But I don't think that's what I reasonable person would think. Perhaps a reasonable and well informed person. But the general public doesn't know anything about wireless security. They simply know to "plug and play" and when they do they leave the environment open. Does that mean that they want and expect anyone other than themselves to use that network? I don't think so. I just think they're ignorant.
Personally, I think the guy knew he was doing something wrong when he tried to hide what he was doing, and he should have been arrested.
No it isn't. Copyright is granting of a temporary monopoly for distribution of a particular work. Monopoly is different from socialism, although they are both inefficient.
Huh? Did you fully read what he wrote? His post, and every similar proposal I've seen, say that an effort should be made to measure the realtive distribution of different works and to allocate funds on that basis.
The problem is that his post inserts some other 3rd party (central authority) into the equation. That party then sets policy for the relationship between the consumer and the producer. That's socialism. It will fail specifically because that 3rd party will never have as much information about how well to distribute goods&services as the two parties directly involved in the transaction. Additionally, the 3rd party, even if perfectly efficient, adds inefficiency to the transaction simply by adding a 3rd party to a 2 party exchange.
If you want to know where I agree with you, it's that the current distribution mechanism (monopoly) is not efficient, and should be replaced by one that is more efficient. Where I disagree is that a socialist replacement would be good. It won't work any better than monopoly. And there are reasons to believe that it would work worse. You (and the OP) seem to have an assumption that the relationship between consumers and producers can be optimally managed by a central authority. I don't believe that it can. And the resulting inefficiency will be of detriment to society as a whole.
You are collosally wrong on this point. For copyrighted works doubling consumption means that at half the price creators get paid the exact same amount. Tripling consumption means that at one third the price creators get paid the exact same amount.
The incentive of the consumer is not the only incentive. And it's not really the incentive that's going to cause the most problems. You should be concerned about the incentive of the producer. In the system that was proposed, the producers of content won't need to respond to the consumers. The consumers will get as much they want whenever they want it. And the producers will get paid whether it's of good quality or bad quality. Why? Because they will argue to the 3rd party that the consumers are consuming their in increasing amounts. They must be satisfied with the quality level. Ever decreasing quality is what will result.
When a producer doesn't have the oppurtunity to scale profits based on the popularity of their product, they will move most of their effort to producing something that does scale on popularity. Why? Because producers are trying to maximize their profitability. That can be achieved by working on quality where it's required in order to continue to sell a product. There is no incentive for the consumers to stop consuming. They're not paying for anything anyway. Hence they can't take away profits by refusing to consume. Hence the producers can (and will) produce without concern for quality.
You may be right that the cost will fall to zero, but what will also happen is that the quality will also fall to zero while the earnings of the producers remain contsant. This is broken specifically because the relationship between the consumer and the producer is broken and managed by a 3rd party. A much better way to deal with this is to leave out the 3rd party and let consumers and producers decide between themselves whether or not to trade.
I'd also like to note that the US and most other countries already use this "socialistic" system. Take a look into... So it's hardly as radical as you suggest. It's already part of our law.
That we have a government that's already instituted socialism into our society does not justify continuing to do so. What matters is how well it works. Socialism doesn't work. I refer you to my previously linked artciles on why it fails.
This is only the entertainment industry we're talking about, not political reform.
As soon as you start talking about tinkering with an industry - even the entertainment industry - you're talking about political reform. Because you're talking about changing the way that a free market works and replacing it with something else. IMHO, that's politics.
No, not at all, since the consumers would also be the producers. That is, you burn your own DVDs.
There's two things here: the DVD and the content on the DVD. The consumer you speak of would be a producer of the DVD, but not the producer of the content on the DVD. They still consume that from somewhere else. And they will overconsume if they are seperated from the costs of that production. Who will this benefit the most? The content producers. They now know that they're going to get paid for their production no matter how good or bad it is. So they'll value leisure over quality content. And we'll end up in a situation where no content is produced but content producers are still paid.
Perhaps I'm missing something. If so, please expound. But to me it looks like this will cause many more problems than it solves.
They release it to the public for free (and Free) and keep track of how many copies are in circulation. Depending on how popular it is, they are then paid $5,00,000,000, or what ever, by a central organisation. The consumers have to pay this organisation a set amount each year to cover their costs, but are then free to do whatever they want with the movie/music/software.
Isn't this socialism? Hasn't the world demonstrated that socialism is an inherently failed distribution system?
Will people be happy being forced to fork out a few grand a year for products? They fork it out already voluntarily.
Yes, but that's a pretty significant distinction. When people voluntarily spend their money, you can discern what's important to them. When people are forced to spend their money, the enforcer of the spending is responsible for determining what's important to the public. But that enforcer doesn't have the data to determine what's important... that data only came from people voluntarily spending their money. As a result, overtime the enforcer will become incredibly inefficient at providing what the public wants. Which is what we see everytime some central authority tries to take control of production.
But that's not all. The consumer of {movies,music,software} will perceive it as free. As a consequence they'll consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. This will lead to escalating costs for everyone.
A crazy, poorly formed idea, but one which does eliminate the problem sellers we are now facing.
I think it will create many times more problems than the single problem it might solve.
All true, and brilliantly presented. But the other side of the coin is that you don't have to be a home theater geek in order to enjoy the same movie experience. I can pay $9.50 to see a movie every once in a while in its full glory. Or I could pay $6000 in order to enjoy every movie in it's full glory.
Generally speaking, I choose the occasional trip to the theater for the much lower price.
Yes. Libertarian. And it appears that we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'll even let you have the last word by not responding to any of the comments in your last post! That doesn't mean I agree with them, but I'll be happy to let them go unchallenged.
Would we? I don't hear anybody screaming monopoly over other community funded ammenities, like parks, playgrounds, paths, libraries, band shells, riverwalks, public lakefronts, community colleges...
No of course you don't hear this. How many privately funded parks are there in your community? Public parks have completely killed any possible provision of private parks or playgrounds or paths or libraries or...
My point is this: if you want something fine. Pay for it. As soon as you fund it with taxes, you're forcing someone else to pay for it who doesn't want it. It doesn't matter what the thing is. It could be a park or a road or a library or wifi. Forcing someone else to pay for something that you want is theft. And it doesn't matter that we've elected people to engage in this activity. It doesn't matter whether one person takes your money without your permission or 51% of the population takes your money. Both are theft.
But that's okay, because it's how a representative government with taxation functions. Taxpayers don't get line item funding control over their tax money, but they get to elect like-minded folks to represent their budgeting preferences.
That is how representative government works. But theft is still wrong. Moreover it's not effective. Forcing someone to pay for something that you want means that they're not free to pay for only the things that they want. Multiply this by a community and businesses that might be sustained because there's a population that wants their services can't run. Instead we have things that only some of the people want, but aren't willing to pay for on their own. On the whole, the community is poorer because they've replaced a profitable business with a publically funded project.
This might be tolerable if the public provision of things was efficient. But it's not. The government is the highest cost producer. If we minimize the amount of money we send to the governemnt, we're all richer. Additionally, the illusion of a free lunch results in over consumption. That's not a good thing when it comes to shared internet access.
I could be wrong about this next part, but I predict that any municipality that implements a taxation subsidized wireless network, will soon start complaining about
insufficient bandwidth
the unreliability of the infrastructure, and
the especially high cost.
Especially after all of the for profit wifi providers have left town.
I can easily agree with your position. I don't care if the muni provides the service as long as it's fully funded through fees charged for the service. Which means no taxation, and no bonds (which are just a form of deferred taxation).
Right. This is why I disagree with this type of abuse of eminent domain.
First thing, I'm not convinced that I am not allowed to rip those cables out of my lawn. There are certain boundaries up to which, I do not have property rights. But I don't know for certain that I can't do just what you said. Not that I'm planning on ripping out these cables at any point.
In any case, I would argue that when I built my house, I did in fact pay to lay those cables. That was part of the construction costs of my house and included in the final cost of my purchase.
This is not really relavent to the current discussion. For the purposes of this discussion, those cables being on your land are just there. They provide you potential which you are not forced to pay for.
But to your point, I think that the abuse of eminent domain is a problem. And the mixing of the public and private sector makes the cable company and the telco not ideal examples of a totally private venture.
So, you're saying that once the broadband network is built, the 25% that voted against it will never be using it?
No. I'm saying that whatever the percentage is, you'll never get 100% usage. Even if you could, all you've done is completely killed the private sector that was providing this service. So either you completely squash the private business or you force someone to pay for something that they aren't going to use. Either case makes us (as a whole) poorer. We've either forced someone to pay for something that they didn't want, or we've killed a profitable business.
Examples: local cable company (only one in town + need to buy (or pay for) basic cable if you want cable internet).
Local phone company (need to buy unneeded 'phone service' if you want dsl).
In both of those cases, if having the money is more important to you, you can choose not to pay for cable and phone service. But if you decide not to pay your taxes, someone is going to come take you to jail. It can feel like the cable and phone companies are forcing you into their service, but if you can choose to stop paying for either of those services. You won't get the services, but the consequence of not paying is that the relationship is broken. No one goes to jail as would happen if you failed to pay your taxes.
The only thing I would have added is that the only reason that there's only one cable company is as a result of the municipality restricting competition through right of way. So the local cable company is not a good example of a totally private enterprise.
Let's use a different example. 100% of the population gets taxed to fund a war that 49% of the people voted against. That 49% of the population is just plain screwed.
You are 100% correct. I couldn't possibly agree with this more. This is why economic power is more equitable than political power. Because with a polarized country, political power screws almost half of the country. With economic power, if you choose not to purchase something, that's your choice.
Now it's true that economic power doesn't make everyone happy. But it's quite a bit better than only 50%.
Of course, the government's decision to support something that wouldn't return a profit anytime soon led to an entire industry of home electronics. Time and time again, the government's infrastructure fuels private industry growth.
This is a fallacy first described by Frederic Bastiat, but later explained very clearly and simply by Henry Hazlitt.
The growth of the electronics industry certainly did come about as a result of widespread delivery of electricity. But you don't know what hidden costs came along with it. You can see what happened, but you can't see what didn't happen. The growth of the electronics industry came at the cost of some other industry. And you don't know whether or not the electronics industry wouldn't have happened anyway if done entirely privately. In which case you'd have both the electronics industry and this other industry that was lost. But now we have lost that other industry and are that much poorer.
The same is true with subsidized wireless. We take away some other industry in order to promote wireless. You see the benefit of wireless, but you don't know what other industry suffers because of it. You don't know how an entire population of people might have spent their money if they hadn't been forced to pay for it in taxes to subsidize wireless.
Personally, I find Bastiat and Hazlitt's argument completely convincing. But in the name of fairness, I should mention that there is another interpretation. That of John Maynard Keynes. It's fairly well discussed in this wikipedia entry. I disagree with it. In order to agree with Keynes, you have to believe that it's economically productive to pay someone to dig a hole, just to pay them again to fill it back up. I can't agree with that so I dismiss Keynes.
How does a muni providing a value-add wireless communications service designed to attract commercial and residential development translate to "squashing" private business?
When a muni provides wireless communication, as long as they fund it entirely out of the revenue generated by the service, then you're right. It's fair competition. But as soon as taxes are used to fund the muni wireless network, then that's the government squashing private business. Why? Because everyone is forced to pay for the service (through taxes) whether they want it or not. Private business does not have the ability to force a service on a user community like the municiple government does.
Let's illustrate this with an example. Imagine a Texas municipality decides to implement broadband. Let's even say that they hold a referrendum to determine whether or not to do it. 75% of the population decides they want it. The problem is that 100% of the population gets taxed to pay for it. Those 25% who voted against it are just plain screwed - they're paying for a service that they didn't want.
But it doesn't end there. Because the service is being subsidised through taxation by those who don't want or need the service, the muni based wireless can offer the overall service for cheaper to the general population? A private company can't get force a community to use a service that they don't want. But the muni can. The result is that private business can't complete because their cost structure doesn't include 25% of their customers who don't use the service. The result: competition is squashed.
If this weren't the city government, we'd all be screaming "Monopoly". And correctly so, because the government is exactly that: a monopoly with the power to extract monopoly prices by forcing payment for a service even if that service isn't delivered to you. Forcing someone to be a customer is generally going to result in expensive and crappy service.
I really don't understand why the/. crowd doesn't simply hate this. It's an exercise of monopoly power to beat out competition.
Greylisting is a very powerful spam reduction technique that works transparently.
Forgot to mention: I use greylisting also. I like it's transparency. However I've found that I have to tweak the wait time. The default time prevents delivery from too many real users. I've settled on 3 mins as a reasonable time.
I don't like heuristic systems (e.g. spamassassin). When they produce a false positive, no one knows. Neither the sender nor the recipient knows that a legit email has been incorrectly identified (see note below). With greylisting and C/R, this doesn't happen. In both cases, the system notifies one or the other party that the email was NOT delivered. That's a good thing.
NOTE: It's certainly possible for someone to know when spamassassin mis-id's a legit email as spam. But it requires one of two things, either the recipient must occasionally scan his/her spam folder looking for false positives, or the sender must be notified that the email wasn't delivered. In the former case, if you're going to scan all of your spam anyway, why have any spam protection at all. In the latter case, this is functionally equivalent to C/R.
Challenge/response can be quite irritating, in particular when someone post to a public mailing list and uses C/R.
I post to public mailing lists using C/R. But I've built it so that all of my posts to that list are set up so that replies to me will get through w/out being challenged. There's more than one way to do this using TMDA.
Any C/R request goes to my trash folder.
See this post for how you can automatically filter any TMDA challenges.
I know that this is going to start a religious flame war. And I apologize in advance. But since I started using challenge/response (specifically TMDA) I just don't care. I give anyone my email whenever they want. I register on websites with an address that expires. So it works for long enough for them to send whatever it is that I need from them and then stops working after that.
Do I still get spam? Yes. The 419 scammers can get through. I see one of them once every 6 months or so. I just blacklist them. 2 spams a year is much easier to deal with than 12000. Do I see automated spam? Nope. Haven't seen one of those in my mailbox since 2001.
IMHO, C/R is the best tool that I've seen to allow me to not worry about giving out my email address to others. I wish there was a way in which we could create a small experiment on the internet in which everyone used C/R, and see what happened to spam. My prediction: it would disappear. And when that happened, no one would be afraid to give out their email address. No one would be worried about companies leaking their email addresses. This story would not be interesting enough to make the front page of/.
(FWIW, I fully understand the argument that says that C/R is bad. I do not agree with it's accuracy nor it's validity. I'm happy to argue about the merits of C/R, but recognize that a lot of these arguments have been addressed by TMDA and other well behaved C/R.)
Paul Grahamhas a different idea. He thinks that some kids should consider the educational advantage you'd get from starting a business instead of going to college. Especially kids with interest in technology. It sounds like Paul was making a suggestion, but I wonder if he's actually describing something that's already happening.
No. My code is GPL. They can't use it unless they compensate me with their code. If I licensed my code under BSD, then you'd be correct. I gave them permission to use my code; I can't complain after the fact that they did. But (like I said) I release under GPL.
So what you really care about is direct compensation. Fair enough. But please don't pretend that there is no compensation already.
The "compensation" that you mention is insufficient to me. The price for my code is your code (or something else that we've negotiated). If you don't like my price, don't buy.
And it doesn't matter that some compensation already exists. In exactly the same way that it doesn't matter to some guy selling his car if you show up with a crisp $100 bill and expect him to give you the car. You may think his price is too high and that you're giving him ample compensation, but it's his car and he gets to decide. You might even be right that $100 is a fair market price for the car. But again, it's his car, and he gets to decide.
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't think that's what I reasonable person would think. Perhaps a reasonable and well informed person. But the general public doesn't know anything about wireless security. They simply know to "plug and play" and when they do they leave the environment open. Does that mean that they want and expect anyone other than themselves to use that network? I don't think so. I just think they're ignorant.
Personally, I think the guy knew he was doing something wrong when he tried to hide what he was doing, and he should have been arrested.
If you want to know where I agree with you, it's that the current distribution mechanism (monopoly) is not efficient, and should be replaced by one that is more efficient. Where I disagree is that a socialist replacement would be good. It won't work any better than monopoly. And there are reasons to believe that it would work worse. You (and the OP) seem to have an assumption that the relationship between consumers and producers can be optimally managed by a central authority. I don't believe that it can. And the resulting inefficiency will be of detriment to society as a whole.
The incentive of the consumer is not the only incentive. And it's not really the incentive that's going to cause the most problems. You should be concerned about the incentive of the producer. In the system that was proposed, the producers of content won't need to respond to the consumers. The consumers will get as much they want whenever they want it. And the producers will get paid whether it's of good quality or bad quality. Why? Because they will argue to the 3rd party that the consumers are consuming their in increasing amounts. They must be satisfied with the quality level. Ever decreasing quality is what will result.When a producer doesn't have the oppurtunity to scale profits based on the popularity of their product, they will move most of their effort to producing something that does scale on popularity. Why? Because producers are trying to maximize their profitability. That can be achieved by working on quality where it's required in order to continue to sell a product. There is no incentive for the consumers to stop consuming. They're not paying for anything anyway. Hence they can't take away profits by refusing to consume. Hence the producers can (and will) produce without concern for quality.
You may be right that the cost will fall to zero, but what will also happen is that the quality will also fall to zero while the earnings of the producers remain contsant. This is broken specifically because the relationship between the consumer and the producer is broken and managed by a 3rd party. A much better way to deal with this is to leave out the 3rd party and let consumers and producers decide between themselves whether or not to trade.
That we have a government that's already instituted socialism into our society does not justify continuing to do so. What matters is how well it works. Socialism doesn't work. I refer you to my previously linked artciles on why it fails.Perhaps I'm missing something. If so, please expound. But to me it looks like this will cause many more problems than it solves.
$.02
But that's not all. The consumer of {movies,music,software} will perceive it as free. As a consequence they'll consume more of it than they would if they had to pay for it. This will lead to escalating costs for everyone.
I think it will create many times more problems than the single problem it might solve.All true, and brilliantly presented. But the other side of the coin is that you don't have to be a home theater geek in order to enjoy the same movie experience. I can pay $9.50 to see a movie every once in a while in its full glory. Or I could pay $6000 in order to enjoy every movie in it's full glory.
Generally speaking, I choose the occasional trip to the theater for the much lower price.
That's how it was taken.
Yes. Libertarian. And it appears that we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'll even let you have the last word by not responding to any of the comments in your last post! That doesn't mean I agree with them, but I'll be happy to let them go unchallenged.
Cheers!
My point is this: if you want something fine. Pay for it. As soon as you fund it with taxes, you're forcing someone else to pay for it who doesn't want it. It doesn't matter what the thing is. It could be a park or a road or a library or wifi. Forcing someone else to pay for something that you want is theft. And it doesn't matter that we've elected people to engage in this activity. It doesn't matter whether one person takes your money without your permission or 51% of the population takes your money. Both are theft. That is how representative government works. But theft is still wrong. Moreover it's not effective. Forcing someone to pay for something that you want means that they're not free to pay for only the things that they want. Multiply this by a community and businesses that might be sustained because there's a population that wants their services can't run. Instead we have things that only some of the people want, but aren't willing to pay for on their own. On the whole, the community is poorer because they've replaced a profitable business with a publically funded project.
This might be tolerable if the public provision of things was efficient. But it's not. The government is the highest cost producer. If we minimize the amount of money we send to the governemnt, we're all richer. Additionally, the illusion of a free lunch results in over consumption. That's not a good thing when it comes to shared internet access.
I could be wrong about this next part, but I predict that any municipality that implements a taxation subsidized wireless network, will soon start complaining about
- insufficient bandwidth
- the unreliability of the infrastructure, and
- the especially high cost.
Especially after all of the for profit wifi providers have left town.I can easily agree with your position. I don't care if the muni provides the service as long as it's fully funded through fees charged for the service. Which means no taxation, and no bonds (which are just a form of deferred taxation).
Right. This is why I disagree with this type of abuse of eminent domain.
First thing, I'm not convinced that I am not allowed to rip those cables out of my lawn. There are certain boundaries up to which, I do not have property rights. But I don't know for certain that I can't do just what you said. Not that I'm planning on ripping out these cables at any point.
In any case, I would argue that when I built my house, I did in fact pay to lay those cables. That was part of the construction costs of my house and included in the final cost of my purchase.
But this is a tangent to the discussion.
This is not really relavent to the current discussion. For the purposes of this discussion, those cables being on your land are just there. They provide you potential which you are not forced to pay for.
But to your point, I think that the abuse of eminent domain is a problem. And the mixing of the public and private sector makes the cable company and the telco not ideal examples of a totally private venture.
I couldn't have said it better.
The only thing I would have added is that the only reason that there's only one cable company is as a result of the municipality restricting competition through right of way. So the local cable company is not a good example of a totally private enterprise.
Now it's true that economic power doesn't make everyone happy. But it's quite a bit better than only 50%.
The growth of the electronics industry certainly did come about as a result of widespread delivery of electricity. But you don't know what hidden costs came along with it. You can see what happened, but you can't see what didn't happen. The growth of the electronics industry came at the cost of some other industry. And you don't know whether or not the electronics industry wouldn't have happened anyway if done entirely privately. In which case you'd have both the electronics industry and this other industry that was lost. But now we have lost that other industry and are that much poorer.
The same is true with subsidized wireless. We take away some other industry in order to promote wireless. You see the benefit of wireless, but you don't know what other industry suffers because of it. You don't know how an entire population of people might have spent their money if they hadn't been forced to pay for it in taxes to subsidize wireless.
Personally, I find Bastiat and Hazlitt's argument completely convincing. But in the name of fairness, I should mention that there is another interpretation. That of John Maynard Keynes. It's fairly well discussed in this wikipedia entry. I disagree with it. In order to agree with Keynes, you have to believe that it's economically productive to pay someone to dig a hole, just to pay them again to fill it back up. I can't agree with that so I dismiss Keynes.
Let's illustrate this with an example. Imagine a Texas municipality decides to implement broadband. Let's even say that they hold a referrendum to determine whether or not to do it. 75% of the population decides they want it. The problem is that 100% of the population gets taxed to pay for it. Those 25% who voted against it are just plain screwed - they're paying for a service that they didn't want.
But it doesn't end there. Because the service is being subsidised through taxation by those who don't want or need the service, the muni based wireless can offer the overall service for cheaper to the general population? A private company can't get force a community to use a service that they don't want. But the muni can. The result is that private business can't complete because their cost structure doesn't include 25% of their customers who don't use the service. The result: competition is squashed.
If this weren't the city government, we'd all be screaming "Monopoly". And correctly so, because the government is exactly that: a monopoly with the power to extract monopoly prices by forcing payment for a service even if that service isn't delivered to you. Forcing someone to be a customer is generally going to result in expensive and crappy service.
I really don't understand why the
I don't like heuristic systems (e.g. spamassassin). When they produce a false positive, no one knows. Neither the sender nor the recipient knows that a legit email has been incorrectly identified (see note below). With greylisting and C/R, this doesn't happen. In both cases, the system notifies one or the other party that the email was NOT delivered. That's a good thing.
NOTE: It's certainly possible for someone to know when spamassassin mis-id's a legit email as spam. But it requires one of two things, either the recipient must occasionally scan his/her spam folder looking for false positives, or the sender must be notified that the email wasn't delivered. In the former case, if you're going to scan all of your spam anyway, why have any spam protection at all. In the latter case, this is functionally equivalent to C/R.
$.02
I know that this is going to start a religious flame war. And I apologize in advance. But since I started using challenge/response (specifically TMDA) I just don't care. I give anyone my email whenever they want. I register on websites with an address that expires. So it works for long enough for them to send whatever it is that I need from them and then stops working after that.
/.
Do I still get spam? Yes. The 419 scammers can get through. I see one of them once every 6 months or so. I just blacklist them. 2 spams a year is much easier to deal with than 12000. Do I see automated spam? Nope. Haven't seen one of those in my mailbox since 2001.
IMHO, C/R is the best tool that I've seen to allow me to not worry about giving out my email address to others. I wish there was a way in which we could create a small experiment on the internet in which everyone used C/R, and see what happened to spam. My prediction: it would disappear. And when that happened, no one would be afraid to give out their email address. No one would be worried about companies leaking their email addresses. This story would not be interesting enough to make the front page of
(FWIW, I fully understand the argument that says that C/R is bad. I do not agree with it's accuracy nor it's validity. I'm happy to argue about the merits of C/R, but recognize that a lot of these arguments have been addressed by TMDA and other well behaved C/R.)
Was it just me or did anyone else finish that sentence with, "our javascript overlords" or some other such permutation?
I might watch too much of The Simpsons.
Right. And I take little comfort in w00t getting 3rd considering that I've never ever - not even once - heard anyone say "confuzzled".
Somehow to me, this seems like placing 3rd in a 1 person race.
Paul Graham has a different idea. He thinks that some kids should consider the educational advantage you'd get from starting a business instead of going to college. Especially kids with interest in technology. It sounds like Paul was making a suggestion, but I wonder if he's actually describing something that's already happening.
No. My code is GPL. They can't use it unless they compensate me with their code. If I licensed my code under BSD, then you'd be correct. I gave them permission to use my code; I can't complain after the fact that they did. But (like I said) I release under GPL.
The "compensation" that you mention is insufficient to me. The price for my code is your code (or something else that we've negotiated). If you don't like my price, don't buy.And it doesn't matter that some compensation already exists. In exactly the same way that it doesn't matter to some guy selling his car if you show up with a crisp $100 bill and expect him to give you the car. You may think his price is too high and that you're giving him ample compensation, but it's his car and he gets to decide. You might even be right that $100 is a fair market price for the car. But again, it's his car, and he gets to decide.
Same thing for my code.