I'm not going to get in to whether its right or wrong to pirate peoples work but I will answer a couple of your points.
and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act
That's because they are not taking something from anybody. All they are stealing is the potential for them to make more money. The "victim" doesn't lose anything physical.
To explain....
Using copyright together with non-redistribute licenses is based on the idea of artificial scarcity of a product. This is completely non-intuitive and unnatural-feeling to many people. It has worked so far, because a significant part of the price paid is for distribution and duplication. These days however, those two cost next to nothing and the people are starting to feel more and more that it's unfair to charge for these things if they can do it themselves. The industries business model is starting to fail. Remember that copyright is something that is not naturally present. It can only happen when some large authority intervenes and removes freedom from some people in order to grant protection to another group (and of course the two overlap)
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free? Personallty, I would feel great because I do such things for the love of it and I want it to be shared by as many people as possible. (My main problem is that I'm no good at it:)
It's good to see people coming up with ways to allow mouse users to cahieve their goals more quickly.
I wonder though whether it will end here. We already have 3 button mice, 5 buttin mice (yes, the "wheel" is actually buttons 4 & 5) Adding any more buttons would have been silly to operate with one hand, so they invented "gesture" control.
Maybe the next step could be to make it two handed. Give it a more rigid design (say a static board shaped design) and that would allow the hands to more more independently of it thus making the addition of many more buttons a better option.
They could call it a "button board" or even a "keyboard" that would be cool, and allow VERY fast control of apps once learned. Now if only all the applications were optimised for this kind of input. Maybe we could have an editor that was optimised for this so called "keyboard"! we could name it "vi"
who the fuck tells people their car door is unlocked?
Just because you don't understand the minds of people who behave in this friendly way doesn't mean they don't exist.
Do you let your friends look into your car? At exactly what point do you know someone well enough to consider it okay for them to open your car door? Where do you draw the line and why?
he must have been looking to steal the radio or the car because nobody actually looks into a car for any other reason.
What!? My example disproves this by experiment. The original poster is wrong. If this bloke was going to steal the radio he would hardly have knocked on my door and identified himself first! (Unless you don't believe that what I said actually happened, in which case there is little point in discussing it)
If I was part of a group of people who came into your house and just looked around, claiming they were only testing the security of your locks and so on, what would you do?
Just the other day someone knocked on my front door to tell me I had left me car outside unlocked. I said thank you and then locked my car. He must have either looked into the car to see the physical position of the lock, or else he tried the door. Either way, he was uninvited. What would you have done?
Slightly less recently, I was given directions to a friends house on a piece of paper. I drove to the street only to discover that the number of the house I had written down was smudged. I took a guess, but it could have been wrong. I went up the pathway to the front door and knocked, (remember if I was wrong, then i was on somebodys land uninvited here) There was no answer. I tried the doorhandle and it was unlocked. I shouted hello through the door. Nobody answered. Just as I was going to leave, my friend appeared from the back garden. Did I do anything wrong? I potentially entered a property without permission. Some people I know would have walked right in to check of things were okay when they got no answer. Would that have been wrong? What if my friend was lying injured somewhere in the house? Is it still not allowed because i might accidentally be in the wrong house.
My point is this... I agree there are parallels between cars, houses etc and computers. But in all these cases there are legitimate reasons for entry other than simply invitation. If you have a car/house/computer in a public place (yes, the internet is a PUBLIC network) then expect that to be the case. Even if you get rid of all malicious hackers, you still find people entering your systems for various reasons (accidentally is probably the most common) so you MUST be prepared for it with proper security. And we all (I hope) know by now from experience that understanding how to make a system secure follows from knowing how to exploit an unsecured system. Thats the way it is - like it or not. You WILL NOT be a good security admin until you know how to crack systems yourself. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an academic.
The thing about people who have probably spent years perfecting their ability to not really answer questions whilst sounding like they have answered, is that they can look very much like they have not weasled out of answering.
Some of us can see through it. Roblimo apparently cannot.
DECSS was written on windows because at that stage there was no UDF Filesystem support in Linux, so the disk file had to be read & decoded on windows. The user could then reboot into linux to watch the movie from the hard drive. That was the only way to watch the movie in linux.
Once UDF was supported in linux this was no longer needed, and it could be done directly under linux.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 2
vast lack of social skills they possess
how tenuous the grasp of geeks is on reality,
they can't even integrate into the hunter-gatherer
Jon,
Why does this just all sound like an unpleasant attack of a large group of people based solely on generalisation and assumption?
What happened to your tolerence of other peoples values?
Actually, this is probably one time where we might not have too much work to do. Companies generally try to be as efficient as they can be and reduce costs where possible. If they have a choice to make between paying for mp3 (licencing the patented tech) , or using ogg with no payment at all, its obvious which they will use. (some ppl call this "greed" but I'm sure they are completely bonkers)
The only rational thing to do is to use Ogg Vorbis exclusively
The rational thing to do is to let the markeyt decide. With ogg being BSD licenced, the choice they will make is clear in my mind.
Secondly, the reason you don't see many improvements in digital sound compression (you said yourself we've had the same mp3 format for years) is because of the absurd number and generality of patents issued in this area. This is precicely what ogg is trying to avoid and they have done a brilliant job.
Have you tried ogg? Have you compared the filesize and output quality with that of mp3? Try it - I dare you.
apt-get is "better" than rpm,
vi is "better" than emacs,
gnome is "better" than kde,
linux is "better" than *bsd,
my car is "better" than your car.
Why can't these people just s/better\ than/different\ from/g and realise that choice and diversity is part of what makes life interesting, and even if it wasn't, there still isn't one "right" answer for everyone.
Why do ppl think we would be better off with only one package manager? Different packages still have to be build for each system because of differing glibc versions and architectures etc (with exceptions for the very similar ones) so what do we gain?
> So maybe Microsoft should be split instead into desktop and server divisions.
All that will happen is that win2k will compete farly in the marketplace with its competitors and the customers will be reasonably happy.
But what about the desktop? I think it's a bit simplistic to say that it "wouldn't be a problem"
It would be a problem. The main problem most ms critics have with ms is with their desktop os. If they go on being a monopoly, how is that going to improve stability or their products? How is is going to help the users at my company who ask me day after day why the screen goes blue if they load big files info wordpad? How will it prevent random crashes and slowdowns after 2-3 days uptime (yes - we leave the desktops on sometimes just to avoid the long boot up times) what will provice them with an incentive to improve to an acceptible level. As a monopoly, it's not in their interests
to produce a good os. If they did, you would have no reason to "upgrade" to its next incarnation 2-3 years later.
In short, a monopoly[1] has no incentive to improve their products when they know they can more easily use their position as a lever to extort money from consumers. This can only be fixed by a more competitive healthy market.
Who let it get this bad in the first place? The consumers of course. And later on the ms fearing cowardly retailers who are pressured into doing much of ms dirty work for them.
[1] - if we are being technical then ms is arguably not a monopoly because they do not own 100% market share. However, all the bad things about a monopoly apply to those who own such a large share that as far as consumers are concerned they might as well own it all. Thats the position ms are in.
What "information wants to be free" means is that there exists some natural force which tends to make it free. That force is people.
Just like "water wants to run downhill" means that there exists some natural force which tends to make it run downhill. That force is gravity.
I'm not saying that people all want information to be free as individuals, but as a whole they do. Just look at napster, warez channels, open source advocates, voluntary teachers, etc.
Personally speaking I think it's driven by the natural human desire to communicate. To prevent any form or communication, be it speech, images, sounds, ideas or any other type of knowledge or information makes me deeply unhappy and seems to go against the grain of what I consider to be basics of enlightened human existance.
Are you suggesting that any company who lays off staff only does so because of the licence they choose? Or is that just a convenient assumption which has nothing to support it. Or perhaps you have some interesting information about what happened at VA that the rest of don't know about? If so, please tell us about it.
And as long as you're not claiming that the GPL is about freedom
I would say that i have two perspectives on this:
1) It is about freedom, and is a very free licence, but clearly not as free as eg. the bsd licenses.
2) It is the most free licence there is if you mean freedom of code rather than freedom of its users.
If you want copyrights abolished, then I assume you're fine with the idea of people being able to do as they please with your code?
In the end, yes. What I find quite funny, is that currently both the closed source mentality Microsoft types rely on copyrights heavily, and so do the anti-closed source RMS types, and whenever the two camps criticise each other it's almost always because of something they can only do because of copyright. They will all be seen as hypocrits in the end, and thats why I think copyright will eventually become a hinderence to everyone.
The reason that I support GPL code now is because we need enough of it to fight the closed source ppl until the war becomes public enough for ppl to realise that the weapon being used to fight the war is copyright. Take it away, and everyone is back on the same level playing field.
I agree, thats worst than patents. But now we're getting on to copyrights and thats another story altogether.
> Because the basic libraries for Linux are GPLed
glibc is LGPLd not GPL. That allows ppl to write software with any licence they choose when they use it. GTK+ is LGPL also.,so is glib and many others. These are what I would call standard libraries and theres no restriction at all in linking to them. Which "standard functions" are you talking about?
How do you think the games developers and people like oracle and IBM release their products with closed source licenses?
The answer is that they choose to do so, because there is nothing in a GNU/Linux system from stopping them. And I choose to GPL my code because I want others to have the freedom to improve it (but not the freedom to steal it.) I'm not saying that's better, but it's my choice as the copyright holder. (until copyrights are abolished, but again thats another story)
You still haven't shown me how patents increase freedom "be definition" You have simply explained that they are supposed to.
America shows the limits of laissez-faire capitalism
America has never experienced laissez-faire capitalism.
corporations tend to dominate markets and impose resitrictions upon others through various mechanisms.
Yes, various unfair mechanisms like patents for example. (lets leave copyright for another day)
Because they have little choice
I don't know which "they" you're speaking for. I write GPLd software (well, I try anyway) and its not because im forced, its because i want to. How can you say people have no choice about it? There are at least tens of thousands of programmers who write code that's not GPL, including some for linux. And how do you explain GPL software for windows as well? (yes - its increasing fast)
Um, what the hell? Why does this need to be in the definition
Because he said it increased freedom "by definition". "By definition" means that the definition says it is true. That's what I challenged, because the definition of patent does not say anything about freedom.
patent (ptnt)
1. a. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
Show me where the definition says it increses freedom.
we need more government control over corporate IP
Too much govermnent control and intervention is the whole problem.
they allow others to benefit from research and innovation done by people and companies, which would otherwise be held secret Name a software related patent that does this or could have done this. How exactly would Amazons one click "technique" have remained a secret if they hadn't patented it?
Of course, unlike the GPL they let the originator make a profit, but that's good in a capitalist society
Firstly, the GPL most certainly does not prevent the originator from making a profit.
Secondly, artificially restricting control only to the originator gives them enough power to exploit everybody else. This tends to lead to monopolies and a small number of very large powerfil coroprations instead of a healthy competitive market.
The incorrect assumption you have made is that people do not do work voluntarily for others unless they can demand payment - after all why should they let others benefit from their superior abilities you might ask?
Well, whatever the reasons you might think that, it is wrong. If it were correct, nobody would be releasing GPLd software. Quite clearly, people (including many innovators) are releasing a lot of GPLd software.
Patents have outlived their usefulness to society and it's about time they we're reformed or ditched altogether.
Re:Helped end the Microsoft era?
on
Rebel Code
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· Score: 5
When the titanic hit that iceberg it shook the ship for a few seconds but other than that for the passengers all was well.
1. All the passengers still beloeved they were on the best most widely admired ship in the world.
2. The bars on board were still selling drinks for cash.
3. They still had lots of money and were operating in profit.
4. No passnegers saw a problem. They were comfortable enough and didn't want to leave.
At that time, a very small number of people on board knew very well that the minor shaking of the ship they had just felt would inevitably lead to the sinking of the ship. Nobody could do anything about it.
My point is this: Just because all looks well from the customers viewpoint doesn't mean all is well. One seemingly minor thing (at the time) can change the course of history entirely for those involved.
I think microsoft has hit its iceberg. I also think that all looks fine right now to customers and to investors. I also think that a small minority of people inside microsoft know very well they they are doomed.
They know there is nothing left they can do, so they get frustrated and start shouting at the iceberg. (icebergs stifle innovation!)
Do you know whats funny though? Microsoft saw their iceberg years ago, but they thought they could sail right through it.
Re:Open Source will change our civilisation.
on
Rebel Code
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· Score: 2
hehe. good try.
The ideas behind open source are about individual freedom and power, as opposed to state power.
Nothing like communism whatsoever. In fact, its closer to a form of anarchy than anything else. ie, a ruthless application of Darwinian survival of the fittest by the people. In open source its the fittest code that survives. In anarchy, its the fittest people.
yes, but if you provide the same interface to everyone, then eventually they start to care less about whats actually happening underneath as long as it works well.
Eventually then, this means you could standardise on one package management system underneath without forcing the users to learn a new interface. I still don't think you're going to get debian to switch to rpm or rh etc to adopt.deb overnight, but a unified interface eliminates a large part of the problem, so although as you say it's only a workaround, it's still a step in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to get in to whether its right or wrong to pirate peoples work but I will answer a couple of your points.
:)
and they don't feel in the least bit guilty about the fact that they're committing a criminal act
That's because they are not taking something from anybody. All they are stealing is the potential for them to make more money. The "victim" doesn't lose anything physical.
To explain....
Using copyright together with non-redistribute licenses is based on the idea of artificial scarcity of a product. This is completely non-intuitive and unnatural-feeling to many people. It has worked so far, because a significant part of the price paid is for distribution and duplication. These days however, those two cost next to nothing and the people are starting to feel more and more that it's unfair to charge for these things if they can do it themselves. The industries business model is starting to fail. Remember that copyright is something that is not naturally present. It can only happen when some large authority intervenes and removes freedom from some people in order to grant protection to another group (and of course the two overlap)
How would you feel if something you'd spent 6-months of your life creating was being given away free?
Personallty, I would feel great because I do such things for the love of it and I want it to be shared by as many people as possible. (My main problem is that I'm no good at it
It's good to see people coming up with ways to allow mouse users to cahieve their goals more quickly.
I wonder though whether it will end here. We already have 3 button mice, 5 buttin mice (yes, the "wheel" is actually buttons 4 & 5) Adding any more buttons would have been silly to operate with one hand, so they invented "gesture" control.
Maybe the next step could be to make it two handed. Give it a more rigid design (say a static board shaped design) and that would allow the hands to more more independently of it thus making the addition of many more buttons a better option.
They could call it a "button board" or even a "keyboard" that would be cool, and allow VERY fast control of apps once learned. Now if only all the applications were optimised for this kind of input. Maybe we could have an editor that was optimised for this so called "keyboard"! we could name it "vi"
who the fuck tells people their car door is unlocked?
Just because you don't understand the minds of people who behave in this friendly way doesn't mean they don't exist.
Do you let your friends look into your car? At exactly what point do you know someone well enough to consider it okay for them to open your car door? Where do you draw the line and why?
he must have been looking to steal the radio or the car because nobody actually looks into a car for any other reason.
What!? My example disproves this by experiment. The original poster is wrong. If this bloke was going to steal the radio he would hardly have knocked on my door and identified himself first! (Unless you don't believe that what I said actually happened, in which case there is little point in discussing it)
If I was part of a group of people who came into your house and just looked around, claiming they were only testing the security of your locks and so on, what would you do?
Just the other day someone knocked on my front door to tell me I had left me car outside unlocked. I said thank you and then locked my car. He must have either looked into the car to see the physical position of the lock, or else he tried the door. Either way, he was uninvited. What would you have done?
Slightly less recently, I was given directions to a friends house on a piece of paper. I drove to the street only to discover that the number of the house I had written down was smudged. I took a guess, but it could have been wrong. I went up the pathway to the front door and knocked, (remember if I was wrong, then i was on somebodys land uninvited here) There was no answer. I tried the doorhandle and it was unlocked. I shouted hello through the door. Nobody answered. Just as I was going to leave, my friend appeared from the back garden. Did I do anything wrong? I potentially entered a property without permission. Some people I know would have walked right in to check of things were okay when they got no answer. Would that have been wrong? What if my friend was lying injured somewhere in the house? Is it still not allowed because i might accidentally be in the wrong house.
My point is this... I agree there are parallels between cars, houses etc and computers. But in all these cases there are legitimate reasons for entry other than simply invitation. If you have a car/house/computer in a public place (yes, the internet is a PUBLIC network) then expect that to be the case. Even if you get rid of all malicious hackers, you still find people entering your systems for various reasons (accidentally is probably the most common) so you MUST be prepared for it with proper security. And we all (I hope) know by now from experience that understanding how to make a system secure follows from knowing how to exploit an unsecured system. Thats the way it is - like it or not. You WILL NOT be a good security admin until you know how to crack systems yourself. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an academic.
without a hint of weasling
The thing about people who have probably spent years perfecting their ability to not really answer questions whilst sounding like they have answered, is that they can look very much like they have not weasled out of answering.
Some of us can see through it. Roblimo apparently cannot.
IIRC, it went something like this....
DECSS was written on windows because at that stage there was no UDF Filesystem support in Linux, so the disk file had to be read & decoded on windows. The user could then reboot into linux to watch the movie from the hard drive. That was the only way to watch the movie in linux.
Once UDF was supported in linux this was no longer needed, and it could be done directly under linux.
vast lack of social skills they possess
how tenuous the grasp of geeks is on reality,
they can't even integrate into the hunter-gatherer
Jon,
Why does this just all sound like an unpleasant attack of a large group of people based solely on generalisation and assumption?
What happened to your tolerence of other peoples values?
Actually, this is probably one time where we might not have too much work to do. Companies generally try to be as efficient as they can be and reduce costs where possible. If they have a choice to make between paying for mp3 (licencing the patented tech) , or using ogg with no payment at all, its obvious which they will use. (some ppl call this "greed" but I'm sure they are completely bonkers)
The only rational thing to do is to use Ogg Vorbis exclusively
The rational thing to do is to let the markeyt decide. With ogg being BSD licenced, the choice they will make is clear in my mind.
Firstly, thats not even a very good troll.
Secondly, the reason you don't see many improvements in digital sound compression (you said yourself we've had the same mp3 format for years) is because of the absurd number and generality of patents issued in this area. This is precicely what ogg is trying to avoid and they have done a brilliant job.
Have you tried ogg? Have you compared the filesize and output quality with that of mp3? Try it - I dare you.
apt-get is "better" than rpm,
vi is "better" than emacs,
gnome is "better" than kde,
linux is "better" than *bsd,
my car is "better" than your car.
Why can't these people just s/better\ than/different\ from/g and realise that choice and diversity is part of what makes life interesting, and even if it wasn't, there still isn't one "right" answer for everyone.
Why do ppl think we would be better off with only one package manager? Different packages still have to be build for each system because of differing glibc versions and architectures etc (with exceptions for the very similar ones) so what do we gain?
> So maybe Microsoft should be split instead into desktop and server divisions.
All that will happen is that win2k will compete farly in the marketplace with its competitors and the customers will be reasonably happy.
But what about the desktop? I think it's a bit simplistic to say that it "wouldn't be a problem"
It would be a problem. The main problem most ms critics have with ms is with their desktop os. If they go on being a monopoly, how is that going to improve stability or their products? How is is going to help the users at my company who ask me day after day why the screen goes blue if they load big files info wordpad? How will it prevent random crashes and slowdowns after 2-3 days uptime (yes - we leave the desktops on sometimes just to avoid the long boot up times) what will provice them with an incentive to improve to an acceptible level. As a monopoly, it's not in their interests
to produce a good os. If they did, you would have no reason to "upgrade" to its next incarnation 2-3 years later.
In short, a monopoly[1] has no incentive to improve their products when they know they can more easily use their position as a lever to extort money from consumers. This can only be fixed by a more competitive healthy market.
Who let it get this bad in the first place? The consumers of course. And later on the ms fearing cowardly retailers who are pressured into doing much of ms dirty work for them.
[1] - if we are being technical then ms is arguably not a monopoly because they do not own 100% market share. However, all the bad things about a monopoly apply to those who own such a large share that as far as consumers are concerned they might as well own it all. Thats the position ms are in.
and how would that have remained a secret, given that fair use laws explicitly allow reverse engineering of code?
What "information wants to be free" means is that there exists some natural force which tends to make it free. That force is people.
Just like "water wants to run downhill" means that there exists some natural force which tends to make it run downhill. That force is gravity.
I'm not saying that people all want information to be free as individuals, but as a whole they do. Just look at napster, warez channels, open source advocates, voluntary teachers, etc.
Personally speaking I think it's driven by the natural human desire to communicate. To prevent any form or communication, be it speech, images, sounds, ideas or any other type of knowledge or information makes me deeply unhappy and seems to go against the grain of what I consider to be basics of enlightened human existance.
Are you suggesting that any company who lays off staff only does so because of the licence they choose? Or is that just a convenient assumption which has nothing to support it. Or perhaps you have some interesting information about what happened at VA that the rest of don't know about? If so, please tell us about it.
And as long as you're not claiming that the GPL is about freedom
I would say that i have two perspectives on this:
1) It is about freedom, and is a very free licence, but clearly not as free as eg. the bsd licenses.
2) It is the most free licence there is if you mean freedom of code rather than freedom of its users.
If you want copyrights abolished, then I assume you're fine with the idea of people being able to do as they please with your code?
In the end, yes. What I find quite funny, is that currently both the closed source mentality Microsoft types rely on copyrights heavily, and so do the anti-closed source RMS types, and whenever the two camps criticise each other it's almost always because of something they can only do because of copyright. They will all be seen as hypocrits in the end, and thats why I think copyright will eventually become a hinderence to everyone.
The reason that I support GPL code now is because we need enough of it to fight the closed source ppl until the war becomes public enough for ppl to realise that the weapon being used to fight the war is copyright. Take it away, and everyone is back on the same level playing field.
there are plenys of examples where expiry can increase freedom, but that doesn't make it true "by definition"
thats not a definition, its a piece of the constitution.
> Patents increase freedom _eventually_ when they expire and fall into the public domain.
Only when they apply to something which could have been kept a secret had it not been patented.
Name one of those that applies to software.
> No, more like things like exclusive contracts
I agree, thats worst than patents. But now we're getting on to copyrights and thats another story altogether.
> Because the basic libraries for Linux are GPLed
glibc is LGPLd not GPL. That allows ppl to write software with any licence they choose when they use it. GTK+ is LGPL also.,so is glib and many others. These are what I would call standard libraries and theres no restriction at all in linking to them. Which "standard functions" are you talking about?
How do you think the games developers and people like oracle and IBM release their products with closed source licenses?
The answer is that they choose to do so, because there is nothing in a GNU/Linux system from stopping them. And I choose to GPL my code because I want others to have the freedom to improve it (but not the freedom to steal it.) I'm not saying that's better, but it's my choice as the copyright holder. (until copyrights are abolished, but again thats another story)
You still haven't shown me how patents increase freedom "be definition" You have simply explained that they are supposed to.
America shows the limits of laissez-faire capitalism
America has never experienced laissez-faire capitalism.
corporations tend to dominate markets and impose resitrictions upon others through various mechanisms.
Yes, various unfair mechanisms like patents for example. (lets leave copyright for another day)
Because they have little choice
I don't know which "they" you're speaking for. I write GPLd software (well, I try anyway) and its not because im forced, its because i want to. How can you say people have no choice about it? There are at least tens of thousands of programmers who write code that's not GPL, including some for linux. And how do you explain GPL software for windows as well? (yes - its increasing fast)
Um, what the hell? Why does this need to be in the definition
Because he said it increased freedom "by definition". "By definition" means that the definition says it is true. That's what I challenged, because the definition of patent does not say anything about freedom.
By definition patents increase freedom
patent (ptnt)
1. a. A grant made by a government that confers upon the creator of an invention the sole right to make, use, and sell that invention for a set period of time.
Show me where the definition says it increses freedom.
we need more government control over corporate IP
Too much govermnent control and intervention is the whole problem.
they allow others to benefit from research and innovation done by people and companies, which would otherwise be held secret
Name a software related patent that does this or could have done this. How exactly would Amazons one click "technique" have remained a secret if they hadn't patented it?
Of course, unlike the GPL they let the originator make a profit, but that's good in a capitalist society
Firstly, the GPL most certainly does not prevent the originator from making a profit.
Secondly, artificially restricting control only to the originator gives them enough power to exploit everybody else. This tends to lead to monopolies and a small number of very large powerfil coroprations instead of a healthy competitive market.
The incorrect assumption you have made is that people do not do work voluntarily for others unless they can demand payment - after all why should they let others benefit from their superior abilities you might ask?
Well, whatever the reasons you might think that, it is wrong. If it were correct, nobody would be releasing GPLd software. Quite clearly, people (including many innovators) are releasing a lot of GPLd software.
Patents have outlived their usefulness to society and it's about time they we're reformed or ditched altogether.
When the titanic hit that iceberg it shook the ship for a few seconds but other than that for the passengers all was well.
1. All the passengers still beloeved they were on the best most widely admired ship in the world.
2. The bars on board were still selling drinks for cash.
3. They still had lots of money and were operating in profit.
4. No passnegers saw a problem. They were comfortable enough and didn't want to leave.
At that time, a very small number of people on board knew very well that the minor shaking of the ship they had just felt would inevitably lead to the sinking of the ship. Nobody could do anything about it.
My point is this: Just because all looks well from the customers viewpoint doesn't mean all is well. One seemingly minor thing (at the time) can change the course of history entirely for those involved.
I think microsoft has hit its iceberg. I also think that all looks fine right now to customers and to investors. I also think that a small minority of people inside microsoft know very well they they are doomed.
They know there is nothing left they can do, so they get frustrated and start shouting at the iceberg. (icebergs stifle innovation!)
Do you know whats funny though? Microsoft saw their iceberg years ago, but they thought they could sail right through it.
hehe. good try.
The ideas behind open source are about individual freedom and power, as opposed to state power.
Nothing like communism whatsoever. In fact, its closer to a form of anarchy than anything else. ie, a ruthless application of Darwinian survival of the fittest by the people. In open source its the fittest code that survives. In anarchy, its the fittest people.
yes, but if you provide the same interface to everyone, then eventually they start to care less about whats actually happening underneath as long as it works well. .deb overnight, but a unified interface eliminates a large part of the problem, so although as you say it's only a workaround, it's still a step in the right direction.
Eventually then, this means you could standardise on one package management system underneath without forcing the users to learn a new interface. I still don't think you're going to get debian to switch to rpm or rh etc to adopt