By this reasoning, all the money in a deceased's bank account should be free for the taking.
If someone puts work into intellectual property and dies the next day it is perfectly reasonable that his heirs should be able to benefit from his effort for a little while.
Making something freely available and giving it away are different things. If I write a piece of code and say "you can use the code as long as you give me credit and don't use it for any purposes I don't like." I have made it freely available. If I say "here is a chunk of code, do with it what you will." I have given it away. If I don't say anything, full copyright protection is the default.
It is within the rights of someone to put their intelectual property somewhere that people can see it, yet still maintain control over how it is used. If someone else makes money from the use of that intellectual property they know it has value and it is not unreasonable to expect them to pay some sort of royalty.
The sound of an outdoor concert is freely available to the neighbors across the street, it does not mean they can record it and make a profit from the recording. The author of material retains all the rights to the material regardless of how it is distributed. You do not need to outline your restrictions before you distribute it.
I am a kayak designer. I want to be able scan in the lines of a Inuit kayak, bring the lines into a CAD package to create a 3D surface model, calculate the hydrostatic properties. Then modify the design to suit modern paddlers. Convert the design into lines from which I can build the boat. Create drawings so I can sell the plans to others. Make renderings of the design to put in my catalog. Take pictures of the finished boat to add to the catalog. Lay out those pictures and drawings in a catalog and send the results to a printer. This is the kind of stuff real people do with computers.
What is it about accesss to lower level operating system procedures that I should care about?
I can see where if you are running a server that a decent GUI is pretty irrelevant, but most people don't operate servers. There seems to be a feeling in the unix user community that if you can't cluster or if the server capacity is even slightly degraded that the computer isn't worth a damn.
If there is ever a time when there are more servers than there a people who actually access those servers for real world applications, the computer industry will die.
The continued growth of the computer industry depends on getting computers into the hands of the mass market. As it stands now even a Mac is too complicated to use for most people. The goal of computer scientists should be to make the computer easier to use, not more powerful as a server.
The Macintosh is designed for people who's job is something other than using a computer. They are a tool for people doing other things. A cake mixer is not a tool for furthing the manufacture of cake mixers, it is for someone who wants to make cakes and is designed accordingly. The same should apply to computers. The real use of computers, is to do non-computer related work. This is what the Mac is good at.
Linux people seem to be in the business of designing a better milling machine just so they can make a better milling machine. They don't seem to consider what is going to be made with that machine when it is made perfect.
Linux sounds great if you want to make a better computer for running a better version of Linux, but what exactly is Linux trying to do that matters to anyone who wants to do something else entirely?
It is arrogant to assume "nerdism" is a modern phenomena. Tolkien himself was a nerd. The word may be new but the type is old. Anyone who is fasinated by arcane knowledge, sometimes to the detriment of personal hygene, qualifies.
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By this reasoning, all the money in a deceased's bank account should be free for the taking.
If someone puts work into intellectual property and dies the next day it is perfectly reasonable that his heirs should be able to benefit from his effort for a little while.
Making something freely available and giving it away are different things. If I write a piece of code and say "you can use the code as long as you give me credit and don't use it for any purposes I don't like." I have made it freely available. If I say "here is a chunk of code, do with it what you will." I have given it away. If I don't say anything, full copyright protection is the default.
It is within the rights of someone to put their intelectual property somewhere that people can see it, yet still maintain control over how it is used. If someone else makes money from the use of that intellectual property they know it has value and it is not unreasonable to expect them to pay some sort of royalty.
The sound of an outdoor concert is freely available to the neighbors across the street, it does not mean they can record it and make a profit from the recording. The author of material retains all the rights to the material regardless of how it is distributed. You do not need to outline your restrictions before you distribute it.
What is it about accesss to lower level operating system procedures that I should care about?
I can see where if you are running a server that a decent GUI is pretty irrelevant, but most people don't operate servers. There seems to be a feeling in the unix user community that if you can't cluster or if the server capacity is even slightly degraded that the computer isn't worth a damn.
If there is ever a time when there are more servers than there a people who actually access those servers for real world applications, the computer industry will die.
The continued growth of the computer industry depends on getting computers into the hands of the mass market. As it stands now even a Mac is too complicated to use for most people. The goal of computer scientists should be to make the computer easier to use, not more powerful as a server.
The Macintosh is designed for people who's job is something other than using a computer. They are a tool for people doing other things. A cake mixer is not a tool for furthing the manufacture of cake mixers, it is for someone who wants to make cakes and is designed accordingly. The same should apply to computers. The real use of computers, is to do non-computer related work. This is what the Mac is good at.
Linux people seem to be in the business of designing a better milling machine just so they can make a better milling machine. They don't seem to consider what is going to be made with that machine when it is made perfect.
Linux sounds great if you want to make a better computer for running a better version of Linux, but what exactly is Linux trying to do that matters to anyone who wants to do something else entirely?
It is arrogant to assume "nerdism" is a modern phenomena. Tolkien himself was a nerd. The word may be new but the type is old. Anyone who is fasinated by arcane knowledge, sometimes to the detriment of personal hygene, qualifies.