or that the law should not provide for penalising those who act in such antisocial ways. That's what laws do.
As said below, plenty of people have refuted your idea here. Selling a game for 50$ at start and 10$ later means you really were willing to sell it for 10$.
No, it doesn't. There is nothing in business, economics, or indeed ethics for that matter, that says you must always sell a product at a constant price throughout. That isn't how free markets work. (Anyone about to divert into an off-topic rant on capitalism and credit crunches, please save it for a more appropriate forum. Thanks.)
Pirates create a false impression of value. All of those
zero dollar value transactions are much like the funny
business that was going on with junk bonds, energy trading
or the recent mortgage resale shenanigans.
I think the flaw in that argument is that while no money changed hands in a pirate "transaction", it is self-evident that the pirated material does have some value to the pirate, because the pirate bothered to spend the time and effort to download and play/listen to/watch the ripped content. Unless someone wants to claim that pirates only ever download material to try, and immediately obtain a legal copy of everything they actually like, of course... (Traditionally on Slashdot, someone now pops up and replies claiming that they do this, ignoring the fact that they are not representative of pirates in general.)
If we assume that pirates do in fact keep and enjoy some of the material they download illegally while others are paying the going rate for that material, then it is easy to argue that piracy is unethical: if everyone would lose out if they all followed the actions of the pirates, then those who do not are subsidising the pirates and the pirates are abusing the system and taking unfair advantage of others.
I'd hardly call free but a fee to play online a creative business model. We usually call that a scam.
You might call it that, but presumably the many players who pay up for their on-line services disagree with you. It's not as if they have to keep paying if they don't think they're getting anything worthwhile in return.
A real creative business model would be something you can embrace that doesn't have infinite fuckups (drm, subscription fees), and uses common sense. Such as, I don't know, paying for a game and not having subscription fees, drm, or cd keys or any forced "linkage" of any sort?
But with this model, what pays for the constant development of new content, maintaining the infrastructure, providing the bandwidth...? I'm not sure what you describe is a viable business model for an MMORPG at all.
Go back to requiring a cd in virtual CD or physical form, and we'll all be happy. Will it sell more copies in reality? You bet you it will.
In a business setting, you're not trying to sell more copies, you're trying to make more money. One user who pays a year's worth of monthly subscription fees is probably worth several users who pay a one-off price for buying the software but never pay again, and the subscriber might still be worth something next year.
Is it cheaper to not have to pay a company to DRM your software (or engineers to do it)? Absolutely.
The implementation cost of DRM is negligible in the final accounts. The cost in terms of PR and lost legitimate customers is far more significant, particularly the way people are starting to feel as average users start to encounter the DRM restrictions that geeks have been warning about for several years. The business decision is simply whether the anticipated loss due to those negative effects is outweighed by the anticipated gains through increased sales from failed pirates. I've always been a bit sceptical about relying on that in the long run, but then I don't run a successful games company, and contrary to Slashdot sarcasm, presumably the people who do aren't completely stupid.
The problem is that it's encouraging "creativity" in the wrong places. If the industry abandoned traditional business models, we'd never have Portal or Ico.
Not wrong, just different. No-one is preventing a game developer from releasing different games using different business models, if it makes sense given the nature of each game.
Somehow, I doubt even Orwell conceived of a situation where $enemy =~/abstractnoun/, though.
On the subject of spin, I love this quote quote from Jacqui Smith (from TFA):
What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity.
I've got a quote for her, too, from a Prime Minister of days gone by, William Pitt:
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I'm guessing 99.8% of people whose computers are in botnets also don't care because they don't know.
Exactly. I'm guessing 99.8% of people whose computers are in botnets also don't care because they don't know. This does not make botnets a good thing, nor mean that those people would be happy if they discovered they couldn't use their Internet any more because the ISP cut them off.
One need only look at the response to recent attempts to close down some music DRM authentication servers to see that when people are informed about their purchases and the limitations concerned, they most certainly do not support DRM. It's just that most people assume when they buy a track that they've bought it and can keep it. I bet most people who buy games assume that having done so, they can play it forever, too.
Youtube is merely a conduit for you to post your videos, since it is hosted on their server w/o human intervention.
The thing is, the sort of common-carrier argument that has been useful in the past doesn't necessarily give a fair balance in an era when the potential damage caused by using such a technology is disproportionate. To extend your analogy somewhat, if a phone service provided a means by which a fraudulent telemarketer could automatically dial millions of households simultaneously for near zero cost, I think you'd soon find people started taking a dim view of the service that meant their evening got disrupted every five minutes, and the facts that they are "only acting as a common carrier" and "technology is neutral" and it's the fraudsters who are originating the specific harm would probably hold about as much water as a leaky sieve.
As I've noted before, I believe in the right of free citizens to arm themselves commensurate with both self defence and, ultimately, compelling governments to accept their wishes by force if things get bad enough. However, I do not support giving every citizen a red button that nukes their entire city. There are too many people screwed up enough to do it, and the consequences are disproportionate to the benefits. It is sufficient that individuals can protect themselves from other individuals and that citizens collectively can protect themselves against their government.
So I think it goes with on-line media distribution. A service that fundamentally relies on large numbers of people breaking the law for its business model shouldn't be able to just shift the blame and get a free pass on some "neutral platform" argument. I'm not sure whether YouTube would qualify as such a service, but it's certainly in a moral and legal grey area.
The higher courts in England do set precedents, though some lower courts don't.
What the courts can't do here that they can do in some jurisdictions is amend the law rather than merely clarifying it. Put another way, in England, statute law always trumps case law, so a precedent set in any court can always be overcome if you can make a sufficiently compelling argument that in your particular case, it conflicts with statute law. Good lawyers might spend a great deal of time researching this sort of stuff to try to find a better authority that they can use to turn a case in their client's favour.
As I understand it, in places like the US the law can actually "drift" away from its original statute form over time as a consequence of a succession of court rulings, though I'm no expert on this subject so you'd best double check all this elsewhere if you think it really matters to you!
In legal context, it probably means "Any technology which you can successfully confuse a jury by explaining."
Wow, it's so lucky that I just patented the process of using a wookie to defend a software patent! Just when I thought the financial world had been destroyed, I'm going to be rich...
But resources are scarce (aren't they always?) and tasks have to be prioritized.
I work in software development, too, and I understand the need to prioritise tasks. However, this one does have 200+ votes and it keeps getting reported as a dupe, so it seems the OOo team's priorities don't necessarily match those of their user base. And yet, the OOo marketing materials do still highlight the PDF export as a major feature of the product, and the evangelists do still argue (despite the presence of a similar feature in Word 2007) that this is a reason to switch from MS Office to OOo. You can't have it both ways.
Add to that the fact that the people behind OOo is just common people, with their own priorities
But they're not, though, are they? Almost all contributions to OOo come from Sun people, and the project is infamous for making community participation difficult. The more cynical might suggest that this approach is behind the stagnation in OOo development that's been reported in a few of the other geek forums over the past week or so. In any case, OOo is not your average OSS project.
If this issue is really important to you, you should consider making your self more important to the OOo community, by participating actively in mailing lists and discussion forums where features are prioritized.
It's not that important to me: I just use other software instead these days. OOo's quality, usability and power usually aren't enough for my needs, even if it is free. That's fine, and of course I don't expect any particular say in how they choose to run their own project when I'm not paying for it.
However, if you're going to have discussions like this on forums like Slashdot, full of people encouraging others to use OOo and talking about the wondrous virtues of the OSS approach, I think it's only fair to show that it doesn't work out that way for everyone so that those who might be considering making the switch can be more informed when they try it out.
But since most of us already have Word at work anyway, PDF export is hardly a killer feature to make us switch to OO at this point, is it? And of course, your typical business isn't paying anything like the prices you're quoting per user, nor is anyone who received Word bundled with their PC, nor anyone with access to a reduced price via say academic or employer connections. In fact, I'm not sure I can think of anyone I know who has a legitimate copy of MS Word but actually paid anything like the nominal list price for it.
I guess we just have different perspectives on this one, though your comment suggests that perhaps you're not appreciating the signifance of the bug. Personally, I consider it pretty much a fatal flaw if you can allow your user to develop an entire document using professional grade fonts (almost all of which have been supplied primarily in the format in question for years now), render everything OK on-screen so there's no warning of any trouble ahead, and then let the user find that those fonts have been arbitrarily substituted by completed unrelated fonts that happened to be OO-friendly only at PDF export time and with no workaround possible. That's a nasty, nasty trap, and I've helped people rescue entire design projects that were in danger of being sunk by this one.
Also, I don't think you can read much into the bug having only 12 subscribers. It's been there for years, with numerous dupes and similar comments being added but no sign of progress. I imagine that most people interested in it do what I do: unsubscribe to spare yourself the never-ending chain of depressing e-mail, but check in with each new version to see if it's fixed yet. Remember, 200+ people have voted for this one (not counting all the dupes).
Oh god somebody's disagreeing with me he must be an idiot or a liar.
Or, as I actually wrote, we could just have different experiences or be talking at cross-purposes.
It's not like the bugs I've mentioned here are hard to reproduce if anyone else wants to try what I described, so I'm not sure what your beef is with my position. As I said, this is what makes me sceptical about people who claim to have lots of experience using OO for non-trivial things, yet never to encounter the little problems I seem to find any time I start trying to do anything at all complicated.
Here in the UK, the various higher courts (such as the Court of Appeal and the High Court) are collectively known as the Royal Courts of Justice, and the corresponding government department is now known as the Ministry of Justice.
I represent over 150 business users that use ONLY OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet, etc, and I can attest that we do use it seriously with very few problems.
Do you? "Seriously"? Or just for quick letters that any old text editor could cope with and trivial data tables in a spreadsheet without any real calculation or data processing?
Your comment is way-over-the-top wrong.
Or your particular users have been very lucky, depending on your point of view. Have you tried sorting spreadsheet data where some affected cells contain formulae? Have you tried undoing a search and replace that used the options beyond plain text? These are data corruption bugs, not some minor UI tweak. These are the sort of crazy bugs that betray fundamentally broken underlying models, and which cost people whole documents if not noticed and worked around immediately.
Version 3 has the ability to edit pdf - that could be a killer feature.
Why? PDFs are useful for distributing material in a reliable way. They have never been designed to be an easily editable format, other than for forms and the like perhaps, and it would be crazy to start treating them as such.
Also, in case you didn't realise, PDF export from Word is available as a freebie plug-in from MS in Word 2007, and it doesn't have all the font bugs OO Writer has! (See my earlier posts in this discussion for details.)
We want a lean, mean, FAST, lightweight wordprocessor, just like FF is a FAST, lightweight browser.
Firefox used to be a fast, lightweight browser. They seem to have been looking for the plot since some time in the FF2 era, though, and FF3 is such a monster that despite the Mozilla gang's irritating efforts to convince me, I still haven't upgraded any other machines beyond the first one I used to try it out.
Notice that it is classified as a feature request rather than a bug and its target milestone is only 3.2, despite being first created more than three years ago, having over 200 votes, and numerous comments on this issue and its various duplicates showing how it's a complete showstopper for using most professional grade fonts with PDF export.
This bug has become the standard counter-example in on-line discussions to all the OSS advocacy that claims many eyes make all bugs shallow, products will naturally develop according to users' needs because people can contribute their own patches, etc.
I'm always sceptical when people talk about using OO seriously with "no problems".
It's strange that so many people on Slashdot make claims like this, yet for me and various people I know in real life, basic things like sorting in OO Calc seem to fail on any non-trivial spreadsheet. Heck, I even got the Undo command not to undo simple find-and-replace changes properly the other day.
And have they fixed the font embedding that kills PDF export from Writer yet? It's only been a bug since forever, with more votes than almost anything else in the bug tracker.
As long as this sort of thing is going on, usability isn't even an issue: OO isn't even useful for more than throwaway work, and it actually seems to be getting worse in the 2.x series to the point that it's not even useful for much throwaway work either.
It was a criminal case, for a minor motoring offence, and I was indeed a little surprised that it ever went to court.
The not guilty verdict was, according to the magistrates' official statement, primarily because the prosection's own witnesses did not appear to support their argument. I hadn't yet given my own evidence, so I didn't see the other witnesses for myself.
Perhaps you're right and it should never have gone to trial, but given that it did and this compelled the defendant to take time off their job to defend themselves, I think it is incumbent on any fair legal system to compensate them for their lost income. I'm not saying they should make a profit on it, but they certainly shouldn't make a loss just because some official decided to bring charges they couldn't prove. Any system where merely defending yourself in law incurs a loss is a very dangerous one, as various popular US-based topics on this forum make all too clear: it leaves the innocent citizen vulnerable to arbitrary harrassment and barratry, with no penalty to those who victimise them.
If you were at Judy's Birthday Party, and that was a particularly crazy night, Facebook is not violating your privacy because Judy decided to post pictures of you mooning the boss.
I think they are. I find it hard to believe that in your particular example, this would not be almost unanimously agreed. There is a difference between what you did in private in the company of friends, even on a crazy night, and what you consented to letting the rest of the world see. Judy may be the person primarily responsible, but Facebook are an accessory to the act.
I just don't think you can expect that kind of granularity in laws and expect it to work. You'd have to outlaw cameras -- and everybody's phone has a &*^%^& camera.
No, you just have to outlaw the antisocial use of cameras, and trust that most people will behave responsibly and consider how their actions affect their fellow man. All laws are based on this premise. Otherwise we would have to ban industrial machinery, motor transport and kitchen knives, because they can all be misused to cause harm to others. We don't, of course, but we do ban misusing them to cause that harm, and we punish those who do so.
Allowing yourself to be photographed in compromising situations doesn't mean that the people who were also there must have a "gag order" placed upon them for how they use their own photographs.
I'll be sure to tell that to my friend, whose sports team spiked his drink after his first match, put him in a seriously compromising position while he was unable to do anything about it as a consequence of their earlier actions, and then posted the pictures all over Facebook where family and girlfriend could see them. The (now former, unsurprisingly) team-mates concerned had no right to do that, and it caused great distress to the friend concerned and his family and other friends. Are you seriously claiming that it was all his fault, and there was nothing wrong with the actions of the team-mates?
If your friends photographed you "hitting that skull bong" and posted it on the internet, you beef is with them, not Facebook.
There is an argument that technology is neutral and it's how we use it that counts. That's a good argument, up to a point, but there has to be some balance and proportionality involved depending on the dangers inherent in the use of the technology. I personally believe in the right to bear arms commensurate with both self-defence and protecting civil liberties against a malicious government, but I don't support the right for every citizen to own a nuclear weapon big enough to level their entire city. That would be disproportionate, and too many people in the world are screwed up in the head for such a balance to be an acceptable risk. For the same reason, I accept the basic premise of having reasonable legal speed limits for cars, even though I expect that the majority of drivers could exceed many of them by a modest amount in complete safety.
As technology — in particular databases, communications systems and data mining techniques, improves — people who deal with photographs are going to have to reconcile what they think should be their freedoms with the dangers associated with allowing arbitrary use of such equipment to basic societal values like respect for others' privacy and the right to a private life. As I've noted in recent discussions here on Google Street View, the difference is not just in whether you take a photograph of someone in public vs. just see them walking past. There are many other considerations, including how the data you collect is stored, who has access to it, what other data it can be combined with, how searchable it is, how permanent it is, etc.
I expect that there will be a lot of soul-searching and dealing with ethical grey areas in the coming years, as commercial services like Google and huge government databases become increasingly powerful. But priv
Slashdot Mirror
You can try to rationalise your behaviour as much as you like, but you still fail the basic ethics test: if everyone behaved as you do, everyone would lose.
If you had no free riders, you'd have no publicity. Your game would be unknown to the world. People just don't get that.
That's because it's clearly not true. Word-of-mouth publicity is a very powerful thing, and it worked just fine before computer games or music or movies could be cheaply and quickly reproduced. The big games shops and movie studios and record labels and book publishers spend a lot of money on marketing to raise awareness of their new products as well.
Also, the minute you sell the game to ANYONE, it can be given to ANYONE else. It's called right of first sale.
No, if you have a product you bought legitimately, you can give it to one other person instead.
Also, people can make illegal copies whether you like it or not. That's not called piracy, it's called sharing.
No, it's called piracy, and if you bothered to consult an etymological dictionary, you'd find that it had been called that for a very, very long time.
In any case, your argument is naive. I could drive my car through a city at 100mph. I could run through the streets hacking at anyone in range with a kitchen knife. Realistically, it is unlikely that anything would physically stop me before serious damage was done. That doesn't mean society should condone such inconsiderate and dangerous behaviour, or that the law should not provide for penalising those who act in such antisocial ways. That's what laws do.
As said below, plenty of people have refuted your idea here. Selling a game for 50$ at start and 10$ later means you really were willing to sell it for 10$.
No, it doesn't. There is nothing in business, economics, or indeed ethics for that matter, that says you must always sell a product at a constant price throughout. That isn't how free markets work. (Anyone about to divert into an off-topic rant on capitalism and credit crunches, please save it for a more appropriate forum. Thanks.)
Pirates create a false impression of value. All of those zero dollar value transactions are much like the funny business that was going on with junk bonds, energy trading or the recent mortgage resale shenanigans.
I think the flaw in that argument is that while no money changed hands in a pirate "transaction", it is self-evident that the pirated material does have some value to the pirate, because the pirate bothered to spend the time and effort to download and play/listen to/watch the ripped content. Unless someone wants to claim that pirates only ever download material to try, and immediately obtain a legal copy of everything they actually like, of course... (Traditionally on Slashdot, someone now pops up and replies claiming that they do this, ignoring the fact that they are not representative of pirates in general.)
If we assume that pirates do in fact keep and enjoy some of the material they download illegally while others are paying the going rate for that material, then it is easy to argue that piracy is unethical: if everyone would lose out if they all followed the actions of the pirates, then those who do not are subsidising the pirates and the pirates are abusing the system and taking unfair advantage of others.
I'd hardly call free but a fee to play online a creative business model. We usually call that a scam.
You might call it that, but presumably the many players who pay up for their on-line services disagree with you. It's not as if they have to keep paying if they don't think they're getting anything worthwhile in return.
A real creative business model would be something you can embrace that doesn't have infinite fuckups (drm, subscription fees), and uses common sense. Such as, I don't know, paying for a game and not having subscription fees, drm, or cd keys or any forced "linkage" of any sort?
But with this model, what pays for the constant development of new content, maintaining the infrastructure, providing the bandwidth...? I'm not sure what you describe is a viable business model for an MMORPG at all.
Go back to requiring a cd in virtual CD or physical form, and we'll all be happy. Will it sell more copies in reality? You bet you it will.
In a business setting, you're not trying to sell more copies, you're trying to make more money. One user who pays a year's worth of monthly subscription fees is probably worth several users who pay a one-off price for buying the software but never pay again, and the subscriber might still be worth something next year.
Is it cheaper to not have to pay a company to DRM your software (or engineers to do it)? Absolutely.
The implementation cost of DRM is negligible in the final accounts. The cost in terms of PR and lost legitimate customers is far more significant, particularly the way people are starting to feel as average users start to encounter the DRM restrictions that geeks have been warning about for several years. The business decision is simply whether the anticipated loss due to those negative effects is outweighed by the anticipated gains through increased sales from failed pirates. I've always been a bit sceptical about relying on that in the long run, but then I don't run a successful games company, and contrary to Slashdot sarcasm, presumably the people who do aren't completely stupid.
The problem is that it's encouraging "creativity" in the wrong places. If the industry abandoned traditional business models, we'd never have Portal or Ico.
Not wrong, just different. No-one is preventing a game developer from releasing different games using different business models, if it makes sense given the nature of each game.
Somehow, I doubt even Orwell conceived of a situation where $enemy =~ /abstractnoun/, though.
On the subject of spin, I love this quote quote from Jacqui Smith (from TFA):
What we will be proposing will be options which follow the key principles which govern all our work in this area - the principles of proportionality and necessity.
I've got a quote for her, too, from a Prime Minister of days gone by, William Pitt:
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I'm guessing 99.8% of people whose computers are in botnets also don't care because they don't know.
Exactly. I'm guessing 99.8% of people whose computers are in botnets also don't care because they don't know. This does not make botnets a good thing, nor mean that those people would be happy if they discovered they couldn't use their Internet any more because the ISP cut them off.
One need only look at the response to recent attempts to close down some music DRM authentication servers to see that when people are informed about their purchases and the limitations concerned, they most certainly do not support DRM. It's just that most people assume when they buy a track that they've bought it and can keep it. I bet most people who buy games assume that having done so, they can play it forever, too.
Youtube is merely a conduit for you to post your videos, since it is hosted on their server w/o human intervention.
The thing is, the sort of common-carrier argument that has been useful in the past doesn't necessarily give a fair balance in an era when the potential damage caused by using such a technology is disproportionate. To extend your analogy somewhat, if a phone service provided a means by which a fraudulent telemarketer could automatically dial millions of households simultaneously for near zero cost, I think you'd soon find people started taking a dim view of the service that meant their evening got disrupted every five minutes, and the facts that they are "only acting as a common carrier" and "technology is neutral" and it's the fraudsters who are originating the specific harm would probably hold about as much water as a leaky sieve.
As I've noted before, I believe in the right of free citizens to arm themselves commensurate with both self defence and, ultimately, compelling governments to accept their wishes by force if things get bad enough. However, I do not support giving every citizen a red button that nukes their entire city. There are too many people screwed up enough to do it, and the consequences are disproportionate to the benefits. It is sufficient that individuals can protect themselves from other individuals and that citizens collectively can protect themselves against their government.
So I think it goes with on-line media distribution. A service that fundamentally relies on large numbers of people breaking the law for its business model shouldn't be able to just shift the blame and get a free pass on some "neutral platform" argument. I'm not sure whether YouTube would qualify as such a service, but it's certainly in a moral and legal grey area.
It's not just regexps you have to worry about. Remember, in Perl, there's more than one way to cause an horrific industrial accident!
The higher courts in England do set precedents, though some lower courts don't.
What the courts can't do here that they can do in some jurisdictions is amend the law rather than merely clarifying it. Put another way, in England, statute law always trumps case law, so a precedent set in any court can always be overcome if you can make a sufficiently compelling argument that in your particular case, it conflicts with statute law. Good lawyers might spend a great deal of time researching this sort of stuff to try to find a better authority that they can use to turn a case in their client's favour.
As I understand it, in places like the US the law can actually "drift" away from its original statute form over time as a consequence of a succession of court rulings, though I'm no expert on this subject so you'd best double check all this elsewhere if you think it really matters to you!
In legal context, it probably means "Any technology which you can successfully confuse a jury by explaining."
Wow, it's so lucky that I just patented the process of using a wookie to defend a software patent! Just when I thought the financial world had been destroyed, I'm going to be rich...
But resources are scarce (aren't they always?) and tasks have to be prioritized.
I work in software development, too, and I understand the need to prioritise tasks. However, this one does have 200+ votes and it keeps getting reported as a dupe, so it seems the OOo team's priorities don't necessarily match those of their user base. And yet, the OOo marketing materials do still highlight the PDF export as a major feature of the product, and the evangelists do still argue (despite the presence of a similar feature in Word 2007) that this is a reason to switch from MS Office to OOo. You can't have it both ways.
Add to that the fact that the people behind OOo is just common people, with their own priorities
But they're not, though, are they? Almost all contributions to OOo come from Sun people, and the project is infamous for making community participation difficult. The more cynical might suggest that this approach is behind the stagnation in OOo development that's been reported in a few of the other geek forums over the past week or so. In any case, OOo is not your average OSS project.
If this issue is really important to you, you should consider making your self more important to the OOo community, by participating actively in mailing lists and discussion forums where features are prioritized.
It's not that important to me: I just use other software instead these days. OOo's quality, usability and power usually aren't enough for my needs, even if it is free. That's fine, and of course I don't expect any particular say in how they choose to run their own project when I'm not paying for it.
However, if you're going to have discussions like this on forums like Slashdot, full of people encouraging others to use OOo and talking about the wondrous virtues of the OSS approach, I think it's only fair to show that it doesn't work out that way for everyone so that those who might be considering making the switch can be more informed when they try it out.
But since most of us already have Word at work anyway, PDF export is hardly a killer feature to make us switch to OO at this point, is it? And of course, your typical business isn't paying anything like the prices you're quoting per user, nor is anyone who received Word bundled with their PC, nor anyone with access to a reduced price via say academic or employer connections. In fact, I'm not sure I can think of anyone I know who has a legitimate copy of MS Word but actually paid anything like the nominal list price for it.
I guess we just have different perspectives on this one, though your comment suggests that perhaps you're not appreciating the signifance of the bug. Personally, I consider it pretty much a fatal flaw if you can allow your user to develop an entire document using professional grade fonts (almost all of which have been supplied primarily in the format in question for years now), render everything OK on-screen so there's no warning of any trouble ahead, and then let the user find that those fonts have been arbitrarily substituted by completed unrelated fonts that happened to be OO-friendly only at PDF export time and with no workaround possible. That's a nasty, nasty trap, and I've helped people rescue entire design projects that were in danger of being sunk by this one.
Also, I don't think you can read much into the bug having only 12 subscribers. It's been there for years, with numerous dupes and similar comments being added but no sign of progress. I imagine that most people interested in it do what I do: unsubscribe to spare yourself the never-ending chain of depressing e-mail, but check in with each new version to see if it's fixed yet. Remember, 200+ people have voted for this one (not counting all the dupes).
Must...
not...
Uuuuuuungh...
<slashbot>That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!</slashbot>
Grrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Damn you, dgatwood, and your Spaceballs meme!
<sigh> 128,299,838kyears ought to be enough for anyone!
Oh god somebody's disagreeing with me he must be an idiot or a liar.
Or, as I actually wrote, we could just have different experiences or be talking at cross-purposes.
It's not like the bugs I've mentioned here are hard to reproduce if anyone else wants to try what I described, so I'm not sure what your beef is with my position. As I said, this is what makes me sceptical about people who claim to have lots of experience using OO for non-trivial things, yet never to encounter the little problems I seem to find any time I start trying to do anything at all complicated.
Here in the UK, the various higher courts (such as the Court of Appeal and the High Court) are collectively known as the Royal Courts of Justice, and the corresponding government department is now known as the Ministry of Justice.
I represent over 150 business users that use ONLY OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet, etc, and I can attest that we do use it seriously with very few problems.
Do you? "Seriously"? Or just for quick letters that any old text editor could cope with and trivial data tables in a spreadsheet without any real calculation or data processing?
Your comment is way-over-the-top wrong.
Or your particular users have been very lucky, depending on your point of view. Have you tried sorting spreadsheet data where some affected cells contain formulae? Have you tried undoing a search and replace that used the options beyond plain text? These are data corruption bugs, not some minor UI tweak. These are the sort of crazy bugs that betray fundamentally broken underlying models, and which cost people whole documents if not noticed and worked around immediately.
Version 3 has the ability to edit pdf - that could be a killer feature.
Why? PDFs are useful for distributing material in a reliable way. They have never been designed to be an easily editable format, other than for forms and the like perhaps, and it would be crazy to start treating them as such.
Also, in case you didn't realise, PDF export from Word is available as a freebie plug-in from MS in Word 2007, and it doesn't have all the font bugs OO Writer has! (See my earlier posts in this discussion for details.)
We want a lean, mean, FAST, lightweight wordprocessor, just like FF is a FAST, lightweight browser.
Firefox used to be a fast, lightweight browser. They seem to have been looking for the plot since some time in the FF2 era, though, and FF3 is such a monster that despite the Mozilla gang's irritating efforts to convince me, I still haven't upgraded any other machines beyond the first one I used to try it out.
Look at issue 43029.
Notice that it is classified as a feature request rather than a bug and its target milestone is only 3.2, despite being first created more than three years ago, having over 200 votes, and numerous comments on this issue and its various duplicates showing how it's a complete showstopper for using most professional grade fonts with PDF export.
This bug has become the standard counter-example in on-line discussions to all the OSS advocacy that claims many eyes make all bugs shallow, products will naturally develop according to users' needs because people can contribute their own patches, etc.
I'm always sceptical when people talk about using OO seriously with "no problems".
It's strange that so many people on Slashdot make claims like this, yet for me and various people I know in real life, basic things like sorting in OO Calc seem to fail on any non-trivial spreadsheet. Heck, I even got the Undo command not to undo simple find-and-replace changes properly the other day.
And have they fixed the font embedding that kills PDF export from Writer yet? It's only been a bug since forever, with more votes than almost anything else in the bug tracker.
As long as this sort of thing is going on, usability isn't even an issue: OO isn't even useful for more than throwaway work, and it actually seems to be getting worse in the 2.x series to the point that it's not even useful for much throwaway work either.
It was a criminal case, for a minor motoring offence, and I was indeed a little surprised that it ever went to court.
The not guilty verdict was, according to the magistrates' official statement, primarily because the prosection's own witnesses did not appear to support their argument. I hadn't yet given my own evidence, so I didn't see the other witnesses for myself.
Perhaps you're right and it should never have gone to trial, but given that it did and this compelled the defendant to take time off their job to defend themselves, I think it is incumbent on any fair legal system to compensate them for their lost income. I'm not saying they should make a profit on it, but they certainly shouldn't make a loss just because some official decided to bring charges they couldn't prove. Any system where merely defending yourself in law incurs a loss is a very dangerous one, as various popular US-based topics on this forum make all too clear: it leaves the innocent citizen vulnerable to arbitrary harrassment and barratry, with no penalty to those who victimise them.
If you were at Judy's Birthday Party, and that was a particularly crazy night, Facebook is not violating your privacy because Judy decided to post pictures of you mooning the boss.
I think they are. I find it hard to believe that in your particular example, this would not be almost unanimously agreed. There is a difference between what you did in private in the company of friends, even on a crazy night, and what you consented to letting the rest of the world see. Judy may be the person primarily responsible, but Facebook are an accessory to the act.
I just don't think you can expect that kind of granularity in laws and expect it to work. You'd have to outlaw cameras -- and everybody's phone has a &*^%^& camera.
No, you just have to outlaw the antisocial use of cameras, and trust that most people will behave responsibly and consider how their actions affect their fellow man. All laws are based on this premise. Otherwise we would have to ban industrial machinery, motor transport and kitchen knives, because they can all be misused to cause harm to others. We don't, of course, but we do ban misusing them to cause that harm, and we punish those who do so.
Allowing yourself to be photographed in compromising situations doesn't mean that the people who were also there must have a "gag order" placed upon them for how they use their own photographs.
I'll be sure to tell that to my friend, whose sports team spiked his drink after his first match, put him in a seriously compromising position while he was unable to do anything about it as a consequence of their earlier actions, and then posted the pictures all over Facebook where family and girlfriend could see them. The (now former, unsurprisingly) team-mates concerned had no right to do that, and it caused great distress to the friend concerned and his family and other friends. Are you seriously claiming that it was all his fault, and there was nothing wrong with the actions of the team-mates?
If your friends photographed you "hitting that skull bong" and posted it on the internet, you beef is with them, not Facebook.
There is an argument that technology is neutral and it's how we use it that counts. That's a good argument, up to a point, but there has to be some balance and proportionality involved depending on the dangers inherent in the use of the technology. I personally believe in the right to bear arms commensurate with both self-defence and protecting civil liberties against a malicious government, but I don't support the right for every citizen to own a nuclear weapon big enough to level their entire city. That would be disproportionate, and too many people in the world are screwed up in the head for such a balance to be an acceptable risk. For the same reason, I accept the basic premise of having reasonable legal speed limits for cars, even though I expect that the majority of drivers could exceed many of them by a modest amount in complete safety.
As technology — in particular databases, communications systems and data mining techniques, improves — people who deal with photographs are going to have to reconcile what they think should be their freedoms with the dangers associated with allowing arbitrary use of such equipment to basic societal values like respect for others' privacy and the right to a private life. As I've noted in recent discussions here on Google Street View, the difference is not just in whether you take a photograph of someone in public vs. just see them walking past. There are many other considerations, including how the data you collect is stored, who has access to it, what other data it can be combined with, how searchable it is, how permanent it is, etc.
I expect that there will be a lot of soul-searching and dealing with ethical grey areas in the coming years, as commercial services like Google and huge government databases become increasingly powerful. But priv