This is further heaped on top of the fact that you cannot sit on a copyright violation and wait for the damages to increase.
SCO is not suing over copyright infringement. They are suing for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract."
So I don't think the existence of Mathematicians getting paid despite their work being "Free" is a good argument for why Programmers will still get paid if their work is "Free", because those Mathematicians only exist in Academia.
Well, some of them are actuaries.
But why isn't it a good argument? The poster claimed that if software is libre then programmers won't get paid. I showed a number of examples (of which mathematicians was only one) where a product is libre but the people who make the product are paid.
Unless you're trying to argue that if I want to get paid to write software, and don't want to work in academia (both of which are true), I shouldn't write "Free" software.
No, I'm certainly not arguing that. There are already people who get paid to write software, don't work in academia, and write "Free" software. In fact, we're having a conversation using such a piece of free software right now.
As for what you should do, you should only write "Free" software. Because anything else is immoral.:)
If you are having problems getting up, then DON'T USE SNOOZE!
I totally agree with this one. It works best when you combine it with your body's natural alarm clock. Maybe this doesn't work for everyone, but I've found if I just think about what time I need to wake up in the morning, and how many hours of sleep that's going to entail, I'll wake up fairly close to that time naturally. Then I just set my alarm clock really loud and obnoxious for 10 minutes later, just in case, and the vast majority of the time I wake up before the alarm clock even goes off. Snooze is not an option, when the alarm clock goes off, I have to get up.
Likewise, I don't want to see the government outlaw either proprietary software or free software because one choice is supposedly better than another.
The government wouldn't need to outlaw proprietary software. It created the concept of proprietary software in the first place.
If you prevent these people from making money whether by outlawing certain things or taxing their profits, the governement simply takes away a choice from everyone. This is what libertarianism is against.
Copyright law is all about "outlawing certain things." Specifically, it's about outlawing copying without permission of the copyright owner. Not "outlawing certain things" is anarchy, not libertarianism.
I love how libertarians pretend to have this natural, self-evident system, while they're really just trying to get back to the "good old days" of fuedalism, something we fortunately got rid of hundreds of years ago.
This is the fundamental difference between government and free enterprise -- the market produces its wealth through voluntary association, while government produces its wealth through force.
So which is Microsoft, then? I never volunteered to pay them for my copy of Windows. Yet if I copy Windows from a friend Microsoft will sue me and extract its wealth through force.
Lots of peole pay. Academia is not necessarily state funded. There are many private schools. And academia and government need software too. Phone books are paid for by advertising. Some software could be paid for the same way. People who are buying houses with title insurance pay for the title histories. In a similar manner, people who need specific software products made for them would pay for software.
To put it into a simple category, people who aren't software developers will pay. Proprietary software is each programmer for himself. Free software is all programmers working together.
We're never going to be finished writing software. No matter how much software is available for free, people will always demand more. Like I said, the only question is whether software programmers want to be paid to write new software based on freely available software which is already written, or if they want to be paid to reinvent the same software over and over again.
I am suggesting that if music sharers weren't running around proclaiming that they were bringing an end to intellectual property and the capitalist machine, then we would have been in a better position to get a user friendly format.
Perhaps. But if we had gotten a user friendly format, music sharers wouldn't wouldn't have been as quick to run to P2P networks in the first place.
Both sides have comprimised somewhat, but I think the natural state of information is such that music sharers are going to win, in the end. Intellectual property had its run for a few hundred years, but I doubt it'll last even a hundred more.
The problem is, if your application is well designed and well documented (as in documentation for users - not just code comments) then there should be little to no need for users to require support for installation and operation.
How many people actually read the documentation? Sure, well written software can cut down on the amount of support needed, but only the simplest functionality software can account for every single possible scenario the end-user might dream up.
Which only leaves you coding new features. Which if you code is suitably well written and commented, then it might be cheaper for them to do the majority of small things internally and leave you completely out of the loop.
I don't care how well written and commented your code is, it's always going to be easier for the original programmer to add new features than for someone else to do so. That difference in ease and cost translates into profit.
Math is free, but we still have mathematicians. Laws are free (usually), but politicians still get paid to write them. Phone books are free, but people still get paid to compile them. Land title histories are free, but employees of title insurance companies still get paid to research them. "Free Software" doesn't mean software developers work for free. It's simply a matter of whether or not you want your job to be recreating stuff made by other people or creating new things.
From what I can tell, the part about ruining the compression techniques seems to be added by the Slashdot author, and isn't backed up anywhere else. Even the link the article points to says that it is a watermark, not a compression spoiler.
Copyright isn't evil. Copyright is an important guarantor of a creator's rights. The whole Linux thing wouldn't be possible without copyright protection. A few/.ers will disagree with that, but I think that nails down the beliefs of the majority.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Personally I think copyright is evil, and I almost always find myself in the minority.
Nevertheless, the current copyright system is too heavily biased towards creators, at the expense of the public and the public domain, and the situation is only getting worse with the recent copyright extension and the DMCA.
Actually it's been my experience that very few slashdotters actually understand the DMCA. They echo the groupthink that the DMCA is bad, but this generally winds up being contradictory to the belief that copyright is good. What good is copyright law if you're going to let people distribute cracks to copyright protection schemes with impunity?
It appears obvious to me that the SCO lawsuit is utterly without merit. Obviously, everyone else here thinks so as well (probably even you).
Absolutely not. I think it's quite possible, maybe even likely, that someone from IBM stole some SCO code and put it in Linux. There's certainly no evidence against this, as you can't prove such a negative without access to the SCO source.
I've also seen a small minority of posts that coherently criticize Linux as a desktop platform, and I don't have to browse at -1 to find them.
I haven't seen much in this regard either way, so I can't really comment.
So while there is a herd mentality here on/., and that's often a bad thing, I don't see that any of the things you've pointed out rise to the level of "unsayable", even within the confines of Slashdot.
I can only think of one post that ever rose to the level of "unsayable." The first Slashdot troll post investigation. But lots of topics rise to lesser levels of unsayable. And many of the rest are drown out in a sea of +5 posts which are just plain incorrect (but are anti-DMCA, or pro-Linux, or whatever).
The dots were in the center of the screen, not on the sides, so it certainly wasn't the DTS time-coding.
My friend who works in the film industry in LA pointed them out to me as "a new copy protection scheme," so I assumed they were a watermark.
As for cropping them out, they were right in the center of the picture. Cropping them out would still reveal the pattern, unless you knew precisely what the film looked like under the dots. I guess you could just crop out those entire frames which contained the dots (I only noticed about 10-20 throughout the film though I'm sure there were more). And still, that's going to be quite a bit of work. Plus, perhaps the times when the marks appear is itself part of the watermark. I couldn't find any details in a quick google search.
Of course, then they'll just start pirating the book as well.
So what, the book's already been written, and Tolkien is dead.
I wonder if Tolkien would have still written it if he didn't think he could make any money off it.
I'm sure he could still make money off it. Cowboyneal makes money off the crap he writes despite Alterslash copying it, and Cowboyneal's prose is incomparible to that of Tolkien (Tolkien could spell, after all).
Slashdot Mirror
This is further heaped on top of the fact that you cannot sit on a copyright violation and wait for the damages to increase.
SCO is not suing over copyright infringement. They are suing for "misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious interference, unfair competition and breach of contract."
So I don't think the existence of Mathematicians getting paid despite their work being "Free" is a good argument for why Programmers will still get paid if their work is "Free", because those Mathematicians only exist in Academia.
Well, some of them are actuaries.
But why isn't it a good argument? The poster claimed that if software is libre then programmers won't get paid. I showed a number of examples (of which mathematicians was only one) where a product is libre but the people who make the product are paid.
Unless you're trying to argue that if I want to get paid to write software, and don't want to work in academia (both of which are true), I shouldn't write "Free" software.
No, I'm certainly not arguing that. There are already people who get paid to write software, don't work in academia, and write "Free" software. In fact, we're having a conversation using such a piece of free software right now.
As for what you should do, you should only write "Free" software. Because anything else is immoral. :)
If you are having problems getting up, then DON'T USE SNOOZE!
I totally agree with this one. It works best when you combine it with your body's natural alarm clock. Maybe this doesn't work for everyone, but I've found if I just think about what time I need to wake up in the morning, and how many hours of sleep that's going to entail, I'll wake up fairly close to that time naturally. Then I just set my alarm clock really loud and obnoxious for 10 minutes later, just in case, and the vast majority of the time I wake up before the alarm clock even goes off. Snooze is not an option, when the alarm clock goes off, I have to get up.
Isn't there a workaround besides reinstalling a new kernel?
Likewise, I don't want to see the government outlaw either proprietary software or free software because one choice is supposedly better than another.
The government wouldn't need to outlaw proprietary software. It created the concept of proprietary software in the first place.
If you prevent these people from making money whether by outlawing certain things or taxing their profits, the governement simply takes away a choice from everyone. This is what libertarianism is against.
Copyright law is all about "outlawing certain things." Specifically, it's about outlawing copying without permission of the copyright owner. Not "outlawing certain things" is anarchy, not libertarianism.
I love how libertarians pretend to have this natural, self-evident system, while they're really just trying to get back to the "good old days" of fuedalism, something we fortunately got rid of hundreds of years ago.
Laws aren't free. We pay for them through our taxes.
Free as in freedom, not free as in cost.
Phone books aren't free. Their cost is hidden in your phone bill and subsidized by advertisers.
Again, I'm talking about freedom. Phone books, like laws, are public domain.
This is the fundamental difference between government and free enterprise -- the market produces its wealth through voluntary association, while government produces its wealth through force.
So which is Microsoft, then? I never volunteered to pay them for my copy of Windows. Yet if I copy Windows from a friend Microsoft will sue me and extract its wealth through force.
Laws are free
How so?
They are public domain.
So no, laws are not free at all -- even the most "insignificant" one comes only at the expense of the market.
You're thinking in terms of cost, not in terms of freedom.
Lots of peole pay. Academia is not necessarily state funded. There are many private schools. And academia and government need software too. Phone books are paid for by advertising. Some software could be paid for the same way. People who are buying houses with title insurance pay for the title histories. In a similar manner, people who need specific software products made for them would pay for software.
To put it into a simple category, people who aren't software developers will pay. Proprietary software is each programmer for himself. Free software is all programmers working together.
We're never going to be finished writing software. No matter how much software is available for free, people will always demand more. Like I said, the only question is whether software programmers want to be paid to write new software based on freely available software which is already written, or if they want to be paid to reinvent the same software over and over again.
Math is free if the mathematicians publish their work.
Likewise with software, of course.
I am suggesting that if music sharers weren't running around proclaiming that they were bringing an end to intellectual property and the capitalist machine, then we would have been in a better position to get a user friendly format.
Perhaps. But if we had gotten a user friendly format, music sharers wouldn't wouldn't have been as quick to run to P2P networks in the first place.
Both sides have comprimised somewhat, but I think the natural state of information is such that music sharers are going to win, in the end. Intellectual property had its run for a few hundred years, but I doubt it'll last even a hundred more.
Does that mean that the Hurd kernel won't allow binary modules, or open wrappers (Nvidia)?
Hurd is microkernel based. The concept of "binary modules" doesn't exist. Nvidia would live in user space.
Actually, I have no clue what I'm talking about, but I think what I said is somewhat true :).
The problem is, if your application is well designed and well documented (as in documentation for users - not just code comments) then there should be little to no need for users to require support for installation and operation.
How many people actually read the documentation? Sure, well written software can cut down on the amount of support needed, but only the simplest functionality software can account for every single possible scenario the end-user might dream up.
Which only leaves you coding new features. Which if you code is suitably well written and commented, then it might be cheaper for them to do the majority of small things internally and leave you completely out of the loop.
I don't care how well written and commented your code is, it's always going to be easier for the original programmer to add new features than for someone else to do so. That difference in ease and cost translates into profit.
Math is free, but we still have mathematicians. Laws are free (usually), but politicians still get paid to write them. Phone books are free, but people still get paid to compile them. Land title histories are free, but employees of title insurance companies still get paid to research them. "Free Software" doesn't mean software developers work for free. It's simply a matter of whether or not you want your job to be recreating stuff made by other people or creating new things.
Umm, if you entered into a contract not to copy code, then all your other points are irrelevant. You're not allowed to copy code.
From what I can tell, the part about ruining the compression techniques seems to be added by the Slashdot author, and isn't backed up anywhere else. Even the link the article points to says that it is a watermark, not a compression spoiler.
Copying code would be a breach of contract, which is what SCO's legal case is based upon.
Lack of evidence either way is far from being "obvious...that the SCO lawsuit is utterly without merit."
there are two types of agnostics. Strong Agnostics and Weak Agnostics.
It isn't stealing if you have permission... ergo it isn't shoplifting.
That's my point.
And I doubt most people would approve of a law being passed about talking in a theater.
Why not? And why is the law about using video cameras any different?
I'll give you a hint: $$$$$$$$.
Copyright isn't evil. Copyright is an important guarantor of a creator's rights. The whole Linux thing wouldn't be possible without copyright protection. A few /.ers will disagree with that, but I think that nails down the beliefs of the majority.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. Personally I think copyright is evil, and I almost always find myself in the minority.
Nevertheless, the current copyright system is too heavily biased towards creators, at the expense of the public and the public domain, and the situation is only getting worse with the recent copyright extension and the DMCA.
Actually it's been my experience that very few slashdotters actually understand the DMCA. They echo the groupthink that the DMCA is bad, but this generally winds up being contradictory to the belief that copyright is good. What good is copyright law if you're going to let people distribute cracks to copyright protection schemes with impunity?
It appears obvious to me that the SCO lawsuit is utterly without merit. Obviously, everyone else here thinks so as well (probably even you).
Absolutely not. I think it's quite possible, maybe even likely, that someone from IBM stole some SCO code and put it in Linux. There's certainly no evidence against this, as you can't prove such a negative without access to the SCO source.
I've also seen a small minority of posts that coherently criticize Linux as a desktop platform, and I don't have to browse at -1 to find them.
I haven't seen much in this regard either way, so I can't really comment.
So while there is a herd mentality here on /., and that's often a bad thing, I don't see that any of the things you've pointed out rise to the level of "unsayable", even within the confines of Slashdot.
I can only think of one post that ever rose to the level of "unsayable." The first Slashdot troll post investigation. But lots of topics rise to lesser levels of unsayable. And many of the rest are drown out in a sea of +5 posts which are just plain incorrect (but are anti-DMCA, or pro-Linux, or whatever).
The first Slashdot troll post investigation
I doubt those were watermarks, rather it was probably the DTS time-coding which you saw.
Read the second question on this page, or do a google search on "cap code" dots AKA "crap code" dots.
The dots were in the center of the screen, not on the sides, so it certainly wasn't the DTS time-coding.
My friend who works in the film industry in LA pointed them out to me as "a new copy protection scheme," so I assumed they were a watermark.
As for cropping them out, they were right in the center of the picture. Cropping them out would still reveal the pattern, unless you knew precisely what the film looked like under the dots. I guess you could just crop out those entire frames which contained the dots (I only noticed about 10-20 throughout the film though I'm sure there were more). And still, that's going to be quite a bit of work. Plus, perhaps the times when the marks appear is itself part of the watermark. I couldn't find any details in a quick google search.
Of course, then they'll just start pirating the book as well.
So what, the book's already been written, and Tolkien is dead.
I wonder if Tolkien would have still written it if he didn't think he could make any money off it.
I'm sure he could still make money off it. Cowboyneal makes money off the crap he writes despite Alterslash copying it, and Cowboyneal's prose is incomparible to that of Tolkien (Tolkien could spell, after all).