It could also be that a lot of the old time programmers (1989) still pretty much shared a belief in the capitalist system and saw software and music as something people would invest in and trade.
It is not unbelieveable that the creator a music format has different beliefs than the creator of a file sharing system. I would be more shocked to find that they believed the exact same thing. My experience is that just about everyone in the world thinks different thoughts...counter, of course, to Schopenhauer who thought there was only one conciousness.
BTW, I think the original MP3.com site that allowed all artists from every music genre to upload and share music was the best web site ever created. Too bad they wasted the company on a stupid copyright battle.
I thought that was the whole point of the analogy. You want to paint your enemy as something that is considered by your audience as lower class.
Thomas Jefferson and many of the founders of the US saw agriculture as the highest trade. Many had hoped to create the US as an agrarian paradise. I personally see this ideal. But the thread is about trying to create metaphors that can be used to attack one's enemies.
And as for the agrarian ideal...well the social reformers of the 19th and 20th century pretty much created a structure that taxed small farms out of existence while subsidizing massive farming conglomerates...so the independent family farm is pretty much a fantasy of the past.
Of course, if we still had family farms, then share cropping would be seen as a way for a person to move up in the world. It would be just part of Adam Smith's division of labor. But the analogy created by this article is a strong weapon since we today have visions of the share farmer working their way up in the world as a stinking, poor peasant.
But when the division of labour has once been thoroughly introduced, the produce of a man's own labour can supply but a very small part of his occasional wants.
[...]
As the accumulation of stock is previously necessary for carrying on this great improvement in the productive powers of labour, so that accumulation naturally leads to this improvement.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
The very heart of "capitalism" is that companies reinvest in their organization to build the capital of their organization.
The very heart of capitalism is that idea that companies sell goods then reinvest a portion of their proceeds back into the organization to build capital.
In the software industry, the capital isn't exactly tangible. The capital is not a physical machine, but a collection of ideas. This is why economists try to define an abstract concept called intellectual property.
The software company sells goods, but reinvests in its big bag of tricks. This intellectual property is essentially the capital of the software industry.
The free software movement essentially says that software is owned by the community. Well, when you take that approach, you essentially remove all vestiges of capitalism from the software industry.
How can the free software movement's denial of the ability to build capital be considered capitalism?
If OSS does not allow companies to accumulate and profit from building up capital, we will not get to the place where we have a large number of successful firms implementing OSS.
No matter how we twist our words, capital is part of capitalism. For OSS to thrive, there needs to be a way for companies to build capital.
People who include licensed software in their products (i.e. Value Added Retailers) might be sharecroppers. But when the code is open sourced and owned by the community, then the developer is at best a squatter. They are working land owned by the state.
The good folks who move from business to business, and make their living installing Linux systems could be called migrant farm workers.
Boy, this is a fun game, we can insult white collar workers by comparing them to different types of farmers.
The fact that the Microsoft monopoly has been bad for the industry does not make OSS by default good.
I actually agree with most of the points about the advancement of knowledge and innovation that come equipped with OSS. I agree with the ability to see in the code, etc., etc., etc..
But there needs to be an economic reward for the developers. What we need is something different from this world of mega monopolies and free software revolution against the machine. We need to figure out how to create a structure where there is both a flow of ideas and money.
"Free Software" alone won't kick the third world's IT industry into high gear. There has to be an economic reward for the hard work it takes to become a great software developing center. Reworked revolutionary sloganeering (even with the Who playing in the background) won't create software heaven.
I would love to be able to make a living developing OSS, however, there needs to be a way to pay rent. For that matter, I think software developers should make enough that on a whim they could vacate for the islands on a cruise ship, and maybe buy some trinkets.
Have you checked the price of trinkets lately? I certainly can't afford trinkets on my software developers salary.
I have not been on a cruise in the Carribbean, bu I suspect most trinkets have to be imported from China as the native labor is too expensive.
Next question: Have you checked the price of Office in Trinidad? As I recall, many companies drop the price of their software depending on economic condiditions.
Next question, what is the cut that the local sofware dealers gets when they sell Office Suite? Hmmm, that money seems to end up funding the software industry in Trinidad.
The OSS is repeating the tired old slogan that anything involving money is evil, but the truth of the matter is that money is what makes a higher standard of living possible.
It seems to me that a better goal would be to bring the third world into the mainstream economy, than to push false idealistic hopes that someday everything will be free.
You need to sell an awful lot of trinkets to cruise ship passengers to buy a proprietary office suite.
Hopefully the OSS revolution will help rid the world of the indignity caused by cruise ships filled with passengers buying trinkets.
As for the question of IT jobs. The software developing jobs will gradually fade into memory, but there is still a need for having IT skills, and there will continue to be jobs for network admins, data entry and report writers, etc.
The main goal of OSS is simply to end the idea of software development as a business. Software development is only one piece of the pie.
But back to third world evangelizing. Most US software companies have found out that they cannot afford serious OSS development. When the flaws of the revolution become apparent, it is natural to move to the third world.
The question is whether or not the natives have caught on to the double edge sword. Preaching free software and creating a world where software is only taken and not traded, then the third world nimrods who fall for the propaganda will find their software development skills worth less than the local trinket makers.
None of the natives are buying
any second hand American Dreams
Jimmy Buffet
In someways I see this little Stalin-wannabe iconoclast preaching in the third world as the ultimate act of contempt. Giving your work away for free doesn't work in the first world. So you preach to the peasantry of the glories of the revolution to the third world.
It is a fun example of history repeating itself. The fearless leader preaches the glories of revolution to the peasantry knowing full well that the dictatorship of the prolitariat intends to pave the roads of their paradise with the blood of their followers.
There is a ton of different viewers for reality and each provide a completely different view of the world and have different: For example, there is the fundamentalists Christian view, the atheist viewer, the pseudo philosophical viewer, the Islamic viewer, the Valley Girl Viewer, the Hindu Viewer, the Urban Youth Viewer, the Buddhist viewer.
Each viewer has its own blockers and filters. You should try a couple and find what works best.
I admit, I've had the false hope that I could use internet ads to pay for content. The truth of the matter is that ads on content sites do not work well. People tune them out. Ads in places where people are looking for information about products do wonders.
To make ads on content sites work, you either have to gear the ads to selling...or you have to make them extraordinarily annoying.
So, the idea of ads paying for content is a failure, people no longer pay for content...that leaves the industry with a big question: How do you pay for content?
In Salt Lake (and other cities I suspect) they paint the entire bus (windows and all) with ads. It makes riding on a bus a really dark, depressing gloomy experience. I would rather walk than ride an ad painted bus. But, there is no inch of human dignity that isn't up for sale.
But on a positive not, the shear distaste and mass rejection people have for spam, popup ads and telemarketers might spawn a whole sale rejection of the intrusive ad culture. People are ticked and are fighting back.
I suspect that this will lead to eBates paradise (or is that purgatory?). When you walk through the grocery store, your cell phone will be ringing up with ads for the competitor's store.
To protect themselves from the ads, stores will start adding jamming devices for cell phones, and all sorts of cool technologies will evolve as advertisers find ways to become even more intrusive.
When ad companies get their grubby little hands on this technology, they will be able to quickly decrease the quality of life on this planet.
Why would they have to charge for this? With this new technology, Spam and popup ads will finally be able to escape from the computers into the community at large where they can really wreak havoc.
People think billboards are sight pollution, well, we ain't seen nothing yet. Ten years from now, you won't be able to walk down a city street without a bombardment of media messages.
Just like the Internet, all these media messages will be free!!!!
Personally, I see the different laws in different countries as a great opportunity for business people around the world. In the US, the web market is already saturated, but there is a great demand in other nations that target their specific needs.
The US web market is saturated. the US only has a small portion of the world's population and there are many portions of the world that are growing faster than the US. The most lucrative opportunity right now on the net is for non-US companies that are targetting their local markets.
The fact that there are different nations on the planet with different languages, customs and laws enriches the net. It means that there is more than one mega market controlled by Amazon and Wal*Mart.
SCO's Linux lawsuit and threats seem to be having little affect on IT managers except to make them angry.
Well, isn't this the whole point of law and politics? Lawyers get people riled, then start collecting money. An increase in the amount of anger and hate in the world means more power for politicians. The goal of the law suit is to make the lawyers at the SCO Group shell company rich.
Payroll systems are generally about databases and applications--not about operating systems. I suspect most US payroll systems are in whatever OS the company uses for other applications. Big companies do their payroll on big equipment. Small companies do their stuff on MS or Linux, or whatever. There is a lot of outsourcing in the industry...out sourced payroll seems to end up on big Sun boxes etc.
Since payroll was one of the first big applications to be put into computers, I suspect that there is a ton of different legacy systems out there on a variety of machines.
Regardless, payroll is a data application, so I find it odd that the OS is the primary consideration in a payroll application.
Sounds like one of the biggest challenge the system has is integrating with the legal system. The legal system is based on oppositional logic...you can't program that type of distorted thinking into a computer.
Artificial Intelligence could never replicate what a lawyer does. At a fundamental level, AI assumes that what it is replicating is intelligent. The American legal system is more about posturing and power plays than about logic.
...The next thing people are going to start saying is that people kill for their religion...
The 20th century provides a large number of examples where people were encouraged to go on massive killing sprees for various mistaken beliefs. There are big piles of bodies in Europe, Russia, China, Korea, Cambodia, the Middle East, etc.. I doubt the Rwanda massacre happened just because a bunch of Hutus had bad essences that made them prone to kill others. They were manipulated into it.
History seems to show that there are things the people get taught that makes them extremely horrible, disgusting gross people.
One of the worst beliefs, IMHO, is that everything is just a game and that I am out to get as much as possible in the game...despite the number of bodies I leave in my wake.
There are ways that you can screw with people's minds that can make those people monsters. Video games probably play a very important role in many children's lives these days. The game manufacturers simply compete on much graphics and sensations they can put in a minute of gaming. However there also needs to be people who worry about what the games teach.
I don't fall for the fundamentalists arguments that unchristian/satanic video games teach bad behaviors, but I do see a need for people to think about what we teach with video games, and what happens when people get too much entertainment and not enough real life.
If you see religion as a myth created by man, then all the killing going on their now is the result of century old fantasy games.
Belief systems do matter, but there is not a blanket statement of video games are bad and church on Sundays is good. I think the main hope is for people to develop a good solid understanding of logic and common sense.
What's the legality of in-store CD players for sampling music you're about to purchase?
The listening stations have physical CDs in them, correct? If that is the case, then the store is playing from a CD that they had purchased. The same logic applies to the CDs in the library. You are listening to music that your town government purchased.
If the music is stored on a computer, then they probably worked out an arrangement with the publishers. I suspect publishers would welcome devices that let people listen at the point of sale, since there is a high chance of making a sale. Such programs would probably be handled by special arrangements.
We only look at the cost of SETI from our perspective here on earth...but if you ever consider the enormous cost space aliens have to incur to make their secret communications appear as background noise, then I think more people would oppose the project.
The whole goal of distributed computing is to externalize costs. When someone else bears your cost...then, yeah, it's free. This is the idea behind P2P. P2P is significantly less efficient than specialized servers, but externalizes costs. In some cases, SETI type arrangements use real idle equipment. In other cases, it pushes real costs onto other unwitting groups.
Your employer has to pay for the electricity if you leave a bunch of computers on at night to help calculate protein folds. It is not necessarily a bad thing...just that an unwitting party is bearing a cost. In many cases the cost is of little consequence...in some cases it is.
Undoubtedly, someone will have a copyright/patent on reverse engineering methodologies.
So, I would suspect the site will have to be taken down if it is just a copy of the copyrighted reverse enginieering process. However, if it was properly reversed engineered, then it would not be considered a copy...or, uh, something like that.
Not at all; that's exactly where you'd expect it to happen first. In more advanced countries, you'd expect the established phone companies to have the clout to block it.
You have it backwards. In more advanced countries you would expect the competing entities in the country to be vying for customers by introducing new technologies and racing to see who can stay ahead of the competition. When you have large entrenched powers stifling innovation, then your country no longer belongs in that coveted "more advanced" category.
The miniature rolls of duct tape will be great if you happend to come across broken miniature duct work. Of course, deferring to Red Green, when it comes to fixing duct work, he recommends masking tape.
BTW, there are better tapes for fixing small things...and they already come in small rolls, but this is not about using the right tools for the right job.
I would not be surprised if flat screen displays doesn't reverse the trend of laptop sales out pacing desktops. The main reason for buying a laptop is size. In most companies the cost of having people move CRTs around the office is more than price differential between lap tops and desktops. It costs about $20 more to ship a computer with a 17" CRT than a laptop.
Personally, I wish more PC manufacturers would get a clue and adopt some of the space saving features of laptops and produce smaller desktop models. In most cases, people don't need the environmentally questionable batteries in laptops, they just want something that isn't heavy and awkward.
Slashdot Mirror
It could also be that a lot of the old time programmers (1989) still pretty much shared a belief in the capitalist system and saw software and music as something people would invest in and trade.
It is not unbelieveable that the creator a music format has different beliefs than the creator of a file sharing system. I would be more shocked to find that they believed the exact same thing. My experience is that just about everyone in the world thinks different thoughts...counter, of course, to Schopenhauer who thought there was only one conciousness.
BTW, I think the original MP3.com site that allowed all artists from every music genre to upload and share music was the best web site ever created. Too bad they wasted the company on a stupid copyright battle.
The very heart of "capitalism" is that companies reinvest in their organization to build the capital of their organization.
The very heart of capitalism is that idea that companies sell goods then reinvest a portion of their proceeds back into the organization to build capital.
In the software industry, the capital isn't exactly tangible. The capital is not a physical machine, but a collection of ideas. This is why economists try to define an abstract concept called intellectual property.
The software company sells goods, but reinvests in its big bag of tricks. This intellectual property is essentially the capital of the software industry.
The free software movement essentially says that software is owned by the community. Well, when you take that approach, you essentially remove all vestiges of capitalism from the software industry.
How can the free software movement's denial of the ability to build capital be considered capitalism?
If OSS does not allow companies to accumulate and profit from building up capital, we will not get to the place where we have a large number of successful firms implementing OSS.
No matter how we twist our words, capital is part of capitalism. For OSS to thrive, there needs to be a way for companies to build capital.
People who include licensed software in their products (i.e. Value Added Retailers) might be sharecroppers. But when the code is open sourced and owned by the community, then the developer is at best a squatter. They are working land owned by the state.
The good folks who move from business to business, and make their living installing Linux systems could be called migrant farm workers.
Boy, this is a fun game, we can insult white collar workers by comparing them to different types of farmers.
The fact that the Microsoft monopoly has been bad for the industry does not make OSS by default good.
I actually agree with most of the points about the advancement of knowledge and innovation that come equipped with OSS. I agree with the ability to see in the code, etc., etc., etc..
But there needs to be an economic reward for the developers. What we need is something different from this world of mega monopolies and free software revolution against the machine. We need to figure out how to create a structure where there is both a flow of ideas and money.
"Free Software" alone won't kick the third world's IT industry into high gear. There has to be an economic reward for the hard work it takes to become a great software developing center. Reworked revolutionary sloganeering (even with the Who playing in the background) won't create software heaven.
I would love to be able to make a living developing OSS, however, there needs to be a way to pay rent. For that matter, I think software developers should make enough that on a whim they could vacate for the islands on a cruise ship, and maybe buy some trinkets.
Have you checked the price of trinkets lately? I certainly can't afford trinkets on my software developers salary.
I have not been on a cruise in the Carribbean, bu I suspect most trinkets have to be imported from China as the native labor is too expensive.
Next question: Have you checked the price of Office in Trinidad? As I recall, many companies drop the price of their software depending on economic condiditions.
Next question, what is the cut that the local sofware dealers gets when they sell Office Suite? Hmmm, that money seems to end up funding the software industry in Trinidad.
The OSS is repeating the tired old slogan that anything involving money is evil, but the truth of the matter is that money is what makes a higher standard of living possible.
It seems to me that a better goal would be to bring the third world into the mainstream economy, than to push false idealistic hopes that someday everything will be free.
Hopefully the OSS revolution will help rid the world of the indignity caused by cruise ships filled with passengers buying trinkets.
As for the question of IT jobs. The software developing jobs will gradually fade into memory, but there is still a need for having IT skills, and there will continue to be jobs for network admins, data entry and report writers, etc.
The main goal of OSS is simply to end the idea of software development as a business. Software development is only one piece of the pie.
But back to third world evangelizing. Most US software companies have found out that they cannot afford serious OSS development. When the flaws of the revolution become apparent, it is natural to move to the third world.
The question is whether or not the natives have caught on to the double edge sword. Preaching free software and creating a world where software is only taken and not traded, then the third world nimrods who fall for the propaganda will find their software development skills worth less than the local trinket makers.
In someways I see this little Stalin-wannabe iconoclast preaching in the third world as the ultimate act of contempt. Giving your work away for free doesn't work in the first world. So you preach to the peasantry of the glories of the revolution to the third world.
It is a fun example of history repeating itself. The fearless leader preaches the glories of revolution to the peasantry knowing full well that the dictatorship of the prolitariat intends to pave the roads of their paradise with the blood of their followers.
There is a ton of different viewers for reality and each provide a completely different view of the world and have different: For example, there is the fundamentalists Christian view, the atheist viewer, the pseudo philosophical viewer, the Islamic viewer, the Valley Girl Viewer, the Hindu Viewer, the Urban Youth Viewer, the Buddhist viewer.
Each viewer has its own blockers and filters. You should try a couple and find what works best.
I admit, I've had the false hope that I could use internet ads to pay for content. The truth of the matter is that ads on content sites do not work well. People tune them out. Ads in places where people are looking for information about products do wonders.
To make ads on content sites work, you either have to gear the ads to selling...or you have to make them extraordinarily annoying.
So, the idea of ads paying for content is a failure, people no longer pay for content...that leaves the industry with a big question: How do you pay for content?
In Salt Lake (and other cities I suspect) they paint the entire bus (windows and all) with ads. It makes riding on a bus a really dark, depressing gloomy experience. I would rather walk than ride an ad painted bus. But, there is no inch of human dignity that isn't up for sale.
But on a positive not, the shear distaste and mass rejection people have for spam, popup ads and telemarketers might spawn a whole sale rejection of the intrusive ad culture. People are ticked and are fighting back.
I suspect that this will lead to eBates paradise (or is that purgatory?). When you walk through the grocery store, your cell phone will be ringing up with ads for the competitor's store.
To protect themselves from the ads, stores will start adding jamming devices for cell phones, and all sorts of cool technologies will evolve as advertisers find ways to become even more intrusive.
When ad companies get their grubby little hands on this technology, they will be able to quickly decrease the quality of life on this planet.
Why would they have to charge for this? With this new technology, Spam and popup ads will finally be able to escape from the computers into the community at large where they can really wreak havoc.
People think billboards are sight pollution, well, we ain't seen nothing yet. Ten years from now, you won't be able to walk down a city street without a bombardment of media messages.
Just like the Internet, all these media messages will be free!!!!
Personally, I see the different laws in different countries as a great opportunity for business people around the world. In the US, the web market is already saturated, but there is a great demand in other nations that target their specific needs.
The US web market is saturated. the US only has a small portion of the world's population and there are many portions of the world that are growing faster than the US. The most lucrative opportunity right now on the net is for non-US companies that are targetting their local markets.
The fact that there are different nations on the planet with different languages, customs and laws enriches the net. It means that there is more than one mega market controlled by Amazon and Wal*Mart.
Well, isn't this the whole point of law and politics? Lawyers get people riled, then start collecting money. An increase in the amount of anger and hate in the world means more power for politicians. The goal of the law suit is to make the lawyers at the SCO Group shell company rich.
Payroll systems are generally about databases and applications--not about operating systems. I suspect most US payroll systems are in whatever OS the company uses for other applications. Big companies do their payroll on big equipment. Small companies do their stuff on MS or Linux, or whatever. There is a lot of outsourcing in the industry...out sourced payroll seems to end up on big Sun boxes etc.
Since payroll was one of the first big applications to be put into computers, I suspect that there is a ton of different legacy systems out there on a variety of machines.
Regardless, payroll is a data application, so I find it odd that the OS is the primary consideration in a payroll application.
Sounds like one of the biggest challenge the system has is integrating with the legal system. The legal system is based on oppositional logic...you can't program that type of distorted thinking into a computer.
Artificial Intelligence could never replicate what a lawyer does. At a fundamental level, AI assumes that what it is replicating is intelligent. The American legal system is more about posturing and power plays than about logic.
...The next thing people are going to start saying is that people kill for their religion...
The 20th century provides a large number of examples where people were encouraged to go on massive killing sprees for various mistaken beliefs. There are big piles of bodies in Europe, Russia, China, Korea, Cambodia, the Middle East, etc.. I doubt the Rwanda massacre happened just because a bunch of Hutus had bad essences that made them prone to kill others. They were manipulated into it.
History seems to show that there are things the people get taught that makes them extremely horrible, disgusting gross people.
One of the worst beliefs, IMHO, is that everything is just a game and that I am out to get as much as possible in the game...despite the number of bodies I leave in my wake.
There are ways that you can screw with people's minds that can make those people monsters. Video games probably play a very important role in many children's lives these days. The game manufacturers simply compete on much graphics and sensations they can put in a minute of gaming. However there also needs to be people who worry about what the games teach.
I don't fall for the fundamentalists arguments that unchristian/satanic video games teach bad behaviors, but I do see a need for people to think about what we teach with video games, and what happens when people get too much entertainment and not enough real life.
If you see religion as a myth created by man, then all the killing going on their now is the result of century old fantasy games.
Belief systems do matter, but there is not a blanket statement of video games are bad and church on Sundays is good. I think the main hope is for people to develop a good solid understanding of logic and common sense.
The Roots of Sound Rational Thinking.
The listening stations have physical CDs in them, correct? If that is the case, then the store is playing from a CD that they had purchased. The same logic applies to the CDs in the library. You are listening to music that your town government purchased.
If the music is stored on a computer, then they probably worked out an arrangement with the publishers. I suspect publishers would welcome devices that let people listen at the point of sale, since there is a high chance of making a sale. Such programs would probably be handled by special arrangements.
We only look at the cost of SETI from our perspective here on earth...but if you ever consider the enormous cost space aliens have to incur to make their secret communications appear as background noise, then I think more people would oppose the project.
This is already true. Most email traffic these day seems to be marketers talking to spam filters.
The whole goal of distributed computing is to externalize costs. When someone else bears your cost...then, yeah, it's free. This is the idea behind P2P. P2P is significantly less efficient than specialized servers, but externalizes costs. In some cases, SETI type arrangements use real idle equipment. In other cases, it pushes real costs onto other unwitting groups.
Your employer has to pay for the electricity if you leave a bunch of computers on at night to help calculate protein folds. It is not necessarily a bad thing...just that an unwitting party is bearing a cost. In many cases the cost is of little consequence...in some cases it is.
Undoubtedly, someone will have a copyright/patent on reverse engineering methodologies.
So, I would suspect the site will have to be taken down if it is just a copy of the copyrighted reverse enginieering process. However, if it was properly reversed engineered, then it would not be considered a copy...or, uh, something like that.
You have it backwards. In more advanced countries you would expect the competing entities in the country to be vying for customers by introducing new technologies and racing to see who can stay ahead of the competition. When you have large entrenched powers stifling innovation, then your country no longer belongs in that coveted "more advanced" category.
The miniature rolls of duct tape will be great if you happend to come across broken miniature duct work. Of course, deferring to Red Green, when it comes to fixing duct work, he recommends masking tape.
BTW, there are better tapes for fixing small things...and they already come in small rolls, but this is not about using the right tools for the right job.
I would not be surprised if flat screen displays doesn't reverse the trend of laptop sales out pacing desktops. The main reason for buying a laptop is size. In most companies the cost of having people move CRTs around the office is more than price differential between lap tops and desktops. It costs about $20 more to ship a computer with a 17" CRT than a laptop.
Personally, I wish more PC manufacturers would get a clue and adopt some of the space saving features of laptops and produce smaller desktop models. In most cases, people don't need the environmentally questionable batteries in laptops, they just want something that isn't heavy and awkward.