Where've you been for the last ten years? People already do this 90% of the time;)
I'm serious- how do you think Windows and Office got so established? How do you think file formats like Microsoft Publisher get established? The data goes around, and woops! Recipient hasn't got the program! No problem *copy*
Joe Sixpack is ALL about giving a copy of his new game to his drinking buddy. That's the natural tendency. If we had star trek replicators, he'd be doing the same thing with new beers, or funny T-shirts.
If anything, people need to be more awake to the fact that current conditions are moving towards more of a climate of fear around this activity. For years, things have been so loose that most people just unthinkingly pool and copy their software whenever it's convenient.
I believe that programmers like you and the software industry at large need to be competed with, or you get lazy and sit on your butts, spending all day figuring out copy protect schemes rather than writing better code.
I believe that even when competed with and forced to really work, you're not better than free software coders- you're just making more money at it, which is your privilege.
And I believe that if it's gotta be one or the other, maybe the world would be a better place if you DID find a new line of work, and never coded again (except, of course, when YOU had something YOU wanted done)- as opposed to if the world of software development was just guys like you, guarding their turf jealously.
So- sure! Go find a new line of work, just in case. Unfortunately for you, there are people who are just as good as you are, coding for ideological reasons rather than for money. If this does you in... oops.
Ok, put a third-party software CD in the drive, select "install", have the software install with minimal user intervention, and place shortcuts automatically in the root menu.
Coolness. Can we install a key logger, a web browsing surveillance tool that phones home to the vendor's systems, and a pseudo-P2P distributed computing system to sell to third parties, topping it off with a copy protection system that gets paranoid and reformats the hard drive if it thinks you've warezed the company's product or altered it to get rid of the distributed computing deal?
Methinks you are a little unclear on the concept, here, in failing to see how the paradigm you prefer (demand!) establishes fertile ground for abuses like these.
You're entitled to your opinion but it IS an opinion. It's not necessarily true that RMS is too radical. In some ways he takes just the right tone- certainly has had plenty of practice. I don't forsee him changing course anytime soon.
Think of it like this: suppose you have a weather report, in ancient Rome. Vesuvius erupts. *BOOOM!*
If you want to deny that Vesuvius even erupted at all, fine, that's up to you.
If you acknowledge that Vesuvius erupted, it is NOT PROPER to have the weather report be 'Weather today is gonna be kind of bad', even if that would be the moderate way to announce it.
Years ago, the news guy Dan Rather was just starting out, and was involved in the first television broadcast of satellite pictures of a hurricane, live. Nobody had ever done this before, and there was concern that the footage (technically possible) would cause panic and hysteria. Rather's take on it was that alerting people was always a problem, and he claims to have used the old army anecdote of whacking a mule over the head with a two-by-four: 'first you have to get their attention'. The hurricane footage was their two-by-four.
Well, with the DMCA affecting countries around the world, with Fritz Hollings' legislation in the system being chewed over, with every imaginable techie concern going to hell, we have a problem. We have an emergency. And RMS can be our two-by-four. It would be a terrible mistake to try to take a moderate, non-alarming tone when we are faced with an emergency. We have to get 'their attention'. We can be moderate AFTER we have some safety...
There have been experiments where people were given 'prism glasses' that reversed the image. After some weeks (?) of great awkwardness, their brains ALTERED to see in reverse too, and they saw out of the glasses as normal.
Then when the experiment ended and the glasses came off...
That's right. ANOTHER couple weeks of helplessness, this time to re-adapt to the natural condition.
This guy may be exaggerating but it's not totally ludicrous. Perhaps his techie stuff really did remap his visual fields and brain functioning to a significant extent. We only have his opinion on that, and it might not be honest.
The question then becomes- do you allow people to do harm to their brains to adapt to cybernetic enhancements?
What is NOT up for debate is that this adaptation happens- to more or less of an extent. If you can remap the visual cortex to reverse images, that tells you a lot about what's possible for unceasing exposure to an unnatural situation- just like this guy's been inflicting on himself.
Don't we already know what their open source strategy is?
Embrace and extend. What else? Or were you wondering what their strategy should be if they did NOT want to dominate the whole freaking world? That's kind of academic.
In fact, the strategy they have is a damned good one. It'll be even better if nobody clues to it in time, which is why I particularly delight in outing it here. This is my interpretation, and they may possibly phrase it differently- or not. Maybe in the NEXT antitrust fiasco this will come to light.
MICROSOFT'S OPEN SOURCE STRATEGY
Come up with a license and call it an open source license
Release a bunch of source under this license
Have the license be VIRAL, in that it propagates a specific legal point that can't be removed, like the GPL propagates the ability to sublicense.
Instead of virally spreading ability to sublicense, have the viral-propagated clause be an admission that the developer remembers copyrighted information from the 'shared source', and an acknowledgement that the developer does not have rights to use the copyrighted information.
Further include a term that defuses the use of patent protection in self-defense.
Attempt to get this viral license adopted, and the code seen, by as many open source developers as possible.
Sue every open source project that's a threat, on the grounds that they are using 'shared source' in defiance of the terms of the licensing agreement, and are therefore in copyright/patent infringement.
Using the terms of the shared source license, establish that people who've agreed to it legally acknowledge that they are remembering concepts from shared source and are furthermore aware that they're not allowed to make use of them outside of shared source.
Using this acknowledgement, require the developers (of any major open source project) to prove their innocence of copyright/patent infringement from a presumption of guilt already established with the admission in the previous step.
Win, or draw, or just bankrupt the other side using these interesting complications, trying wherever possible to completely prohibit commercial or noncommercial use of the disputed open source code, on the grounds that it is pure thievery.
Now- after an initial waiting period during which you get the shared source seen and used by as many developers as possible, take all that and think big: sue EVERY open source project at once along these lines. Throw money at the problem and try to get pretty much all of the open source ground absolutely scorched so there's no chance of anyone freely cooperating to develop any such threat again..
Keep pumping Shared Source into the schools all the while, to guard against future outbreaks.
This. Is. What. They. Are. Doing.
Note that it plays to their strengths, including the strengths they've learned in the antitrust trial, of barratrous lawsuits and dragging things out endlessly, and note the brilliance of embracing and extending, not the openness of collaboration, but the concept of a viral license. This is brilliant conceptual work on their part, it really is.
But it does not have to succeed- because they really need people who are KNOWN to have agreed to their license. They can't really go around suing everyone who writes open source and dragging them into court and saying, "You DID agree to the Shared Source license, didn't you? Everybody does! You had to have!". That won't fly- people who can legitimately say they've never agreed to that license are in a position of strength.
However, people who have in fact agreed to their viral Shared Source license, EVER, are fucked. And can never be allowed to participate in open source or free software development- because of the legal exposure.
Given this state of affairs, why would Microsoft ever need to find another open source strategy? This is unquestionably the best one for their goals. Yes, it's evil. And your point is?
Yes, in that news.com has increasingly taken to loading the 'tech news' page and then immediately loading some sort of CNET corporate umbrella page right after, taking away the desired page. (I suppose on IE it opens another page or tab or something...)
So, news.com.com is now the proper bookmark for what used to be www.news.com, God knows why.
The thing is, Microsoft are just as geeky as the Slashdot crowd. This could be their downfall. They honestly believe that they can have as much bad faith as you could imagine, scorn the legal system and say 'HA! You didn't say Simon Says!' and get away with absolutely anything.
This is not quite true. It'll work up to a point, but then stop working. They nearly got nailed for this with Judge Jackson, but he vented his feelings outside the courtroom and they got to go HA! again. Now they feel that's a law of nature. They are mistaken.
My own favorite bit was when, after years of legal problems beginning with the per-CPU licensing, they are now using the terms of the 'Seattlement' to force the OEMs into- per-PC licensing. Literally, the OEM pays for Windows on every PC whether they include it or not. And Microsoft considers this perfectly fine, because to them the issue is IE, or modularity, or ANYTHING other than a consideration of their patterns of behavior.
They really can't keep doing that forever. The rest of the world are not geeks, to believe themselves stymied on a technicality. The rest of the world is inclined to give them a spanking.
"Given that water is free, how can Evian sell bottled water?"
"Um, no, since land and natural resources have largely been privatized (read: made subject to private property), the only water that is "free" is water that is on land you own. The other water you get you pay for (e.g. with taxes to a city water system)."
*BOOOOOM**tsssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh*
Paid for your umbrella too, Sparky?:)
Well now that's interesting, because Orrin Hatch is not happy about what happened to the DMCA he helped to create, and he has NO love for the entertainment industry. This is the guy who has been in support of Napster. I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that he would support this in any way.
Rather nice that no matter who ends up in the control position, they don't trust the entertainment industry (they'll take the money, but it doesn't guarantee 'results', evidently)
You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft's copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.
That is the clause that would permit Microsoft to harass pretty much anyone working in open source code who's seen their 'shared source' to barratrous lawsuits.
You are correct that nothing in there prohibits a Linux port of what they do. That is because they've come up with a provision that is the anti-GPL: in agreeing to their license you specifically acknowledge that you are using remembered ideas from their Shared Source, and further acknowledge that you do not have any rights to such ideas.
That is a legal slamdunk: given such an admission, a simple lawsuit could shut down any open or free project taking place legally and openly. That includes the Linux kernel itself.
Microsoft have come up with their own viral approach, but in this case rather than virally spreading a license provision that mandates the ability to sublicense, they are virally spreading a license provision that mandates an admission of vulnerability to legal attack.
It is hard to properly express how dangerous this could be in the hands of a corporate entity that can afford more legal armament than the United States Government...
Hang on- stop thinking like a geek and start thinking like a lawyer. MS lawyers will be!:D
(1) anything can be a patent. You are not in any sense protecting yourself from being sued and shut down on the grounds of patent infringement or even copyright infringement. You've been tricked: this is a smokescreen. It says right up front: "You may use any ideas in intangible form. HOWEVER- not! ahahahaha!"
How is it that 'you may use this copyrighted idea in intangible form, except it doesn't give you copyright or any right to use the idea' is safe?
(2) since anything can be a patent, it is just as possible for YOU to look at this stuff, also file for patents on it, and the patent office may just take your money and give you a patent too. This would set up a conflicting patent lawsuit. Except- that 'odd provision' is nothing of the sort. It is a very neatly placed bomb to take you out should you manage to get patent protection for your own stuff in turn. Using this, Microsoft can not only sue you, but strip you of a second layer of defense you might have tried to get. This possibly could work well in the context of a patent challenge to get your patent overturned, on the grounds that it derives from Microsoft patents and copyrights, which, surprise, you stole! Stole since you no longer have a license to do anything with this stuff at all...
I'm sorry: you're wrong. Even looking at this stuff is VERY BAD. This is as devious as music business contracts, and you're being fooled. If you have looked at this stuff, please do not so much as touch anyone else's open source code... you can still produce your own, mind you, as long as everyone involved is firmly aware that the entire project can be rendered illegal anytime Microsoft wants. Hell, even if you were doing a project and taking out PATENTS on it, you could still be stripped of it anytime Microsoft wants.
Microsoft's market capitalisation being almost twenty times IBM's on a tenth of the revenues and profits means that somebody is being a fscking idiot. Using tax laws and revenues to sustain this does not change the underlying situation in any way.
200 times the valuation relative to earnings means a bubble- a SPECULATIVE bubble. The worth of the actual company has nothing to do with it- we are talking about investment behavior, and there really is no way out of this other than a run on the stock when it crashes. It can't go forever- even if everyone on the PLANET eventually became an amway distributor oops I mean a MS stockholder (they almost are already, what with pension plans and all), it would hit a point where no further growth was possible- at say 2000 times the valuation relative to earnings- and boom. Actually, I'm surprised it's got this far... I'd bet money they can't reach 500 times IBM's value/earnings ratio. It's astonishing they even got to 200 times the value of IBM without the bubble bursting. Are people completely crazy to swallow that one?
All those who still believe in dot-com stocks even now, carry on. Everyone else- get the hell out of Microsoft stock and anything you do that is predicated on Microsoft stock! That includes pension plans and such things- that or give up on them, as they are going to be bankrupt.
Speaking as someone designing and manufacturing a relatively SMALL physical device (a guitar preamplifier for recording), I can walk about eight feet from where I'm sitting and look at hundreds of dollars of parts that turned out to be slightly off-spec or no longer relevant to new revisions of the design.
You are wrong that it's the same as software. If I code up some subroutine and it's not right, I don't have a pile of deprecated parts stacked up somewhere.
Mind you, if you are supporting software patents, I see your point- because you're trying to set up a situation where I can end up with a pile of purchased INTELLECTUAL property that was slightly off-spec or didn't end up fitting the design! I could end up having had to pay for intangible ideas, spending money just to TRY OUT a software design, and then ending up with a pile of NOTHING for my money, rather than a pile of surplus parts.
You will forgive me for not being enthusiastic about this prospect...
Um... this is Windows Media. What on earth gives you the idea it's not going to expire next week? Ask yourself why Warner _isn't_ using mp3 for this...
I don't know who modded that 'insightful', but there are some really serious problems with your context here, which you're not even mentioning or noticing.
You are behaving as if the 'software world' was entirely confined to people legally authoring programs and buying them in an exchange of goods and services.
That is not an acceptable definition.
Software can also be viewed as a form of communication of ideas, and this is where your context really becomes harshly inadequate to express reality. In your view, if for instance Microsoft succeeded in passing legislation that OUTLAWED anything but Microsoft software (or outlawed every form of 'OSS'), everywhere in the world, they would 'win'. That would be the rules: if it was against the rules even to exist as an OSS producer, MS would 'win'.
However, EVEN IN THIS EXAMPLE, your context is inadequate. The idea is restrictive and distressing enough that large numbers of people would continue using and producing OSS- indeed, the tighter the screws are turned, the more a 'sympathy' or 'conscience' vote would turn up, people intentionally supporting OSS BECAUSE it is severely challenged.
You are wrong- Microsoft cannot win, in reality. Only in your reality can it win- and in that case, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock akin to the aristocracy in the French Revolution. "But they can't DO that! It's against the rules!"
Yeah, and to be a good boy he has to not REMEMBER the songs if he sells his CDs;)
No, wait, he can remember them but he has to remember them WRONG.
No, wait, if that was OK then keeping mp3s of the music would be OK, because that is certainly remembering the CD tracks wrong- in some cases like with the Xing encoder, severely wrong. So he can't remember the tunes at all.
Next up, Captain Cyborg has his brain ripped out by RIAA security guards because he is remembering CDs he sold, and can't give a good answer on where he stops and his implants begin...
Only because they are brilliant, dedicated, invented the damned personal computer market in the first place, did all the heavy lifting for establishing GUI, fought like rabid weasels to build an Apple community which itself has fought like rabid weasels unceasingly for almost 20 years to get...
...what, five percent of the home computer market?
All that, constant stunning feats of technical imagination like the fanless iMac, the 'Luxo' flatscreen iMac, desktop filmmaking, object-oriented integrated internet access (Cyberdog: that one Microsoft _specifically_ snuffed. After talks with Jobs, the whole project was dumped AFTER it was released and had a following), and they're only running in place, when by all rights they should be Coke to MS's Pepsi.
This is about monopoly maintenance. It is NOT A MARKET and has not been one for many, many years...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm serious- how do you think Windows and Office got so established? How do you think file formats like Microsoft Publisher get established? The data goes around, and woops! Recipient hasn't got the program! No problem *copy*
Joe Sixpack is ALL about giving a copy of his new game to his drinking buddy. That's the natural tendency. If we had star trek replicators, he'd be doing the same thing with new beers, or funny T-shirts.
If anything, people need to be more awake to the fact that current conditions are moving towards more of a climate of fear around this activity. For years, things have been so loose that most people just unthinkingly pool and copy their software whenever it's convenient.
No, I don't.
I believe that programmers like you and the software industry at large need to be competed with, or you get lazy and sit on your butts, spending all day figuring out copy protect schemes rather than writing better code.
I believe that even when competed with and forced to really work, you're not better than free software coders- you're just making more money at it, which is your privilege.
And I believe that if it's gotta be one or the other, maybe the world would be a better place if you DID find a new line of work, and never coded again (except, of course, when YOU had something YOU wanted done)- as opposed to if the world of software development was just guys like you, guarding their turf jealously.
So- sure! Go find a new line of work, just in case. Unfortunately for you, there are people who are just as good as you are, coding for ideological reasons rather than for money. If this does you in... oops.
Coolness. Can we install a key logger, a web browsing surveillance tool that phones home to the vendor's systems, and a pseudo-P2P distributed computing system to sell to third parties, topping it off with a copy protection system that gets paranoid and reformats the hard drive if it thinks you've warezed the company's product or altered it to get rid of the distributed computing deal?
Methinks you are a little unclear on the concept, here, in failing to see how the paradigm you prefer (demand!) establishes fertile ground for abuses like these.
Think of it like this: suppose you have a weather report, in ancient Rome. Vesuvius erupts. *BOOOM!*
If you want to deny that Vesuvius even erupted at all, fine, that's up to you.
If you acknowledge that Vesuvius erupted, it is NOT PROPER to have the weather report be 'Weather today is gonna be kind of bad', even if that would be the moderate way to announce it.
Years ago, the news guy Dan Rather was just starting out, and was involved in the first television broadcast of satellite pictures of a hurricane, live. Nobody had ever done this before, and there was concern that the footage (technically possible) would cause panic and hysteria. Rather's take on it was that alerting people was always a problem, and he claims to have used the old army anecdote of whacking a mule over the head with a two-by-four: 'first you have to get their attention'. The hurricane footage was their two-by-four.
Well, with the DMCA affecting countries around the world, with Fritz Hollings' legislation in the system being chewed over, with every imaginable techie concern going to hell, we have a problem. We have an emergency. And RMS can be our two-by-four. It would be a terrible mistake to try to take a moderate, non-alarming tone when we are faced with an emergency. We have to get 'their attention'. We can be moderate AFTER we have some safety...
Then when the experiment ended and the glasses came off...
That's right. ANOTHER couple weeks of helplessness, this time to re-adapt to the natural condition.
This guy may be exaggerating but it's not totally ludicrous. Perhaps his techie stuff really did remap his visual fields and brain functioning to a significant extent. We only have his opinion on that, and it might not be honest.
The question then becomes- do you allow people to do harm to their brains to adapt to cybernetic enhancements?
What is NOT up for debate is that this adaptation happens- to more or less of an extent. If you can remap the visual cortex to reverse images, that tells you a lot about what's possible for unceasing exposure to an unnatural situation- just like this guy's been inflicting on himself.
Embrace and extend. What else? Or were you wondering what their strategy should be if they did NOT want to dominate the whole freaking world? That's kind of academic.
In fact, the strategy they have is a damned good one. It'll be even better if nobody clues to it in time, which is why I particularly delight in outing it here. This is my interpretation, and they may possibly phrase it differently- or not. Maybe in the NEXT antitrust fiasco this will come to light.
MICROSOFT'S OPEN SOURCE STRATEGY
This. Is. What. They. Are. Doing.
Note that it plays to their strengths, including the strengths they've learned in the antitrust trial, of barratrous lawsuits and dragging things out endlessly, and note the brilliance of embracing and extending, not the openness of collaboration, but the concept of a viral license. This is brilliant conceptual work on their part, it really is.
But it does not have to succeed- because they really need people who are KNOWN to have agreed to their license. They can't really go around suing everyone who writes open source and dragging them into court and saying, "You DID agree to the Shared Source license, didn't you? Everybody does! You had to have!". That won't fly- people who can legitimately say they've never agreed to that license are in a position of strength.
However, people who have in fact agreed to their viral Shared Source license, EVER, are fucked. And can never be allowed to participate in open source or free software development- because of the legal exposure.
Given this state of affairs, why would Microsoft ever need to find another open source strategy? This is unquestionably the best one for their goals. Yes, it's evil. And your point is?
When they do, can they send US some please? :P
O_O
So, news.com.com is now the proper bookmark for what used to be www.news.com, God knows why.
This is not quite true. It'll work up to a point, but then stop working. They nearly got nailed for this with Judge Jackson, but he vented his feelings outside the courtroom and they got to go HA! again. Now they feel that's a law of nature. They are mistaken.
My own favorite bit was when, after years of legal problems beginning with the per-CPU licensing, they are now using the terms of the 'Seattlement' to force the OEMs into- per-PC licensing. Literally, the OEM pays for Windows on every PC whether they include it or not. And Microsoft considers this perfectly fine, because to them the issue is IE, or modularity, or ANYTHING other than a consideration of their patterns of behavior.
They really can't keep doing that forever. The rest of the world are not geeks, to believe themselves stymied on a technicality. The rest of the world is inclined to give them a spanking.
"Um, no, since land and natural resources have largely been privatized (read: made subject to private property), the only water that is "free" is water that is on land you own. The other water you get you pay for (e.g. with taxes to a city water system)."
*BOOOOOM* *tsssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh* Paid for your umbrella too, Sparky? :)
I say we take over the Greens :D
Rather nice that no matter who ends up in the control position, they don't trust the entertainment industry (they'll take the money, but it doesn't guarantee 'results', evidently)
That is the clause that would permit Microsoft to harass pretty much anyone working in open source code who's seen their 'shared source' to barratrous lawsuits.
You are correct that nothing in there prohibits a Linux port of what they do. That is because they've come up with a provision that is the anti-GPL: in agreeing to their license you specifically acknowledge that you are using remembered ideas from their Shared Source, and further acknowledge that you do not have any rights to such ideas.
That is a legal slamdunk: given such an admission, a simple lawsuit could shut down any open or free project taking place legally and openly. That includes the Linux kernel itself.
Microsoft have come up with their own viral approach, but in this case rather than virally spreading a license provision that mandates the ability to sublicense, they are virally spreading a license provision that mandates an admission of vulnerability to legal attack.
It is hard to properly express how dangerous this could be in the hands of a corporate entity that can afford more legal armament than the United States Government...
(1) anything can be a patent. You are not in any sense protecting yourself from being sued and shut down on the grounds of patent infringement or even copyright infringement. You've been tricked: this is a smokescreen. It says right up front: "You may use any ideas in intangible form. HOWEVER- not! ahahahaha!"
How is it that 'you may use this copyrighted idea in intangible form, except it doesn't give you copyright or any right to use the idea' is safe? (2) since anything can be a patent, it is just as possible for YOU to look at this stuff, also file for patents on it, and the patent office may just take your money and give you a patent too. This would set up a conflicting patent lawsuit. Except- that 'odd provision' is nothing of the sort. It is a very neatly placed bomb to take you out should you manage to get patent protection for your own stuff in turn. Using this, Microsoft can not only sue you, but strip you of a second layer of defense you might have tried to get. This possibly could work well in the context of a patent challenge to get your patent overturned, on the grounds that it derives from Microsoft patents and copyrights, which, surprise, you stole! Stole since you no longer have a license to do anything with this stuff at all...
I'm sorry: you're wrong. Even looking at this stuff is VERY BAD. This is as devious as music business contracts, and you're being fooled. If you have looked at this stuff, please do not so much as touch anyone else's open source code... you can still produce your own, mind you, as long as everyone involved is firmly aware that the entire project can be rendered illegal anytime Microsoft wants. Hell, even if you were doing a project and taking out PATENTS on it, you could still be stripped of it anytime Microsoft wants.
Don't take the bait!
200 times the valuation relative to earnings means a bubble- a SPECULATIVE bubble. The worth of the actual company has nothing to do with it- we are talking about investment behavior, and there really is no way out of this other than a run on the stock when it crashes. It can't go forever- even if everyone on the PLANET eventually became an amway distributor oops I mean a MS stockholder (they almost are already, what with pension plans and all), it would hit a point where no further growth was possible- at say 2000 times the valuation relative to earnings- and boom. Actually, I'm surprised it's got this far... I'd bet money they can't reach 500 times IBM's value/earnings ratio. It's astonishing they even got to 200 times the value of IBM without the bubble bursting. Are people completely crazy to swallow that one?
All those who still believe in dot-com stocks even now, carry on. Everyone else- get the hell out of Microsoft stock and anything you do that is predicated on Microsoft stock! That includes pension plans and such things- that or give up on them, as they are going to be bankrupt.
Speculative bubbles ARE NOT FOREVER. Okay?
Is it me or did they top off the pref-unsetting experience by rewarding me with a pop-under? :P
Oops, sorry- for a second there I imagined Microsoft would care about telling obvious lies :)
MacOSX is a Unix.
You are wrong that it's the same as software. If I code up some subroutine and it's not right, I don't have a pile of deprecated parts stacked up somewhere.
Mind you, if you are supporting software patents, I see your point- because you're trying to set up a situation where I can end up with a pile of purchased INTELLECTUAL property that was slightly off-spec or didn't end up fitting the design! I could end up having had to pay for intangible ideas, spending money just to TRY OUT a software design, and then ending up with a pile of NOTHING for my money, rather than a pile of surplus parts.
You will forgive me for not being enthusiastic about this prospect...
Um... this is Windows Media. What on earth gives you the idea it's not going to expire next week? Ask yourself why Warner _isn't_ using mp3 for this...
I don't know who modded that 'insightful', but there are some really serious problems with your context here, which you're not even mentioning or noticing.
You are behaving as if the 'software world' was entirely confined to people legally authoring programs and buying them in an exchange of goods and services.
That is not an acceptable definition.
Software can also be viewed as a form of communication of ideas, and this is where your context really becomes harshly inadequate to express reality. In your view, if for instance Microsoft succeeded in passing legislation that OUTLAWED anything but Microsoft software (or outlawed every form of 'OSS'), everywhere in the world, they would 'win'. That would be the rules: if it was against the rules even to exist as an OSS producer, MS would 'win'.
However, EVEN IN THIS EXAMPLE, your context is inadequate. The idea is restrictive and distressing enough that large numbers of people would continue using and producing OSS- indeed, the tighter the screws are turned, the more a 'sympathy' or 'conscience' vote would turn up, people intentionally supporting OSS BECAUSE it is severely challenged.
You are wrong- Microsoft cannot win, in reality. Only in your reality can it win- and in that case, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock akin to the aristocracy in the French Revolution. "But they can't DO that! It's against the rules!"
Oh yeah? Watch us.
No, wait, he can remember them but he has to remember them WRONG.
No, wait, if that was OK then keeping mp3s of the music would be OK, because that is certainly remembering the CD tracks wrong- in some cases like with the Xing encoder, severely wrong. So he can't remember the tunes at all.
Next up, Captain Cyborg has his brain ripped out by RIAA security guards because he is remembering CDs he sold, and can't give a good answer on where he stops and his implants begin...
All that, constant stunning feats of technical imagination like the fanless iMac, the 'Luxo' flatscreen iMac, desktop filmmaking, object-oriented integrated internet access (Cyberdog: that one Microsoft _specifically_ snuffed. After talks with Jobs, the whole project was dumped AFTER it was released and had a following), and they're only running in place, when by all rights they should be Coke to MS's Pepsi.
This is about monopoly maintenance. It is NOT A MARKET and has not been one for many, many years...