I'll bring it up again. "The Future of Ideas" by Lawrence Lessig argues well against many of our current network-controlling systems, including copyright, patents, and in your case, physical-layer/node control. If you read this book, you'll be able to easily prepare a non-partisan argument that if the CBDTPA was passed, it would seriously hurt innovation.
The CBDTPA would slice the throat of the digital commons and neutrality of network layers Lessig argues for. Innovation thrives on digital commons and neutral network layers. Eliminating the neutrality of digital devices brings us well back on the way to an AT&T-like controlled network, where you need to ask AT&T's permission to do anything.
As John Gilmore puts it:
[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity....I think we should embrace the era of plenty, and how to mutually live in it.
Great! That leaves Theo available for leading the Linux kernel:
Theo de Raadt: Theo is an exceptional candidate. Not only is he a
more than adequate hacker; he attracts exactly the type of people
to OpenBSD that he wants, and will jettison those who are not up to
the task. While purging out all the less-than-adequate hackers
in the Linux project will inevitably attract negative publicity
from Slashdot and other "community" sites where these feeble hackers
hang out, it will no doubt strengthen Linux in the future. Just
look at what Theo's strong leadership has done for OpenBSD! He
turned around the worthless "research project" that was NetBSD and
made it an enterprise-class firewall system. I can only imagine
the effect his Midas touch could have on the Linux kernel.
Richard M. Stallman: RMS has an exceptional track record in the
open-source field, being largely responsible for my favorite text
editor, compiler, and debugger. No other open-source hacker has
come as close as he has to replicating the integration available
with Microsoft Visual C++ 6 years ago. I fully endorse him as a
candidate, assuming he's willing to drop his puerile "GNU/Linux"
ego stroking.
I can just see RMS now, jumping up and down, flailing his arms, "No no no no! I am part of the Free Software movement, not..."
And yet we still grant patents in the medical field. Medical instruments and devices are patented. So are drugs.
First of all, we grant patents on these public health products to the demise of poorer third-world nations who would be producing generic drugs instead.
I don't see how whether something is research or commercial efforts has any bearing on whether patents are good or not. In both cases, we apply patent law the same, and we as a society get the same result from such patents of either type.
The only time there is a possible difference between the two is that patent giants such as IBM are able to coerce smaller patent holders with litigous threats (this is described in Stallman's speech).
Hence, I'll say the funding has little to no importance, and even go on to saying that with commercial interest, the problems patent system is are exasperated even further.
What is important is whether society benefits from granting such a patent. Since, as Stallman explains, software is so different from other fields, these differences incur a greater cost to society with each granted patent, without anything in return. With a greater commons society and companies as a whole benefit.
One could argue, similarly, that if we impose stronger and stronger restrictions on what we can build into software, then we are resisting the natural cultural synergy that results from algorithms and features being shared among the community members.
Bingo. You get it. This is exactly the idea that Lawrence Lessig argues in "The Future of Ideas". Intellectual commons are a good thing.
If you want to read a great book on the topic of copyrights and patents, you must read "The Future of Ideas" by Lawrence Lessig. In it he explains how the current battles are not a Left vs. Right issue, but a New vs. Old issue.
The book is filled with good arguments and strong references. He argues that patents are only one tool in the aresenal of the old that are being used to protect the dinosaurs and destroy the freedom of the end-to-end Internet.
It is key to remember that when deciding whether or not we should have patents, the question we need to ask is "do we as a society benefit from patents." I argue that patents for software, especially as they currently are, have no practical benefit for society. Society is supposed to benefit from patents by studying the disclosure of the design, but noone does this because they are not written legibly. Furthermore, the lifetime of patents greatly exceeds the lifetime of software, so by the time the patent clears, society gains little from it. Also, software patents that are also protected by copyright is ridiculous.
Society gains most in a fast-growing sector by having a large commons of ideas to pull from.
It is from this commons that innovators are able to flourish.
The Internet is the greatest proof that patents are not the solution. Only because there was a lot of freedom to innovate, unencumbered by patents, were researchers able to develop one of the most freedom-promoting tools for society.
To a large extent, our society and our economy are powered by software.
You're going to eat these words. The reason our society depends on software is because there were no patent restrictions hurled upon researchers. Our society benefits from a commons of software much more than if it were locked away in patents.
Paraphrasing Alan Cox, we have the great Internet and software we do today not due to intellectual property laws, but in spite of them.
I don't think you understand. The company hired to do the work (it was not Microsoft), sure, paid its employees and fed the money somehow 'back into the sytsem'. But if as taxpayer if you don't think there was anything wrong, feel free to send checks without getting anything in return to the company that failed the project and didn't deliver. You'd be doing the same thing.
Ya... you'd need to be the richest corp on the planet to do that... ermm...
I don't think that Microsoft is the 'richest' corporation there is. Certainly giants like GE are larger. It just happens that Bill Gates is the 'richest' individual.
My company's product uses a Free Software unix, database, web server, et. al. We save the government, and hence your tax dollars (if you are in the US) thousands on each machine we ship because our machine is so solid, and we don't have to pay royalties to MS.
We won our contract after a much larger company was awarded 6 million dollars and failed trying to implement on a Windows platform. 6 million of your tax dollars gone, *poof*. My company produced a working version for only half a million using Free Software, and entirely avoiding Windows and other Microsoft products. We could have saved taxpayers over 5 million dollars if people like you would realize that Free unix solutions are better than Windows ones.
Clearly you misunderstand Free Software licenses. We do not provide our product to anyone but our customers. We provide the source to our customers under a Free Software license. They can choose to or (more likely) not share the source. Wouldn't do you much good since part of our turnkey solution is to provide cross-network requests, which you wouldn't be allowed to access.
Different how? Details! Tell me HOW I WILL GET PAID!
I've been doing fairly well on my first job out of college getting paid writing Free Software. My company sells turnkey software+hardware solutions for various law enforcement agencies.
O'Reilly has reviews of the book available. Among them, is a 'review' by Bill Gates:
Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?
Bill Gates in his "Open Letter to Hobbyists," 1976
Well, damnit, if you took on running ORBZ, then you better have the time to run it right, or shut it down!
Why do you get to determine what it means to "run it right"? ORBZ wasn't doing anything wierd at all. No other mail server in the world crashed, only Domino. If your browser crashes when it comes across PNG images, do you blame all the website owners out there that use PNG, or do you blame your browser maker?
Re:Relay-testing
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're right. But on the other hand, once you understand what you're doing is crashing servers, you should probably either (a) fix what you're doing, even though its not your fault (b) refuse to test domino servers until they get it fixed.
With regards to your (a), there wasn't anything to 'fix' on ORBZ's end. If you think so, you have a gross lack of knowledge of SMTP. If you think (b) is a viable solution, then it would only be fair to to mark all Lotus servers as open relays if they can't be tested. This would be a worse solution than simply getting people to fix their Lotus servers.
However, I'd be very curious to know who is actually doing the suing and issuing the legal threats.
Ian Gulliver talked about facing criminal charges. Criminal charges have nothing to do with suits (those are civil matters), and are brought by the state, not individual citizens.
How many times have you emailed a developer of a GPL'd program for some feature or help, and gotten a reply along the lines of, "You have the source code, you figure it out!"?
Interesting you ask this. Anyone who's written to me asking questions about my software always gets their question answered. I take pride whenever someone asks me a question, because to me, it means that I have another person using my software. It's definitely an ego thing, and might not scale if I got dozens of people asking me questions every day, but for now, it works, and I like to think my users are happy.
Oh, and if someone mailed me with unreasonable requests, I would never say anything along the lines of "use the source luke", but probably more along the lines of "That isn't a high priority for me" or "That would not fit well within the scope of the program", both of which would be entirely accurate statements.
If you write software and release under the GPL, you can charge whatever you want. It's only the recipients that are limited by in what they can charge for re-distributing.
I think one of the 'issues' with the GPL is that the 'free beer' part of it tends to be the dominant image in most people's minds. It would be nice if GPL'd software could be non-free-beer yet Software Libre. Unfortunately, if we did this, we would likely end up with a situation where monetary figures start trampling on the Libre aspect.
For example, consider if the GPL allowed recipients to charge. If they charged $10, this is reasonable to most people, even if the distributor got it for free beer. However, if they charged $300, this gets out of control, and starts trampling on idea that the GPL requires you to pass along the same rights.
If we could resolve this issue, I think a lot of people's worries about the GPL would go away. The most important part of the GPL is the 'free speech' part; the 'free beer' simply appears to be a necessary clause to help ensure the 'free speech' part.
C and C++ are definitely assembly-level languages. C especially can almost be translated to assembly fairly straightforward; it's just a nicer syntax for assembly. Both languages, however, force you to deal with 'machine' issues, such as allocating and freeing memory. In higher level languages, such as ML, scripting languages, and (kind of) Java, you don't worry about keeping the 'machine' happy.
There is a whole slew of non-low-level languages that are out there. Work with them and learn what is 'high' and what is 'low'. It's a sad situation that we're stuck with so many people writing everyday applications in assembly-level languages.
Because the program is licensed free of charge, there is no warranty for the program, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Except when otherwise stated in writing the copyright holders and/or other parties provide the program "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the program is with you. Should the program prove defective, you assume the cost of all necessary servicing,
repair or correction.
Now, not only does GPL'd software contain this clause, but practically any software. You accept a great deal of risk when you install software.
Good point. However, in their defense, it is of some comfort to know that the site validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional if you mandate it be verified as such (they are missing the DOCTYPE on the page). On the other hand, the original site still doesn't validate even after selecting HTML 4.01 Transitional (the closest it possibly comes to).
Your site does not validate. Your complaint is hence analogous to the stating "My program does not work well", when in fact it it has syntax errors and doesn't even compile.
If the FCC hadn't existed (and I'm not even sure the FCC was relevent in this case), it would have been just as able to enforce this regulation through standard contracts, etc.
This is, as you suggest, the critical issue. The idea is that the contract should not be as powerful as it is allowed to be. There are restraints that nullfy many terms of contracts depending on where you live (e.g., state by state laws can require certain warranty terms no matter what the contract says), contstitutional-rights relevance (you cannot contract away your rights), etc.
I'll agree I may have mistated that the government sponsored the monopoly directly, but it did sponsor it indirectly through inaction by allowing terms of contract that violate the senses (mine, at least). The FCC actively made a decision to allow the AT&T terms to stand. Just as with your TV/VCR example; I'm not certain that it would be legally possible to contract that restriction, but if it is allowed, I would think this is a gross error.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bring it up again. "The Future of Ideas" by Lawrence Lessig argues well against many of our current network-controlling systems, including copyright, patents, and in your case, physical-layer/node control. If you read this book, you'll be able to easily prepare a non-partisan argument that if the CBDTPA was passed, it would seriously hurt innovation.
The CBDTPA would slice the throat of the digital commons and neutrality of network layers Lessig argues for. Innovation thrives on digital commons and neutral network layers. Eliminating the neutrality of digital devices brings us well back on the way to an AT&T-like controlled network, where you need to ask AT&T's permission to do anything.
As John Gilmore puts it:
Nah, it's because you live on Sesame street in a tin garbage can.
Great! That leaves Theo available for leading the Linux kernel:
I can just see RMS now, jumping up and down, flailing his arms, "No no no no! I am part of the Free Software movement, not..."
First of all, we grant patents on these public health products to the demise of poorer third-world nations who would be producing generic drugs instead.
I don't see how whether something is research or commercial efforts has any bearing on whether patents are good or not. In both cases, we apply patent law the same, and we as a society get the same result from such patents of either type. The only time there is a possible difference between the two is that patent giants such as IBM are able to coerce smaller patent holders with litigous threats (this is described in Stallman's speech).
Hence, I'll say the funding has little to no importance, and even go on to saying that with commercial interest, the problems patent system is are exasperated even further.
What is important is whether society benefits from granting such a patent. Since, as Stallman explains, software is so different from other fields, these differences incur a greater cost to society with each granted patent, without anything in return. With a greater commons society and companies as a whole benefit.
Bingo. You get it. This is exactly the idea that Lawrence Lessig argues in "The Future of Ideas". Intellectual commons are a good thing.
If you want to read a great book on the topic of copyrights and patents, you must read "The Future of Ideas" by Lawrence Lessig. In it he explains how the current battles are not a Left vs. Right issue, but a New vs. Old issue.
The book is filled with good arguments and strong references. He argues that patents are only one tool in the aresenal of the old that are being used to protect the dinosaurs and destroy the freedom of the end-to-end Internet.
It is key to remember that when deciding whether or not we should have patents, the question we need to ask is "do we as a society benefit from patents." I argue that patents for software, especially as they currently are, have no practical benefit for society. Society is supposed to benefit from patents by studying the disclosure of the design, but noone does this because they are not written legibly. Furthermore, the lifetime of patents greatly exceeds the lifetime of software, so by the time the patent clears, society gains little from it. Also, software patents that are also protected by copyright is ridiculous.
Society gains most in a fast-growing sector by having a large commons of ideas to pull from. It is from this commons that innovators are able to flourish.
The Internet is the greatest proof that patents are not the solution. Only because there was a lot of freedom to innovate, unencumbered by patents, were researchers able to develop one of the most freedom-promoting tools for society.
You're going to eat these words. The reason our society depends on software is because there were no patent restrictions hurled upon researchers. Our society benefits from a commons of software much more than if it were locked away in patents.
Paraphrasing Alan Cox, we have the great Internet and software we do today not due to intellectual property laws, but in spite of them.
I don't think you understand. The company hired to do the work (it was not Microsoft), sure, paid its employees and fed the money somehow 'back into the sytsem'. But if as taxpayer if you don't think there was anything wrong, feel free to send checks without getting anything in return to the company that failed the project and didn't deliver. You'd be doing the same thing.
I don't think that Microsoft is the 'richest' corporation there is. Certainly giants like GE are larger. It just happens that Bill Gates is the 'richest' individual.
My company's product uses a Free Software unix, database, web server, et. al. We save the government, and hence your tax dollars (if you are in the US) thousands on each machine we ship because our machine is so solid, and we don't have to pay royalties to MS.
We won our contract after a much larger company was awarded 6 million dollars and failed trying to implement on a Windows platform. 6 million of your tax dollars gone, *poof*. My company produced a working version for only half a million using Free Software, and entirely avoiding Windows and other Microsoft products. We could have saved taxpayers over 5 million dollars if people like you would realize that Free unix solutions are better than Windows ones.
Clearly you misunderstand Free Software licenses. We do not provide our product to anyone but our customers. We provide the source to our customers under a Free Software license. They can choose to or (more likely) not share the source. Wouldn't do you much good since part of our turnkey solution is to provide cross-network requests, which you wouldn't be allowed to access.
I've been doing fairly well on my first job out of college getting paid writing Free Software. My company sells turnkey software+hardware solutions for various law enforcement agencies.
Is Windows ready as a server? I think not. Linux wins there hands down.
Oh, and I've been using free unixes (Linux and FreeBSD) on the the desktop for the past 6 years.
O'Reilly has reviews of the book available. Among them, is a 'review' by Bill Gates:
Why do you get to determine what it means to "run it right"? ORBZ wasn't doing anything wierd at all. No other mail server in the world crashed, only Domino. If your browser crashes when it comes across PNG images, do you blame all the website owners out there that use PNG, or do you blame your browser maker?
With regards to your (a), there wasn't anything to 'fix' on ORBZ's end. If you think so, you have a gross lack of knowledge of SMTP. If you think (b) is a viable solution, then it would only be fair to to mark all Lotus servers as open relays if they can't be tested. This would be a worse solution than simply getting people to fix their Lotus servers.
Ian Gulliver talked about facing criminal charges. Criminal charges have nothing to do with suits (those are civil matters), and are brought by the state, not individual citizens.
Interesting you ask this. Anyone who's written to me asking questions about my software always gets their question answered. I take pride whenever someone asks me a question, because to me, it means that I have another person using my software. It's definitely an ego thing, and might not scale if I got dozens of people asking me questions every day, but for now, it works, and I like to think my users are happy.
Oh, and if someone mailed me with unreasonable requests, I would never say anything along the lines of "use the source luke", but probably more along the lines of "That isn't a high priority for me" or "That would not fit well within the scope of the program", both of which would be entirely accurate statements.
If you write software and release under the GPL, you can charge whatever you want. It's only the recipients that are limited by in what they can charge for re-distributing.
I think one of the 'issues' with the GPL is that the 'free beer' part of it tends to be the dominant image in most people's minds. It would be nice if GPL'd software could be non-free-beer yet Software Libre. Unfortunately, if we did this, we would likely end up with a situation where monetary figures start trampling on the Libre aspect.
For example, consider if the GPL allowed recipients to charge. If they charged $10, this is reasonable to most people, even if the distributor got it for free beer. However, if they charged $300, this gets out of control, and starts trampling on idea that the GPL requires you to pass along the same rights.
If we could resolve this issue, I think a lot of people's worries about the GPL would go away. The most important part of the GPL is the 'free speech' part; the 'free beer' simply appears to be a necessary clause to help ensure the 'free speech' part.
C and C++ are definitely assembly-level languages. C especially can almost be translated to assembly fairly straightforward; it's just a nicer syntax for assembly. Both languages, however, force you to deal with 'machine' issues, such as allocating and freeing memory. In higher level languages, such as ML, scripting languages, and (kind of) Java, you don't worry about keeping the 'machine' happy.
There is a whole slew of non-low-level languages that are out there. Work with them and learn what is 'high' and what is 'low'. It's a sad situation that we're stuck with so many people writing everyday applications in assembly-level languages.
Now, not only does GPL'd software contain this clause, but practically any software. You accept a great deal of risk when you install software.
Good point. However, in their defense, it is of some comfort to know that the site validates as HTML 4.01 Transitional if you mandate it be verified as such (they are missing the DOCTYPE on the page). On the other hand, the original site still doesn't validate even after selecting HTML 4.01 Transitional (the closest it possibly comes to).
Your site does not validate. Your complaint is hence analogous to the stating "My program does not work well", when in fact it it has syntax errors and doesn't even compile.
This is, as you suggest, the critical issue. The idea is that the contract should not be as powerful as it is allowed to be. There are restraints that nullfy many terms of contracts depending on where you live (e.g., state by state laws can require certain warranty terms no matter what the contract says), contstitutional-rights relevance (you cannot contract away your rights), etc.
I'll agree I may have mistated that the government sponsored the monopoly directly, but it did sponsor it indirectly through inaction by allowing terms of contract that violate the senses (mine, at least). The FCC actively made a decision to allow the AT&T terms to stand. Just as with your TV/VCR example; I'm not certain that it would be legally possible to contract that restriction, but if it is allowed, I would think this is a gross error.