I don't disagree that that's how unit tests should be used, and in fact I'm writing this as a whole set of tests run on a change I've just made to my current project. But the approach advocated by a lot of the agile crowd, including the poster to whom I replied above, places unit tests on a pedestal. I'm sure you've heard their war cries: "If the unit tests pass, everything must be working right," they tell us, or, "The tests are the design." That sort of status simply isn't justified, and basing your entire development process on a poor assumption is no way to run a software project.
It's not extortion, it's just completely untrue. We're talking explicitly about the UK, so your comments about the US are irrelevant. Moreover, the BSA has no legal basis for stopping a court awarding costs against it if it takes you to court and loses.
You're missing two vital parts of project management: ensuring the train stays on track,
Which can never be done reliably for non-trivial projects with the tools and techniques we have available today, regardless of what anyone trying to sell you their book says. No-one has yet shown how to beat picking two of cheap, fast and good.
and ensuring that the investors (stockholders, direct investors, whoever supplied the $$) is kept aware of progress.
Which is a much higher level than the sort of day-to-day project stuff we're talking about here.
For those at the highest level of a large company, you're looking at possibly dozens or hundreds of projects. How does a company distill the important information that policies and decisions need to be based upon?
It doesn't, in this context. Again, no executive of a large company should routinely be involved in the day-to-day progress of minor projects by a particular dev team. That's not their job, and it's the worst kind of micromanagement.
If you're going to analyze data from dozens of projects, you'll need common metrics -- which means bureacratic "red tape" in order to get values for those metrics.
It also means you need metrics worth something, which random estimates for project timescales based on the inadequate information that was available six months earlier most certainly are not.
You look at the test cases, they tell you exactly what the subsystem should be doing. And since the code passes all the tests, it tells you what the code actually is doing.
Which is great, as long as your application is so trivial that you can faithfully demonstrate that it has the desired behaviour using only a limited number of self-contained tests. Unfortunately, real game developers write posts like this that make the flaws in that approach pretty obvious.
But, one of the most important tenents of Agile methodologies is that you must have _strong_ teams that are highly skilled, and with great amounts of personal motivation.
...who, by definition, will produce good results using pretty much any methodology. The test of any business process is how much it helps the guys who aren't already good, not how much it helps the office guru.
This is just an issue with management, though. A good manager will trust his engineers (or fire them and replace them with trustworthy alternatives). The manager's job is to set the direction of the project, get the engineers what they need to steer in that direction, and then get out of the way as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
It's staggering how many managers don't realise this, and hamstring their dev teams with their personal, half-baked, technically-incompetent ideas and/or with excessive procedures and beaucratic reporting because the manager "has to know what's going on". Of course he does, up to a point, but what exactly is he going to do if a developer does tell him that a bug fix was delayed by a day because {$TECHNOBABBLE}? If he's not going to act on some information, he doesn't need to know it, and requiring developers to take time out of their day to "keep the manager in the loop" more than necessary just disrupts development.
I, too, was taught about software engineering processes during my CompSci days. But in my case, the waterfall model was the textbook example of how not to do things...
Of course, you can take things too far that other way as well. Being too rough and ready -- something encouraged by an "agile" approach -- may get you best results locally, but what matters is getting optimal results globally across the lifetime of the project and all its features. Just as the old hands look at managers trying in vain to match reality to a waterfall model and smile, so they look at young enthusiasts diving in with little to no big picture planning and wait for things to fall apart.
There has been a lot of talk lately about what the 'next big thing' in development will be. Could this be it?
I doubt it. Smart dev teams have been using iterative development cycles and keeping their code tidy since a long time before anyone coined the buzzphrase "agile" (or using SillyCapitalLetters and calling things "extreme", or any of the other hype we've put up with lately).
I suspect we probably do agree on most of this, at least from an ethical perspective if not on how the law should match up to it. However, in my defence, I came into this thread around this post of yours, which contains the following, with emphasis on the relevant points:
I have no problem with individuals pirating software for their personal use.
However, if I found something useful and wanted to make it into a business, I bought a legit copy.
To me, using pirated software to make money is just flat out wrong.
To me, that implied clearly that your distinction between ethical and non-ethical was based on whether the software is only being used for business purposes to make financial gains. That's the position I criticised, and it's very different to what we've been discussing more recently, where you're using the term "profit" to include non-monetary benefits, and your definition of "personal use" has narrowed a lot from its usual meaning of "not business use".
On the face of it, I don't disagree with your argument from a moral standpoint. Indeed, if I were running a software company shipping professional applications rather than just working for one, I'd probably try different pricing schemes for private home users and businesses.
My problem with your argument is simple practicality. While you, personally, may be very ethical about how you infringe copyrights, most people aren't. (I don't like stating generalisations like that without supporting evidence, but in this case, I consider it so obvious that I'll ask you to humour me.)
So, if it's OK for someone to rip a bit of software to try it out, where do you draw the line? Is it fair to use it for a week without paying? A month? Is it fair to rip some pro-grade DTP software and fonts, "try" them for a couple of days by producing the one document you really want, and then not buy them because you find they don't meet your needs (since you no longer need them once you've got the "trial" document)?
For this reason, I think the choice to offer trial periods, discounts for home users, and the like must be made by the developers. Sure, naive management will fail to take advantage of opportunities such as those you describe, and they'll pay for it by losing potential sales. But as soon as you transfer this right to the user, in practice you've given up any protection copyright had to offer.
I'm sure some people around here would like that, as a completely blanket measure, but I doubt many of them have thought through the economics beyond their own wallets. You apparently have, and I commend you for it. Indeed, as I said earlier, I personally would take a business approach that would support the sort of trial use you talked about for exactly the reasons you gave. But unfortunately, I think you're in a minority of consumers and I'm not the sales manager for my team, and until those things change, I think your approach is too open to abuse for the law to support it.
Remember that the UK legal system is generally loser-pays. If you believe your rogue employee was just being malicious, tell the BSA so and don't invite them to audit you. If they choose to sue, defend yourself and then ask the court to award you costs.
Perhaps you realise this and just wrote loosely -- your mention of MM fonts suggests so, at least -- but for the avoidance of doubt NMerriam isn't talking about weights like light, regular, book, demi-bold, and so on. What's being described here is a collection of subtly adjusted font designs, often called "opticals", which are tuned for use within a fairly tight range of sizes. For example, you might have four variants in your family:
"caption" (for use at up to 8pt)
"regular" (for say 9-12pt)
"subhead" (for 13-16pt)
"display" (for larger sizes).
Although stroke weight often is one of the variations, other changes commonly include how open the bowls of letters are, the relative x-height, the relative size of serifs and other decorations, and the default amount of inter-letter spacing.
Random factoid for the day: if you read any of the research into what makes a highly readable font for low-resolution screen use, many of the same elements are used in caption-size optical variants to maintain legibility at smaller sizes in print as well.
You sir, are the reason why DRM is really needed and why everyone will get stuck with it. Thank you fucking very much.
And speaking as someone who currently works on code that ultimately goes into those ludicrously expensive 3D applications the GP poster mentioned, I'd like to thank that poster personally for ripping me off. After all, like all software developers, I am ludicrously wealthy as a result of the software I make. My employer being ripped off doesn't in any way impact the profit-sharing scheme that pays my rent and that of my equally ludicrously overpaid colleagues.
I imagine those who spend months designing high quality professional fonts feel much the same way. Font design is one of those crafts where very few people are genuinely good at it, but using good work has a subtle but very real effect. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect those benefitting from the hard work of skilled craftsmen to pay fair compensation in return, and I fail to see why it matters whether they're doing it for personal financial benefit or for some other reason.
I find it tragic that the GP's position is so acceptable around here that it actually gets modded insightful.
Is that definitive now? The French legislature and judiciary have been changing their minds radically on what is and isn't allowed for something like a year now, with several relevant rulings in very high courts, subsequent legislation changing them, more proposed legislation changing that, and so on....
OK, let's remember the context here. We're talking about the market size in the US compared to the market size in Europe. The question at hand is whether the costs of localisation make a significant impact on the profitability of going for the wider European market. And in particular, we're talking about Microsoft software.
So, for a start, most of their stuff can be localised across Europe just by replacing text and basic formatting for dates, currencies, etc. Almost all European languages use similar conventions for their UI (e.g., left-to-right text). There may be a few odd messages among the accessibility stuff that need an audible translation, but not a lot in comparison.
I don't know about the arrangements for hypothetical start-up developers and their publishers, but that's irrelevant to this conversation anyway.
I also don't know about Google. I have written internationalised code, not written about having written it. But I do know that on the project I'm particularly thinking of, a release required the full-time efforts of a dev team of six for around six months plus support staff etc. The translation, in contrast, was done in a couple of days by an agency we subcontracted to. The amount we paid for it was so small that it didn't even register on the budget overviews I saw as a team leader, which means their day rate can't have been much more than we charged for a developer-day on T&M contracts.
So yes, the mechanical translation work is very cheap in comparison to the development, and probably insignificant to Microsoft compared to the profitability of shipping to the additional European countries mentioned.
Sure, but once you've got an i18n-friendly architecture in your software, translation is a relatively cheap operation. I used to work on a program shipping in probably 10 different languages, and we never even noticed during development, it just added a few days to a release cycle while the translators did their thing.
So, a couple hundred font-families is several thousand actual fonts. For a publishing house, where you need the right font for every occasion, that's a small collection.
I'd be surprised if there were as many as 200 font families that actually have that wide a range available. A quick look at the web sites of the major font suppliers suggests few generally offer more than say 10 or 20 "serious" fonts with a full range of variations. The popular fonts generally seem to be the interesting non-standard things, script fonts and the like, which by their nature only come in a small number of variations. (Having said that, my Zapfino Extra Pro came with a dozen different variations...)
I'm also slightly surprised at what you describe as a small collection for a publishing house. Do many publishers really pay for the full range for each of more than a dozen standard text faces? I've done some graphic design and typography in my time, but never in a professional context, so I can't really gauge this one at all.
Your main point is absolutely spot on, of course. Take perhaps eight weights, condensed/regular/expanded widths, italic variants, small caps variants, caption/body/subhead/display optical variants, and multiply it all up, and you can easily get dozens of variations of popular fonts like Helvetica or Palatino.
I'd not even thought of the possibility one could be harboring illegitimate payload by dint of receiving someone's documents.
That's because in general, one wouldn't be. You aren't copying the font yourself, and font licensing isn't really as absurd as some people here are making out: the licence usually does permit temporarily using a copy of the font at a print shop for the purposes of printing a document you've created using it, for example. What is generally illegal is extracting a font definition that was encoded in a document and reusing it for other purposes, or simply copying.ttf files or whatever off one computer and installing them on another.
Incidentally, contrary to another reply you got, the font design itself may be copyrightable in some juridictions, though not all. The font definition via TrueType, METAFONT source, or whatever is copyrightable pretty much everywhere in the western world AFAIK.
The BSA (ironic acronym matching a possibly more wholesome organization, n'est-ce pas?) is a snarky pest, generating ill will from C to shining C++. I'd be interested to know their bottom line, for all of the dollars spent running the BSA how many dollars are returned in generated revenue.
They're a snarky pest if you're illegally ripping off the people the BSA represent and you get caught, yes. Sorry, but in that case, that's just too bad for you.
On the other hand, if you're one of the people whose software is being ripped off -- and remember, most software companies are not huge and rich like Microsoft and Adobe, and feel the pain of illegal copying all too well -- then the BSA can be an effective means of getting what you're due.
Aside from occasional high profile screw-ups, the BSA generally doesn't have an RIAA-esque reputation for abusing the legal system. (Even if they did try it, that approach would get stonewalled every time it went to court in the UK, with the defence awarded costs.) I imagine the amount of money the BSA regain for their clients pays for a lot more than their overheads.
Someday, they should consolidate... just call them: MRB (MIAA/RIAA/BSA). Every new article I read about any of these pushes me further from commercial offerings (not that that is any great deal anymore).
Someday, Microsoft, Apple and Red Hat should consolidate... just call them MAR. Every new article I read about any of these makes me think they're cut from the same cloth, and all of them produce similar products and run their business exactly the same way. My generalisations are thus entirely appropriate, and not in any way misrepresentative (not that that is any great deal any more).
In any case, no-one's forcing you, or the publisher here, to use those commercial offerings. They're simply insisting that if you do choose to use them, you must pay the going rate for the privilege.
I think the EU has made a game of making Microsoft "guess", and then saying, "BZZT! WRONG! We didn't mean that, but we're not going to clarify much either. Try again. Oh, and your time is up."
And I have little sympathy for Microsoft even so. This is one of those cases where someone has been taking the piss for years, everyone knows it, but no-one's been able to pin them according to the letter of the law and the processes in place. In such cases, the end result is often that the relevant authorities say "enough is enough" and deliberately make a draconian but effective over-reaction that leaves no scope for wriggle room. No, it's not "fair" in itself, but it's a self-inflicted wound caused by playing the system (in particular, effectively complying with the letter of the law but not its spirit) for an extended period. Think of it as the civil equivalent of "contempt of court".
The fine itself is relatively modest. But think of the knock-on effects that charging it will have.
The fine will inevitably hit Microsoft's profitability. That in turn will hit their stock price, as a company already struggling to increase profitability, whose stock is traded in a market already very cautious about the value of the US dollar and interest rates. If MS stock prices start to slide, then that will have three dramatic effects.
Firstly, the MS executives will suddenly become a lot poorer. BillG's fortune looks impressive, but it's electronic money, and much of it is tied to MS stock. Moreover, he can't take much of it out of MS, because doing so would send huge negative vibes through the market, which would itself hit the stock price further. The same goes for the other long-timers and big name execs.
Secondly, a lot of MS employees have pretty low salaries by industry standards, getting a significant amount of their compensation through stock options and the like. If the stock price tanks, it will take employee morale with it, and a lot of talented people's resumes are going to arrive at Google, Apple, Web 2.0 start-ups and other potentially more lucrative places within a week. Naturally, this in turn will do further damage to the company's market value.
Thirdly, the shareholders will be seriously pissed. That will result in a sell-off, lowering share prices still further. It may also result in executive heads rolling; big finance is not nearly as forgiving of executive blunders as it used to be, and there have been some high profile boardroom casualties in recent years.
In other words, if this snowball starts rolling, it's going to roll a long way, very possibly enough to bring down the whole company, and certainly enough to bring down a few executives and lose a lot of good people from the staff.
That is why the European judgement is a good one. It isn't, in itself, enough to sink Microsoft (and possibly tip the world economy into meltdown overnight). It is, however, enough to condemn them to death by a thousand cuts if they don't respond quickly. This is what is being missed by the people who have looked at their bank balance and concluded that they could last centuries just by paying the fines out of interest.
Historical, I suspect. The US DoJ may let organisations pull that kind of stunt, but I suspect that having sat back to allow the US to go first, the EU authorities have now decided that enough is enough. I imagine, having played the requisite legal games for a couple of years, they now plan to drag Microsoft kicking and screaming back to their reality, where breaking the law has real consequences.
Microsoft is a multi-national conglomerate doing business in many nations around the world.
Indeed. Moreover, a lot of people from the US who lurk around here don't seem to appreciate how small their market is compared to the rest of the world. The US may have the world's single biggest national economy (though not by far, depending on the metric you use) but compared to, say, Europe as a whole, it's not so much. Losing most or all of its European income would basically kill Microsoft overnight. Of course, in the current economic climate, it could also trigger the freefall meltdown that the world economy is in grave danger of falling into any time now.:-(
If only there were another option; some kind of operating environment one could install on one's computer to do one's work. And maybe some other bits and pieces of software that could go with that environment that would still let one perform one's computer-centric duties.
Unfortunately, for most users, there isn't. If there were, a lot of us would be using it.
This is not intended to be a facetious reply, and I do appreciate the point you were trying to make. But right now, the only potential alternatives for most people are platforms based on MacOS or Linux. By the time you factor in the big name business applications for users at work, games and hardware limitations for users at home, the relatively high cost of Macs, and the relatively poor training and support available for most OSS, that pretty much rules out both for the vast majority of people who might switch away from Microsoft platforms given a reasonable alternative.
Not only that, but the claims in the ad are dubious and subjective at best, if not outright untrue. For a start, I'd be expecting a call from Microsoft's legal team, followed by several others, over the claim to be the "world's best" at all those things.
If they run that ad, then unfortunately I think it will have only one overwhelming effect: it will convince serious businesspeople everywhere that open source software is from amateurish wannabe land, and shouldn't be touched with a bargepole.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree that that's how unit tests should be used, and in fact I'm writing this as a whole set of tests run on a change I've just made to my current project. But the approach advocated by a lot of the agile crowd, including the poster to whom I replied above, places unit tests on a pedestal. I'm sure you've heard their war cries: "If the unit tests pass, everything must be working right," they tell us, or, "The tests are the design." That sort of status simply isn't justified, and basing your entire development process on a poor assumption is no way to run a software project.
It's not extortion, it's just completely untrue. We're talking explicitly about the UK, so your comments about the US are irrelevant. Moreover, the BSA has no legal basis for stopping a court awarding costs against it if it takes you to court and loses.
Which can never be done reliably for non-trivial projects with the tools and techniques we have available today, regardless of what anyone trying to sell you their book says. No-one has yet shown how to beat picking two of cheap, fast and good.
Which is a much higher level than the sort of day-to-day project stuff we're talking about here.
It doesn't, in this context. Again, no executive of a large company should routinely be involved in the day-to-day progress of minor projects by a particular dev team. That's not their job, and it's the worst kind of micromanagement.
It also means you need metrics worth something, which random estimates for project timescales based on the inadequate information that was available six months earlier most certainly are not.
Which is great, as long as your application is so trivial that you can faithfully demonstrate that it has the desired behaviour using only a limited number of self-contained tests. Unfortunately, real game developers write posts like this that make the flaws in that approach pretty obvious.
...who, by definition, will produce good results using pretty much any methodology. The test of any business process is how much it helps the guys who aren't already good, not how much it helps the office guru.
This is just an issue with management, though. A good manager will trust his engineers (or fire them and replace them with trustworthy alternatives). The manager's job is to set the direction of the project, get the engineers what they need to steer in that direction, and then get out of the way as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
It's staggering how many managers don't realise this, and hamstring their dev teams with their personal, half-baked, technically-incompetent ideas and/or with excessive procedures and beaucratic reporting because the manager "has to know what's going on". Of course he does, up to a point, but what exactly is he going to do if a developer does tell him that a bug fix was delayed by a day because {$TECHNOBABBLE}? If he's not going to act on some information, he doesn't need to know it, and requiring developers to take time out of their day to "keep the manager in the loop" more than necessary just disrupts development.
I, too, was taught about software engineering processes during my CompSci days. But in my case, the waterfall model was the textbook example of how not to do things...
Of course, you can take things too far that other way as well. Being too rough and ready -- something encouraged by an "agile" approach -- may get you best results locally, but what matters is getting optimal results globally across the lifetime of the project and all its features. Just as the old hands look at managers trying in vain to match reality to a waterfall model and smile, so they look at young enthusiasts diving in with little to no big picture planning and wait for things to fall apart.
I doubt it. Smart dev teams have been using iterative development cycles and keeping their code tidy since a long time before anyone coined the buzzphrase "agile" (or using SillyCapitalLetters and calling things "extreme", or any of the other hype we've put up with lately).
I suspect we probably do agree on most of this, at least from an ethical perspective if not on how the law should match up to it. However, in my defence, I came into this thread around this post of yours, which contains the following, with emphasis on the relevant points:
To me, that implied clearly that your distinction between ethical and non-ethical was based on whether the software is only being used for business purposes to make financial gains. That's the position I criticised, and it's very different to what we've been discussing more recently, where you're using the term "profit" to include non-monetary benefits, and your definition of "personal use" has narrowed a lot from its usual meaning of "not business use".
On the face of it, I don't disagree with your argument from a moral standpoint. Indeed, if I were running a software company shipping professional applications rather than just working for one, I'd probably try different pricing schemes for private home users and businesses.
My problem with your argument is simple practicality. While you, personally, may be very ethical about how you infringe copyrights, most people aren't. (I don't like stating generalisations like that without supporting evidence, but in this case, I consider it so obvious that I'll ask you to humour me.)
So, if it's OK for someone to rip a bit of software to try it out, where do you draw the line? Is it fair to use it for a week without paying? A month? Is it fair to rip some pro-grade DTP software and fonts, "try" them for a couple of days by producing the one document you really want, and then not buy them because you find they don't meet your needs (since you no longer need them once you've got the "trial" document)?
For this reason, I think the choice to offer trial periods, discounts for home users, and the like must be made by the developers. Sure, naive management will fail to take advantage of opportunities such as those you describe, and they'll pay for it by losing potential sales. But as soon as you transfer this right to the user, in practice you've given up any protection copyright had to offer.
I'm sure some people around here would like that, as a completely blanket measure, but I doubt many of them have thought through the economics beyond their own wallets. You apparently have, and I commend you for it. Indeed, as I said earlier, I personally would take a business approach that would support the sort of trial use you talked about for exactly the reasons you gave. But unfortunately, I think you're in a minority of consumers and I'm not the sales manager for my team, and until those things change, I think your approach is too open to abuse for the law to support it.
With respect, you just undermined either the economics of every service industry on the planet or the validity of your own argument.
Remember that the UK legal system is generally loser-pays. If you believe your rogue employee was just being malicious, tell the BSA so and don't invite them to audit you. If they choose to sue, defend yourself and then ask the court to award you costs.
Perhaps you realise this and just wrote loosely -- your mention of MM fonts suggests so, at least -- but for the avoidance of doubt NMerriam isn't talking about weights like light, regular, book, demi-bold, and so on. What's being described here is a collection of subtly adjusted font designs, often called "opticals", which are tuned for use within a fairly tight range of sizes. For example, you might have four variants in your family:
Although stroke weight often is one of the variations, other changes commonly include how open the bowls of letters are, the relative x-height, the relative size of serifs and other decorations, and the default amount of inter-letter spacing.
Random factoid for the day: if you read any of the research into what makes a highly readable font for low-resolution screen use, many of the same elements are used in caption-size optical variants to maintain legibility at smaller sizes in print as well.
Blockquoth the AC:
And speaking as someone who currently works on code that ultimately goes into those ludicrously expensive 3D applications the GP poster mentioned, I'd like to thank that poster personally for ripping me off. After all, like all software developers, I am ludicrously wealthy as a result of the software I make. My employer being ripped off doesn't in any way impact the profit-sharing scheme that pays my rent and that of my equally ludicrously overpaid colleagues.
I imagine those who spend months designing high quality professional fonts feel much the same way. Font design is one of those crafts where very few people are genuinely good at it, but using good work has a subtle but very real effect. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect those benefitting from the hard work of skilled craftsmen to pay fair compensation in return, and I fail to see why it matters whether they're doing it for personal financial benefit or for some other reason.
I find it tragic that the GP's position is so acceptable around here that it actually gets modded insightful.
Is that definitive now? The French legislature and judiciary have been changing their minds radically on what is and isn't allowed for something like a year now, with several relevant rulings in very high courts, subsequent legislation changing them, more proposed legislation changing that, and so on....
OK, let's remember the context here. We're talking about the market size in the US compared to the market size in Europe. The question at hand is whether the costs of localisation make a significant impact on the profitability of going for the wider European market. And in particular, we're talking about Microsoft software.
So, for a start, most of their stuff can be localised across Europe just by replacing text and basic formatting for dates, currencies, etc. Almost all European languages use similar conventions for their UI (e.g., left-to-right text). There may be a few odd messages among the accessibility stuff that need an audible translation, but not a lot in comparison.
I don't know about the arrangements for hypothetical start-up developers and their publishers, but that's irrelevant to this conversation anyway.
I also don't know about Google. I have written internationalised code, not written about having written it. But I do know that on the project I'm particularly thinking of, a release required the full-time efforts of a dev team of six for around six months plus support staff etc. The translation, in contrast, was done in a couple of days by an agency we subcontracted to. The amount we paid for it was so small that it didn't even register on the budget overviews I saw as a team leader, which means their day rate can't have been much more than we charged for a developer-day on T&M contracts.
So yes, the mechanical translation work is very cheap in comparison to the development, and probably insignificant to Microsoft compared to the profitability of shipping to the additional European countries mentioned.
Sure, but once you've got an i18n-friendly architecture in your software, translation is a relatively cheap operation. I used to work on a program shipping in probably 10 different languages, and we never even noticed during development, it just added a few days to a release cycle while the translators did their thing.
I'd be surprised if there were as many as 200 font families that actually have that wide a range available. A quick look at the web sites of the major font suppliers suggests few generally offer more than say 10 or 20 "serious" fonts with a full range of variations. The popular fonts generally seem to be the interesting non-standard things, script fonts and the like, which by their nature only come in a small number of variations. (Having said that, my Zapfino Extra Pro came with a dozen different variations...)
I'm also slightly surprised at what you describe as a small collection for a publishing house. Do many publishers really pay for the full range for each of more than a dozen standard text faces? I've done some graphic design and typography in my time, but never in a professional context, so I can't really gauge this one at all.
Your main point is absolutely spot on, of course. Take perhaps eight weights, condensed/regular/expanded widths, italic variants, small caps variants, caption/body/subhead/display optical variants, and multiply it all up, and you can easily get dozens of variations of popular fonts like Helvetica or Palatino.
That's because in general, one wouldn't be. You aren't copying the font yourself, and font licensing isn't really as absurd as some people here are making out: the licence usually does permit temporarily using a copy of the font at a print shop for the purposes of printing a document you've created using it, for example. What is generally illegal is extracting a font definition that was encoded in a document and reusing it for other purposes, or simply copying .ttf files or whatever off one computer and installing them on another.
Incidentally, contrary to another reply you got, the font design itself may be copyrightable in some juridictions, though not all. The font definition via TrueType, METAFONT source, or whatever is copyrightable pretty much everywhere in the western world AFAIK.
They're a snarky pest if you're illegally ripping off the people the BSA represent and you get caught, yes. Sorry, but in that case, that's just too bad for you.
On the other hand, if you're one of the people whose software is being ripped off -- and remember, most software companies are not huge and rich like Microsoft and Adobe, and feel the pain of illegal copying all too well -- then the BSA can be an effective means of getting what you're due.
Aside from occasional high profile screw-ups, the BSA generally doesn't have an RIAA-esque reputation for abusing the legal system. (Even if they did try it, that approach would get stonewalled every time it went to court in the UK, with the defence awarded costs.) I imagine the amount of money the BSA regain for their clients pays for a lot more than their overheads.
Someday, Microsoft, Apple and Red Hat should consolidate... just call them MAR. Every new article I read about any of these makes me think they're cut from the same cloth, and all of them produce similar products and run their business exactly the same way. My generalisations are thus entirely appropriate, and not in any way misrepresentative (not that that is any great deal any more).
In any case, no-one's forcing you, or the publisher here, to use those commercial offerings. They're simply insisting that if you do choose to use them, you must pay the going rate for the privilege.
And I have little sympathy for Microsoft even so. This is one of those cases where someone has been taking the piss for years, everyone knows it, but no-one's been able to pin them according to the letter of the law and the processes in place. In such cases, the end result is often that the relevant authorities say "enough is enough" and deliberately make a draconian but effective over-reaction that leaves no scope for wriggle room. No, it's not "fair" in itself, but it's a self-inflicted wound caused by playing the system (in particular, effectively complying with the letter of the law but not its spirit) for an extended period. Think of it as the civil equivalent of "contempt of court".
The fine itself is relatively modest. But think of the knock-on effects that charging it will have.
The fine will inevitably hit Microsoft's profitability. That in turn will hit their stock price, as a company already struggling to increase profitability, whose stock is traded in a market already very cautious about the value of the US dollar and interest rates. If MS stock prices start to slide, then that will have three dramatic effects.
Firstly, the MS executives will suddenly become a lot poorer. BillG's fortune looks impressive, but it's electronic money, and much of it is tied to MS stock. Moreover, he can't take much of it out of MS, because doing so would send huge negative vibes through the market, which would itself hit the stock price further. The same goes for the other long-timers and big name execs.
Secondly, a lot of MS employees have pretty low salaries by industry standards, getting a significant amount of their compensation through stock options and the like. If the stock price tanks, it will take employee morale with it, and a lot of talented people's resumes are going to arrive at Google, Apple, Web 2.0 start-ups and other potentially more lucrative places within a week. Naturally, this in turn will do further damage to the company's market value.
Thirdly, the shareholders will be seriously pissed. That will result in a sell-off, lowering share prices still further. It may also result in executive heads rolling; big finance is not nearly as forgiving of executive blunders as it used to be, and there have been some high profile boardroom casualties in recent years.
In other words, if this snowball starts rolling, it's going to roll a long way, very possibly enough to bring down the whole company, and certainly enough to bring down a few executives and lose a lot of good people from the staff.
That is why the European judgement is a good one. It isn't, in itself, enough to sink Microsoft (and possibly tip the world economy into meltdown overnight). It is, however, enough to condemn them to death by a thousand cuts if they don't respond quickly. This is what is being missed by the people who have looked at their bank balance and concluded that they could last centuries just by paying the fines out of interest.
Historical, I suspect. The US DoJ may let organisations pull that kind of stunt, but I suspect that having sat back to allow the US to go first, the EU authorities have now decided that enough is enough. I imagine, having played the requisite legal games for a couple of years, they now plan to drag Microsoft kicking and screaming back to their reality, where breaking the law has real consequences.
Indeed. Moreover, a lot of people from the US who lurk around here don't seem to appreciate how small their market is compared to the rest of the world. The US may have the world's single biggest national economy (though not by far, depending on the metric you use) but compared to, say, Europe as a whole, it's not so much. Losing most or all of its European income would basically kill Microsoft overnight. Of course, in the current economic climate, it could also trigger the freefall meltdown that the world economy is in grave danger of falling into any time now. :-(
Unfortunately, for most users, there isn't. If there were, a lot of us would be using it.
This is not intended to be a facetious reply, and I do appreciate the point you were trying to make. But right now, the only potential alternatives for most people are platforms based on MacOS or Linux. By the time you factor in the big name business applications for users at work, games and hardware limitations for users at home, the relatively high cost of Macs, and the relatively poor training and support available for most OSS, that pretty much rules out both for the vast majority of people who might switch away from Microsoft platforms given a reasonable alternative.
Not only that, but the claims in the ad are dubious and subjective at best, if not outright untrue. For a start, I'd be expecting a call from Microsoft's legal team, followed by several others, over the claim to be the "world's best" at all those things.
If they run that ad, then unfortunately I think it will have only one overwhelming effect: it will convince serious businesspeople everywhere that open source software is from amateurish wannabe land, and shouldn't be touched with a bargepole.