I don't do C++, it's 10 years since I last had to use that language for anything serious. The point of GC and memory management is in general a few things: (A) decreasing programmer load, (B) allowing the design of reasonable APIs (as Meyer says, a language without GC isn't an OO language, and I halfway agree with him), (C) Increased performance (depending on what kind of memory management we're talking about). Avoiding buffer overflows is an almost completely separate issue. I don't doubt there are libraries that does this for C++ and they may use GC as an enabling technology, yet these are still very separate issues. Are you smoking crack or something?
And I read your comment, and the point I was making (which you jumped across) was LEAST PRIVILEGE. Read again: LEAST PRIVILEGE. And again: LEAST PRIVILEGE. This means RESTRICTING ALL PROGRAMS AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. I'm uppercasing so you can see this through the crack smoke. In LEAST PRIVILEGE, ALL APPLICATIONS ARE UNTRUSTED. Yes, that is it: All Applications Are UNTRUSTED. They get only as much access as they have to have. They are ALL sandboxed as much as possible. That means that to be implemented as LEAST PRIVILEGE, all applications that CAN be managed SHOULD be managed. It also means that those that can run with a more restrictive security policy run with a more restrictive security policy. This would fit fairly nicely with the "Evidence based security" that MS is talking about, and it would include not giving evidence of higher trust than is absolutely needed for each piece.
I just read it, and my impression is that you don't understand security contexts and security design. I do OS development, I've worked as a security consultant doing similar things, I've studied the literature,
etc.
One would DEFINATELY want OS components to run in a reduced security context. It's the POINT in least privilege - you run as close to everything as possible in a context with access reduced as far as possible. I don't know if the access control.NET use is detailed enough to make the restrictions that's possible really useful, as I've fairly much ignored.NET due to time constraints.
Also, "garbage collection and memory management" has little to do with this - the issue close to this in C++ etc is the naked pointer support, and the ease of creating various forms of security errors (buffer overflows) using that. A virtualized system that's designed for security will avoid that problem. It will also be able to restrict other types of privilege, such as reading from files the user haven't opened in a system dialog box or drag-dropped onto a suitable graphical area.
While many other privilege restrictions could theoretically be done in C++, it would require removing the old APIs and creating new ones. I don't believe MS has done that, nor do I believe they've created *yet another* virtual machine when they have a decent one already.
I'd say relying on each and every one of hundreds of thousands of buffer operations being right is the bandaid, and that using "least privilege" is the systematic, proper approach. Of course, pros do both. It's known under various terms, a common one being "defense in depth".
I was sort of worried that MS was going to take over for open source, by actually taking the job of fixing their security model and creating really secure and stable system. Don't look like the chose to.
I'll admit to not noticing that. However, checking it out more carefully, it seems like there's still a fair amount of disagreement over this, as the bill had very broad support - so I think the issue will come up again.
Checking out reviews, sampling material beforehand, etc - it all takes time and effort from the consumer. That's a transaction cost. The consumers obviously feel this cost is so high that it is more worthwhile to risk the money at hand and possibly buy crap, otherwise they would be sampling and reading reviews.
Nothing presently prevent me from releasing region 0 DVDs. I am not sure that is going to be kept up, though. And there are things the prevent me from referencing most of the culture that people actually are part of, which is a significant new restriction (added in the last century or so.)
To be more specific on what parts of copying is beneficial and which are potentially negative, see my previous comment.
As for buying things: I sample much less music now that it's not as easily available, so there's less that I'm interested in buying. I want the artists to get money from me; I'm not so hot on the record companies, because I feel they abuse the position they are in. The last CD I bought was directly off a band member - I feel good about that:)
Good examples; for a fairly mainstream and recent example, I like to point out Rodrigues' "Sin City" - budget of $5 (five) million, actually finished for $4 (four) million.
What you're describing increase transaction costs so much that it wouldn't be worth it to consumers. Or at least that is clearly the perception of consumers, or they wouldn't buy second rate "content".
And I don't care about what justification they use - I care about being allowed to release materials I produce myself, being able to use things that I have bought the way I want to (No stupid advertisements I have to watch. No forced subtitles to avoid it being sold in a different area. No stupid zone coding.)
I also believe that a certain amount of what is presently illegal copying is to the benefit of everybody, and just releasing it all (removing all protections for digital copying for private use) might be to the benefit of society.
Also, I happen to buy roughly everything except books, which I borrow. I've copied about three movies in my life, and the last year I think it's about three CDs, buying about 10 - down from about 100 the year I copied 50.
Speaking as both a creator (maybe half the money I've earned is from copyrights) and somebody that's looked closely at these issues: Charging consumers for a work isn't a right - it is a privilege, a trade between me and society, ultimately enforced by using guns to remove other people's ability to produce things.
It's fairly clear that I have a moral right to keep my work secret. The moment I make it public and people start reading or viewing or using it, however, it becomes part of the heritage of the society, it influences and changes - and, if it is widely consumed, society end up with a much larger investment in it than I had.
Presently, society grants me the privilege of restricting copying - using its guns or the threat of them to punish those that defy my wishes. This is, however, not something I can demand. It is something that society grants.
At least if the P2P laws that's up in France goes through (flat rate per month to be allowed to use P2P legally for all material). So, suddenly all of France is one big loophole. This will be interesting, indeed.
You were discussing licenses where only development models are relevant. Distributed development and heavy use of volunteers block corporate takeovers of the project (corporate derivates of the codebase is a totally different issue), while centralized development under the roof of one company allows takeover of the project.
You've also made assumptions about what my assumptions are: I know perfectly well that in most projects most of the development is done by volunteers, mostly for a combination of fun and wish for functionality, occasionally with part of their time paid because they need that functionality in their job. I'm even arguing that this is the standard open source model.
Over to licenses: The GPL only "protects the code" (removes developer rights to their mods to it) if you've got external contributors with copyright doing license restrictions. This disappears with copyright assignment, which MySQL required. Besides, the code isn't that important - what's important is the project itself. The code as released will be available as long as somebody bothers to mirror it - the license cannot be revoked. However, if the project velocity can be killed - e.g, by MS favourite tactic of buying the company that develops it and reassigning the programmers to other demanding projects - then the code itself is as free under either license. The only case you have is if somebody would buy up a company creating a BSD licensed project and then close that project while continuing to offer it as a product. The closest I know to this happening is SSH, where the original developers made the license more restrictive. That would have been possible even with the GPL (they had no substantial external contributions), and it eventually lead to OpenSSH.
Licensing and benefit private corporations: You'll ALWAYS benefit private corporations. They may benefit by utilizing the code to run other business functions (GPL), or by having your codebase to add features to for creating a product Q instead of having to license a codebase elsewhere, or Q not being created at all. If we say that Q would benefit society with a level X and isn't being developed, you've just made society X poorer. Of course, if X is a negative value, this would be good. The purchasers of Q has made the judgement that Q makes their life better by more than the cost of Q, though, after having evaluated their situation and Q.
A sidenote on allowing derivates of codebases: It makes people do changes they CAN contribute back, and it makes them learn the codebase, so it's often got significant benefits patch-wise. It's given FreeBSD the entire SCSI subsystem, an optimized internal network system, multilink PPP, and a myriad of smaller things (and probably some large ones I forget).
Mod parent down. (Kindly, please - he's just done the mistake of feeling instead of thinking about licenses, and it's a common mistake.)
Being able to buy out an open source project has to do with DEVELOPMENT MODELS rather than licenses. With a distributed development model, the project can't be bought out - only some of the developers can be. With a centralized development model (like the MySQL model), you can be bought out.
XFree86 was a BSD license; FreeBSD was a BSD license; they/we still couldn't be bought out.
Eazel (developers of the Nautilus browser for GNOME) used only GPL and was considered an aquisition target. SuSE uses only GPL AFAIK, and was aquired. Cygnus used only the GPL and was aquired.
No matter what the license, an open source project will still be available in the form it was last released. What can change is development momentum. With an open development process with full participation, a single aquisition will normally be a fairly small bump. Some developers will be lost, and there will be other developers that know the codebase, the process is actively run through the mailing lists etc anyway, and the community can take up the slack. With a closed development process, it's necessary to invent a whole new way of working, and that's much more problematic.
Whether 95% of the actual developer would join totally depends on the project. The issue I see is that the open source userbase hasn't really learned to distinguish between a project with an open source license (and both XFree86 and MySQL is an example of such a project) and a project with an open source process - and mysql hasn't got an open source process. To the best of my knowledge, MySQL development happens almost exclusively by employees of MySQL AB. They have just given a job to all the biggest contributors.
For XFree86, there was a bunch of "free" developers that could fairly easily create a new project. For MySQL, there isn't. To me, this shows the problem of relying on corporate "gifted" open source projects: They're much less resilient than those that use an open source project. (To my mind, they also tend to be of lower core quality than the projects run by an open source process, though they've often got a higher quality user interface.)
I agree with you that the business model is broken, and I'm totally with you on the problem of artists being able to make a living from art. It's a difficult problem. The traditional way (prior to copyright, in other words prior to 1790 in the US, or for the first in the world, prior to 1710 in the UK) has been patronage, playing for live audiences (see e.g. Shakespeare), dontations (tips, basically), selling individual pictures etc, and selling rights to publishers. Publishers used serials and "freshness" to give their material scarcity, somewhat like newspapers today, as well as gentleman's agreements to not copy each other's material. Authors were fairly badly paid.
As for the future, I'm guessing that we'll end up with private copying in all forms being allowed (criminalizing 2/3s of the population seems unlikely), and I see different media as ending up with significantly different problems and problem levels.
Movies can make income on cinema showing, easy access to high capacity media (for a while, anyway), the feel of having a physical thing (with boxes etc), and possibly give bonuses in the form of e.g. chances at meeting the stars if you buy the movie. Cinema alone should make enough income to support reasonably cheap movie production. As an example of what can be done "on the cheap", Sin City cost $4M to make.
Books are probably OK at least for the time being, as people want the physical copy, and printing single copies is (at least for a while) about as expensive as buying a copy. Local printers that can print and bind at a reasonable price seems a far way off.
Music gives fairly little royalty to the actual artists, so the artists may be better off with a tip-based system, at least if the tipping is made EASY. Marketing is likely to somewhat die off for this segment, as Last.fm, Pandora, and similar tools make finding new music easy.
Games. Without copyright and per-copy payment, games is in big trouble. They're played at home, they're hideously expensive to make, and they command fairly little loyalty from the consumers. Maybe - just maybe - the copy protection on the disks and consoles may handle these. PC based games is likely to die.
Graphic artists. Actually, none of the good ones I know (personally) get their revenue from selling pictures in a form where private digital copying is likely to matter. They get it either from games, or from selling custom artwork for advertising use, or from selling physical paintings directly, or from other work (non-graphics related). I'm not sure if these are a representative sample or not - I suspect they're at least somewhat representative, in that I cannot actually think of anybody at all that live off selling pictures on the net.
Now, of these, there's two things that seems to be hit so hard they may go out of business: Record companies and games developers. With record companies come the side business, as you mention. I think there will be some loss of graphics artist positions, that's fairly small, though. The recording studios, however, will be hit fairly hard. However, if their service is really worth it to the consumer, this should increase tip levels for those bands that use recording studios so much that the successful bands will pay for them. I guess it will also create a market for much cheaper recording studios, where software and the musicans themselves do much more of the work.
It will be interesting to see the development here - whether for good or bad, it will certainly be "for different."
If you understand that I am using "stealing" in place of "copyright infringement" then what
the hell is your problem?
Please take the following in the friendliest possible way: For me, classifying "copyright infringement" as "stealing" muddled my thinking, and it was cleaned up when I started being careful around this. I see the exact same muddling coming out in what you write. On a hobby bases, I study language based therapy - language profoundly influences how we think. So, I am trying to make you aware that your language use is affecting your thinking. I am doing it on the basis of having done the same mistake myself.
I think that mistake is part of the reason for the next mistake: The example in the message I reply to now is in direct conflict with the situation I originally described. There are four types of copiers for a work:
Those that won't buy the work whether they get a copy or not
Those that will buy the work only if they don't get a copy (the copy is enough for them)
Those that will buy the work only if they DO get a copy (samplers, people that prefer the original for supporting the artist, etc)
Those that will buy the work no matter if they get a copy or not.
Let's disregard indirect effects for a moment. Without indirect effects, copying by class 1 and 4 are irrelevant for the profit potential of the creator/publisher. Copying by class 2 is negative, copying by class 3 is positive. Overall copying is positive for the creator if class 3 is larger than class 2, negative if class 2 is larger than class 3. Accounting for indirect effects, my guess is that class 3 is larger than class 2, though the data there is somewhat debatable.
Copying by class 1 and 4 create wealth for society "out of thin air". This copying leads to increased wealth for the person copying, with no associated costs.
In addition to this, there are the indirect effects. Network effects benefits those that are good and copied an "appropriate" amount (leading to increased word of mouth advertising), habit changes might benefit everybody, etc. These effects are extremely complex, and nobody know their total impact.
Apart from that, it's somewhat debatable whether society should grant the privilege of restriction citizens to allow release of creations for profit. I'll use an extreme analogy: If I started producing oxygen and sold it to people, it would be utterly unreasonable to demand that they make sure "my" oxygen atoms didn't end up in the air other people breathe. There is no reason for society to enforce that, even if I want to be able to produce oxygen and try to sell it for profit. The cost of the restrictions would be too high. The same may be true with copyright - enforcing the restrictions (and even making the behaviour illegal) may be too expensive for society. I do not know - I just know that I believe this has to be part of the evaluation.
Ah, then I missed the point. That's an interesting aspect of.NET, one that I've not thought about. I mostly stay away from MS technology for "ideological" reasons (put my money where my mouth is).
That said, I think the tech around C# seems very, very nice.
Isn't the present split between programmers about 50-50 with Windows experience and without? I know I don't run into Windows programming that often, and I tend to run into more Unix than Windows programmers, even outside Unix circles...
Part of that is probably that I tend to like the "deep knowledge crowd" everywhere, and Windows is hard to have deep knowledge of, but I thought I'd seen statistics indicating about 50-50?
No, YOU are being arrogant in assuming you understand this. If everybody is being "condescending" to you, it may be a sign that you are being arrogant in many areas. And right now I'm being condescending because you've been treating this as a stupid debating class.
I assume that you are lacking information *as a compliment*. I do not subscribe to weird idea of "opinions" on factual topics. Copyright is tool in an opimization process. This is a factual process. What you write contains disortion of underlying facts; I assume that that disortion is accidental. This is an implied complient, as the alternative is you deliberately disorting the facts. Opionions are for assholes - what I am trying to give you is the underlying facts of how this works so you can make up an informed evaluation. The moral judgements are up to every person - my interest is in the realities of how this works.
OK, now GET RID OF YOUR DEFENSE and instead listen and choose to understand these concepts. This is NOT a debating class, it is a science and economics class, and you get a failing grade if you don't lower your defenses and pay heed to the topic. When you do, we may get to a rational discussion - the solutions and tradeoffs for this are far from obvious, yet first we need to face the facts and THEN we can find out how to act. If you're too uptight in your own importance to be willing to listen to the facts, then don't bother replying.
First, let's go for what I actually say: I don't argue a "God given right to access to your creation". I argue that as long as you keep it as a trade secret, it is only your creation. When you start to distribute it, it becomes partially an aspect of the culture society, giving society a vested interest in it.
Second, I have not acknowledged that if the cost of resources is not reimbursed then the creation of new content stops. I don't get paid for writing this message, and you don't get paid for writing the message above.
In other words, "creation of content" continues. What content is created and consumed will be different with different economics around it - if I had to pay per message posted to Slashdot, for instance, I probably wouldn't. When I had to pay for film and processing to create movies, I created less movies and of lower quality. And since I don't get directly paid for the the time to create movies, I spend less time on making movies than I'd do if I was paid for it. However, I still create movies, and I still write. And before we had copyright, people still told stories.
Content will always be there. New content will always be there. The question is how much, of what quality, and of what topics.
Third, you assume I assume people "are out to be cultural philantropists". No, I don't. I recognize that changing the economics of this will change which people do what. And that's OK. You, however, assume that society has a duty to do effort to protect and keep secret your ideas that you are TELLING PEOPLE PUBLICLY. I disagree. I recognize that this may result in you not getting money, and this may result in your working less to create ideas. This is an effect that may be unfortunate. The issue is a tradeoff between the unfortunateness of you not working hard at creating ideas and the unfortunateness of the limitations and resources spent on protecting those public ideas from public exploitation.
Now, let me talk a bit about words. I'd like to introduce the concept of "nominalizations". That's when we take a process and turn it into a noun. Let's take "journey" as an example. In reality, this is a process consisting of a bunch of travelling, eating, sleeping, etc, which again consists of moving around of atoms. Also, when I talk about a non-specific "journey", join up all the different journeys into one.
Now, nominalizations are useful. They allow us to talk about complex things and cut away all the complexity, by deleting a lot of stuff (which particular foot did I put in front of which other h
While I can't say anything specifically, security estimates (including mine, I think) often end up overblown. Some friends did breaks of DVD region protection for resale (while it was legal here), and the systems that were estimated at weeks according to inside sources usually took them 2-3 evenings. They would replace CPUs with probes (ICE), snooped buses, snarf all code and try to run it on a simulator, etc - whatever it took. They were a highly experienced embedded systems team.. They didn't have the expertise or equipment to attack things that were fully embedded in silisium, I think, but anything external seemed to be taken in much shorter times than the estimates, often by doing something unexpected. (Partial power failures create many interesting security breaches, for instance.)
Back to topic: In the split memory model, the data structures tend to be much simpler, because data is copied. Also, a call across a kernel/userland callgate is fairly expensive (hundreds if not thousands of cycles) so the calls tend to do much more, or you'll get abmyssal performance. Both of these tend to make things easier to reverse engineer - you don't have to reverse engineer 5000 different calls that pass complex structures around, you can instead reverse engineer one call at a time.
Also, the calls are gated through a specific system, so the arguments are somewhat normalized. It may be possible to go around each of these things, yet I think that would cost a lot of engineering complexity.
The below is important perspective points - please try to really understand why these are significant and important and how they affect perspective. If you think they are just quibbling of words, you are missing the point - please think harder about the topic or ask for more help, instead of trying to argue.
You're missing a very significant point in your analogy: The *real* product in question is bits, and the manufacturer is a machine. A $500 machine can manufacture bits at a rate of at least 100,000,000 per second. So your analogy of "take something" is wrong - the manufacturer gives it to you because he can manufacture it so cheaply that it's OK for him or her to do so.
What you are talking about as if it was a god-given right is restricting the manufacturers. Now, I make about half my income from such restrictions, so I'm on both sides of the fence. Morally, I see it as unclear.
The "designer sets cost of reading" doesn't work, unless borrowing a book off a library or a friend is wrong. The "reading isn't copying" doesn't fully work - what about people that have photographic memory? I used to be able to recite The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy from start to finish. Should my head be illegal? I assume we both say "No" to that (and agree that it's an extreme example.)
If a book cost too much and I borrow it from the library or a friend, it decrease the revenue for the publisher and author. Yet, this is clearly accepted by society, and defined as "moral" by everybody. Even if it was a book where the cost was *less* than the value I'd get from reading it, and that I would have bought if I couldn't borrow it.
Then we have the next problem: The value of a mass market work to the author is in people buying it, and for a successful mass market work, it is in becoming a part of culture. As each person has limited attention (a maximum of 24 hours of attention per day), this is competing for a limited resource. And society use shared experiences as a communications basis called "culture", which is even more limited. We allow much stronger protection for anything that does NOT enter this area - it's called "trade secrets". It's when somebody start PUBLISHING that the tradeoff comes in effect, and the morals become quite difficult to judge.
One thing that is sure is that society becomes OVERALL RICHER when somebody copy something that they would not be able to afford. New wealth is produced by the transaction. This is only a poblem if the wealth produced comes at the cost of resources not being transferred to the original "designers" of patterns (programmers, writers, film people, graphics artists, etc), stopping the feedback loop for new patterns.
NOTE: I'm assuming that there won't be DRM features that directly handle libraries and block them from running on any non-original kernel. That could be a problem (ie, require cracking the copy protection on each library).
I don't think (C) and (D) is likely to be doable without screwing up the debugging possibilities of normal developers. It is definately doable in a shared address space system like Windows 3 and with full library change. I don't think it's reasonably doable in a system with segregated address spaces.
I think we will always be able to get hold of a binary of the kernel *somehow* - even with really heavy DRM this should be doable by using the extreme techniques, like putting chips in liquid nitrogen, using electron microscopes to read out registers, etc. The kernel is actually a fairly small program. The FreeBSD kernel is about 4MB - I assume the OSX kernel is about the same. When I was a cracker on the Amiga (half my life ago - how time flies) I did complete reverse engineering of programs of that size (to compilable, commented source code). To find the interfaces, it would only be necessary to reverse engineer small parts of that.
As for giving out private APIs to some developers: I would think this to generally be too expensive, and as I said, reverse engineering is reasonable.
Lockdown is a very icky task. It's an extreme amount of work. I don't think it would be particularly hard to keep compatibility while doing it if you had a prior example, it's just that it's an extreme amount of work. And it's the kind of work I put into the 10x more part of maintaining a kernel,
Slashdot Mirror
And I read your comment, and the point I was making (which you jumped across) was LEAST PRIVILEGE. Read again: LEAST PRIVILEGE. And again: LEAST PRIVILEGE. This means RESTRICTING ALL PROGRAMS AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. I'm uppercasing so you can see this through the crack smoke. In LEAST PRIVILEGE, ALL APPLICATIONS ARE UNTRUSTED. Yes, that is it: All Applications Are UNTRUSTED. They get only as much access as they have to have. They are ALL sandboxed as much as possible. That means that to be implemented as LEAST PRIVILEGE, all applications that CAN be managed SHOULD be managed. It also means that those that can run with a more restrictive security policy run with a more restrictive security policy. This would fit fairly nicely with the "Evidence based security" that MS is talking about, and it would include not giving evidence of higher trust than is absolutely needed for each piece.
Eivind.
One would DEFINATELY want OS components to run in a reduced security context. It's the POINT in least privilege - you run as close to everything as possible in a context with access reduced as far as possible. I don't know if the access control .NET use is detailed enough to make the restrictions that's possible really useful, as I've fairly much ignored .NET due to time constraints.
Also, "garbage collection and memory management" has little to do with this - the issue close to this in C++ etc is the naked pointer support, and the ease of creating various forms of security errors (buffer overflows) using that. A virtualized system that's designed for security will avoid that problem. It will also be able to restrict other types of privilege, such as reading from files the user haven't opened in a system dialog box or drag-dropped onto a suitable graphical area.
While many other privilege restrictions could theoretically be done in C++, it would require removing the old APIs and creating new ones. I don't believe MS has done that, nor do I believe they've created *yet another* virtual machine when they have a decent one already.
Eivind.
I was sort of worried that MS was going to take over for open source, by actually taking the job of fixing their security model and creating really secure and stable system. Don't look like the chose to.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Nothing presently prevent me from releasing region 0 DVDs. I am not sure that is going to be kept up, though. And there are things the prevent me from referencing most of the culture that people actually are part of, which is a significant new restriction (added in the last century or so.)
To be more specific on what parts of copying is beneficial and which are potentially negative, see my previous comment.
As for buying things: I sample much less music now that it's not as easily available, so there's less that I'm interested in buying. I want the artists to get money from me; I'm not so hot on the record companies, because I feel they abuse the position they are in. The last CD I bought was directly off a band member - I feel good about that :)
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
And I don't care about what justification they use - I care about being allowed to release materials I produce myself, being able to use things that I have bought the way I want to (No stupid advertisements I have to watch. No forced subtitles to avoid it being sold in a different area. No stupid zone coding.)
I also believe that a certain amount of what is presently illegal copying is to the benefit of everybody, and just releasing it all (removing all protections for digital copying for private use) might be to the benefit of society.
Also, I happen to buy roughly everything except books, which I borrow. I've copied about three movies in my life, and the last year I think it's about three CDs, buying about 10 - down from about 100 the year I copied 50.
Eivind.
It's fairly clear that I have a moral right to keep my work secret. The moment I make it public and people start reading or viewing or using it, however, it becomes part of the heritage of the society, it influences and changes - and, if it is widely consumed, society end up with a much larger investment in it than I had.
Presently, society grants me the privilege of restricting copying - using its guns or the threat of them to punish those that defy my wishes. This is, however, not something I can demand. It is something that society grants.
Eivind.
Eivind.
You've also made assumptions about what my assumptions are: I know perfectly well that in most projects most of the development is done by volunteers, mostly for a combination of fun and wish for functionality, occasionally with part of their time paid because they need that functionality in their job. I'm even arguing that this is the standard open source model.
Over to licenses: The GPL only "protects the code" (removes developer rights to their mods to it) if you've got external contributors with copyright doing license restrictions. This disappears with copyright assignment, which MySQL required. Besides, the code isn't that important - what's important is the project itself. The code as released will be available as long as somebody bothers to mirror it - the license cannot be revoked. However, if the project velocity can be killed - e.g, by MS favourite tactic of buying the company that develops it and reassigning the programmers to other demanding projects - then the code itself is as free under either license. The only case you have is if somebody would buy up a company creating a BSD licensed project and then close that project while continuing to offer it as a product. The closest I know to this happening is SSH, where the original developers made the license more restrictive. That would have been possible even with the GPL (they had no substantial external contributions), and it eventually lead to OpenSSH.
Licensing and benefit private corporations: You'll ALWAYS benefit private corporations. They may benefit by utilizing the code to run other business functions (GPL), or by having your codebase to add features to for creating a product Q instead of having to license a codebase elsewhere, or Q not being created at all. If we say that Q would benefit society with a level X and isn't being developed, you've just made society X poorer. Of course, if X is a negative value, this would be good. The purchasers of Q has made the judgement that Q makes their life better by more than the cost of Q, though, after having evaluated their situation and Q.
A sidenote on allowing derivates of codebases: It makes people do changes they CAN contribute back, and it makes them learn the codebase, so it's often got significant benefits patch-wise. It's given FreeBSD the entire SCSI subsystem, an optimized internal network system, multilink PPP, and a myriad of smaller things (and probably some large ones I forget).
Being able to buy out an open source project has to do with DEVELOPMENT MODELS rather than licenses. With a distributed development model, the project can't be bought out - only some of the developers can be. With a centralized development model (like the MySQL model), you can be bought out.
XFree86 was a BSD license; FreeBSD was a BSD license; they/we still couldn't be bought out.
Eazel (developers of the Nautilus browser for GNOME) used only GPL and was considered an aquisition target. SuSE uses only GPL AFAIK, and was aquired. Cygnus used only the GPL and was aquired.
No matter what the license, an open source project will still be available in the form it was last released. What can change is development momentum. With an open development process with full participation, a single aquisition will normally be a fairly small bump. Some developers will be lost, and there will be other developers that know the codebase, the process is actively run through the mailing lists etc anyway, and the community can take up the slack. With a closed development process, it's necessary to invent a whole new way of working, and that's much more problematic.
Eivind.
For XFree86, there was a bunch of "free" developers that could fairly easily create a new project. For MySQL, there isn't. To me, this shows the problem of relying on corporate "gifted" open source projects: They're much less resilient than those that use an open source project. (To my mind, they also tend to be of lower core quality than the projects run by an open source process, though they've often got a higher quality user interface.)
Eivind.
I agree with you that the business model is broken, and I'm totally with you on the problem of artists being able to make a living from art. It's a difficult problem. The traditional way (prior to copyright, in other words prior to 1790 in the US, or for the first in the world, prior to 1710 in the UK) has been patronage, playing for live audiences (see e.g. Shakespeare), dontations (tips, basically), selling individual pictures etc, and selling rights to publishers. Publishers used serials and "freshness" to give their material scarcity, somewhat like newspapers today, as well as gentleman's agreements to not copy each other's material. Authors were fairly badly paid.
As for the future, I'm guessing that we'll end up with private copying in all forms being allowed (criminalizing 2/3s of the population seems unlikely), and I see different media as ending up with significantly different problems and problem levels.
Movies can make income on cinema showing, easy access to high capacity media (for a while, anyway), the feel of having a physical thing (with boxes etc), and possibly give bonuses in the form of e.g. chances at meeting the stars if you buy the movie. Cinema alone should make enough income to support reasonably cheap movie production. As an example of what can be done "on the cheap", Sin City cost $4M to make.
Books are probably OK at least for the time being, as people want the physical copy, and printing single copies is (at least for a while) about as expensive as buying a copy. Local printers that can print and bind at a reasonable price seems a far way off.
Music gives fairly little royalty to the actual artists, so the artists may be better off with a tip-based system, at least if the tipping is made EASY. Marketing is likely to somewhat die off for this segment, as Last.fm, Pandora, and similar tools make finding new music easy.
Games. Without copyright and per-copy payment, games is in big trouble. They're played at home, they're hideously expensive to make, and they command fairly little loyalty from the consumers. Maybe - just maybe - the copy protection on the disks and consoles may handle these. PC based games is likely to die.
Graphic artists. Actually, none of the good ones I know (personally) get their revenue from selling pictures in a form where private digital copying is likely to matter. They get it either from games, or from selling custom artwork for advertising use, or from selling physical paintings directly, or from other work (non-graphics related). I'm not sure if these are a representative sample or not - I suspect they're at least somewhat representative, in that I cannot actually think of anybody at all that live off selling pictures on the net.
Now, of these, there's two things that seems to be hit so hard they may go out of business: Record companies and games developers. With record companies come the side business, as you mention. I think there will be some loss of graphics artist positions, that's fairly small, though. The recording studios, however, will be hit fairly hard. However, if their service is really worth it to the consumer, this should increase tip levels for those bands that use recording studios so much that the successful bands will pay for them. I guess it will also create a market for much cheaper recording studios, where software and the musicans themselves do much more of the work.
It will be interesting to see the development here - whether for good or bad, it will certainly be "for different."
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I think that mistake is part of the reason for the next mistake: The example in the message I reply to now is in direct conflict with the situation I originally described. There are four types of copiers for a work:
- Those that won't buy the work whether they get a copy or not
- Those that will buy the work only if they don't get a copy (the copy is enough for them)
- Those that will buy the work only if they DO get a copy (samplers, people that prefer the original for supporting the artist, etc)
- Those that will buy the work no matter if they get a copy or not.
Let's disregard indirect effects for a moment. Without indirect effects, copying by class 1 and 4 are irrelevant for the profit potential of the creator/publisher. Copying by class 2 is negative, copying by class 3 is positive. Overall copying is positive for the creator if class 3 is larger than class 2, negative if class 2 is larger than class 3. Accounting for indirect effects, my guess is that class 3 is larger than class 2, though the data there is somewhat debatable.Copying by class 1 and 4 create wealth for society "out of thin air". This copying leads to increased wealth for the person copying, with no associated costs.
In addition to this, there are the indirect effects. Network effects benefits those that are good and copied an "appropriate" amount (leading to increased word of mouth advertising), habit changes might benefit everybody, etc. These effects are extremely complex, and nobody know their total impact.
Apart from that, it's somewhat debatable whether society should grant the privilege of restriction citizens to allow release of creations for profit. I'll use an extreme analogy: If I started producing oxygen and sold it to people, it would be utterly unreasonable to demand that they make sure "my" oxygen atoms didn't end up in the air other people breathe. There is no reason for society to enforce that, even if I want to be able to produce oxygen and try to sell it for profit. The cost of the restrictions would be too high. The same may be true with copyright - enforcing the restrictions (and even making the behaviour illegal) may be too expensive for society. I do not know - I just know that I believe this has to be part of the evaluation.
Eivind.
That said, I think the tech around C# seems very, very nice.
Eivind.
And yeah, .NET is definately much more complex than RoR - not sure if you're trying to say that's an advantage or disadvantage or just a fact?
Eivind.
Isn't the present split between programmers about 50-50 with Windows experience and without? I know I don't run into Windows programming that often, and I tend to run into more Unix than Windows programmers, even outside Unix circles...
Part of that is probably that I tend to like the "deep knowledge crowd" everywhere, and Windows is hard to have deep knowledge of, but I thought I'd seen statistics indicating about 50-50?
Eivind, questioning...
I assume that you are lacking information *as a compliment*. I do not subscribe to weird idea of "opinions" on factual topics. Copyright is tool in an opimization process. This is a factual process. What you write contains disortion of underlying facts; I assume that that disortion is accidental. This is an implied complient, as the alternative is you deliberately disorting the facts. Opionions are for assholes - what I am trying to give you is the underlying facts of how this works so you can make up an informed evaluation. The moral judgements are up to every person - my interest is in the realities of how this works.
OK, now GET RID OF YOUR DEFENSE and instead listen and choose to understand these concepts. This is NOT a debating class, it is a science and economics class, and you get a failing grade if you don't lower your defenses and pay heed to the topic. When you do, we may get to a rational discussion - the solutions and tradeoffs for this are far from obvious, yet first we need to face the facts and THEN we can find out how to act. If you're too uptight in your own importance to be willing to listen to the facts, then don't bother replying.
First, let's go for what I actually say: I don't argue a "God given right to access to your creation". I argue that as long as you keep it as a trade secret, it is only your creation. When you start to distribute it, it becomes partially an aspect of the culture society, giving society a vested interest in it.
Second, I have not acknowledged that if the cost of resources is not reimbursed then the creation of new content stops. I don't get paid for writing this message, and you don't get paid for writing the message above.
In other words, "creation of content" continues. What content is created and consumed will be different with different economics around it - if I had to pay per message posted to Slashdot, for instance, I probably wouldn't. When I had to pay for film and processing to create movies, I created less movies and of lower quality. And since I don't get directly paid for the the time to create movies, I spend less time on making movies than I'd do if I was paid for it. However, I still create movies, and I still write. And before we had copyright, people still told stories.
Content will always be there. New content will always be there. The question is how much, of what quality, and of what topics.
Third, you assume I assume people "are out to be cultural philantropists". No, I don't. I recognize that changing the economics of this will change which people do what. And that's OK. You, however, assume that society has a duty to do effort to protect and keep secret your ideas that you are TELLING PEOPLE PUBLICLY. I disagree. I recognize that this may result in you not getting money, and this may result in your working less to create ideas. This is an effect that may be unfortunate. The issue is a tradeoff between the unfortunateness of you not working hard at creating ideas and the unfortunateness of the limitations and resources spent on protecting those public ideas from public exploitation.
Now, let me talk a bit about words. I'd like to introduce the concept of "nominalizations". That's when we take a process and turn it into a noun. Let's take "journey" as an example. In reality, this is a process consisting of a bunch of travelling, eating, sleeping, etc, which again consists of moving around of atoms. Also, when I talk about a non-specific "journey", join up all the different journeys into one.
Now, nominalizations are useful. They allow us to talk about complex things and cut away all the complexity, by deleting a lot of stuff (which particular foot did I put in front of which other h
Eivind.
Back to topic: In the split memory model, the data structures tend to be much simpler, because data is copied. Also, a call across a kernel/userland callgate is fairly expensive (hundreds if not thousands of cycles) so the calls tend to do much more, or you'll get abmyssal performance. Both of these tend to make things easier to reverse engineer - you don't have to reverse engineer 5000 different calls that pass complex structures around, you can instead reverse engineer one call at a time.
Also, the calls are gated through a specific system, so the arguments are somewhat normalized. It may be possible to go around each of these things, yet I think that would cost a lot of engineering complexity.
Eivind.
You're missing a very significant point in your analogy: The *real* product in question is bits, and the manufacturer is a machine. A $500 machine can manufacture bits at a rate of at least 100,000,000 per second. So your analogy of "take something" is wrong - the manufacturer gives it to you because he can manufacture it so cheaply that it's OK for him or her to do so.
What you are talking about as if it was a god-given right is restricting the manufacturers. Now, I make about half my income from such restrictions, so I'm on both sides of the fence. Morally, I see it as unclear.
The "designer sets cost of reading" doesn't work, unless borrowing a book off a library or a friend is wrong. The "reading isn't copying" doesn't fully work - what about people that have photographic memory? I used to be able to recite The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy from start to finish. Should my head be illegal? I assume we both say "No" to that (and agree that it's an extreme example.)
If a book cost too much and I borrow it from the library or a friend, it decrease the revenue for the publisher and author. Yet, this is clearly accepted by society, and defined as "moral" by everybody. Even if it was a book where the cost was *less* than the value I'd get from reading it, and that I would have bought if I couldn't borrow it.
Then we have the next problem: The value of a mass market work to the author is in people buying it, and for a successful mass market work, it is in becoming a part of culture. As each person has limited attention (a maximum of 24 hours of attention per day), this is competing for a limited resource. And society use shared experiences as a communications basis called "culture", which is even more limited. We allow much stronger protection for anything that does NOT enter this area - it's called "trade secrets". It's when somebody start PUBLISHING that the tradeoff comes in effect, and the morals become quite difficult to judge.
One thing that is sure is that society becomes OVERALL RICHER when somebody copy something that they would not be able to afford. New wealth is produced by the transaction. This is only a poblem if the wealth produced comes at the cost of resources not being transferred to the original "designers" of patterns (programmers, writers, film people, graphics artists, etc), stopping the feedback loop for new patterns.
See the complexity?
Eivind.
I don't think (C) and (D) is likely to be doable without screwing up the debugging possibilities of normal developers. It is definately doable in a shared address space system like Windows 3 and with full library change. I don't think it's reasonably doable in a system with segregated address spaces.
I think we will always be able to get hold of a binary of the kernel *somehow* - even with really heavy DRM this should be doable by using the extreme techniques, like putting chips in liquid nitrogen, using electron microscopes to read out registers, etc. The kernel is actually a fairly small program. The FreeBSD kernel is about 4MB - I assume the OSX kernel is about the same. When I was a cracker on the Amiga (half my life ago - how time flies) I did complete reverse engineering of programs of that size (to compilable, commented source code). To find the interfaces, it would only be necessary to reverse engineer small parts of that.
As for giving out private APIs to some developers: I would think this to generally be too expensive, and as I said, reverse engineering is reasonable.
Lockdown is a very icky task. It's an extreme amount of work. I don't think it would be particularly hard to keep compatibility while doing it if you had a prior example, it's just that it's an extreme amount of work. And it's the kind of work I put into the 10x more part of maintaining a kernel,