The GPL is for extending to _every_ end user the CAPACITY to become another coder or distributor. Without exception. To free software there is NO such thing as an 'end user' distinct from a developer. This is a sharp difference from proprietary software, to say the least...
For that reason, the GPL applies to the end user in the sense that, at ANY point the end user can become a developer or distributor, with no further authorization than the GPL itself. Any or all end users can do this and are encouraged to.
That's why this confusion arises: to the GPL and those who wrote it, there's no such thing as a passive end user. It is a philosophical distinction that rejects the idea of a 'consumer' and instead asserts that every person who comes in contact with the software may have something to offer and thus needs to be included in the licensing arrangement in case they feel like lending a hand.
So, it's true that you can use GPLed stuff all day without being bound by the terms of the GPL, just by not doing ANY activities that the GPL makes available to you- but to a large extent this misses the point, and more importantly you always have the _option_ of adding those activities and accepting the terms with which they're granted. At no point are you ever limited to 'consumer' interaction, no matter how stubbornly you avoid coding or distributing. Getting more involved is always an option, and if you do, the terms become relevant to your situation.
They said that?? They're lying. The usual advance is more like $2000. In some cases the record industry, seeing a new genre that might pose a threat to their cash cows (for instance, 'noise'- what I'm about to say is from an insider and is factual information), will send A&R reps out with contracts and 'sign' a lot of acts, at $2000 advances, with NO PROVISION FOR EVER RELEASING A RECORD. I am not making this up and it's not hypothetical- it happened in the 'industrial/noise' genre. A company signed a bunch of bands to contracts that didn't include actually releasing a record, to take them off the market and make sure nobody else had them. $2000 a pop, guaranteed zero sales, no record was EVER intended.
_Nobody_ gets $750,000. Hell, damned few get $75,000, including independent promo (bribes and payola).
I think I know where they got that. They took the _total_ payola they spent, which for the top few acts totals more than half their revenue... and divided it by their total number of acts to make it seem that they GAVE ARTISTS ADVANCES like that.
Lies, crap, bullshit, nonsense, deliberate deception, trickery, hype, more lies. Bullshit. Don't ever take these people at their word or believe what they seem to be suggesting.
Boy, do you have _that_ right! It's a good example of what happens. Now where's that -1 Offtopic? Surely comment about the mechanics of HOW THIS CAME ABOUT is far from the desired topic of bitching about the RIAA;)
I don't think anything like a GPL is necessary, not directly. Copyright means someone writing music owns it, and the big labels make sure that this is not compromised.
The only remaining concern is: if unsigned artists own the music they write (which they do), how do they get it played? And this is where the attention needs to be: internet access to unsigned musicians is a threat to the big labels because it could bleed off potential sales of Britney etc. Expect concerted efforts to eat up or destroy the internet services that offer music hosting (mp3.com is already done for- it is sold to Universal, and the contract has been changed under the artists' noses to a very dangerous one). Anything publically held is at risk: anything linked to the Big Five (like Farmclub) is like a 'honey trap', a snare for the unwary or stupid. It really is "take stuff off the market" land out there.
Yet, at the same time, the musicians are still out there, many with technical resources as good as what the majors use these days- and some of the internet sites are still there too. BeSonic is still there. Ampcast is not only still there, it's just gone live with its own CD order-fulfillment service. Some of these places (like Ampcast) are built on the mission of being an alternative rather than seizing the market: Ampcast's mission statement is all about being a useful indie alternative to the major labels, it's very informed of the cartel-like conditions that exist. More importantly, if Ampcast _did_ get taken over somehow (dunno how, it's not publically held and I'm not sure if it's even a corporation or holds stock), its contract continues to allow artists to bail out taking their music with them and taking the rights back- unlike mp3.com, where the place keeps a right to your stuff forever even if you bail.
The main thing is to keep the alternate routes alive. I feel the existing industry will go beyond the letter and spirit of the law in attempts to destroy even poorly-resourced, unpromoted indie musicians: for instance, I could imagine mp3s being made illegal through manipulating and paying off the government, and a new format decreed where you have to pay $60,000 to get one of the 12 licenses for generating the encrypted whatever-it-is. This is of course a shocking, extreme suggestion, but the point is that IT WOULD WORK as much as anything would (i.e. sort of...). Only the geekiest musicians would have the savvy or connections to be able to generate that format themselves through stolen encoders- and here's the BIG point- in doing so they would be BREAKING THE LAW! If the only public format is NOT a public format, you can't seek a public audience for your content unless you are legally allowed to generate the media.
That is the REAL killer: people burning bootleg CDs would be perfectly safe, but musicians with a legitimate reason to generate the format using their own content could be legally blocked from entering the market on the grounds of DMCA violation, illegal use of methods to circumvent copyright violation. It's the TOOLS that would land them in jail, their music would remain harmless and they'd have a right to it, but they would no longer have a right to put out their own media in the cartel-owned popular format.
Let's see to it that this never happens- continue to demand and support the original CD Audio (Red Book) format, because it is permissible to generate that without paying a controlling authority- and dare I say it, support mp3 despite Fraunhofer and the KNOWN legal problems with mp3. Something tells me Fraunhofer have their hands full with the problem of keeping their format relevant. Proposed alternatives could be much, much worse. Ideally we could switch to Ogg Vorbis: remains to be seen whether this can be practical. I hope so, mp3 is booby-trapped in a way that Red Book is not.
"Independent Promotion" means (and I quote/paraphrase from the words OF an independent promoter as reported IN 'Hit Men' which I own and have read with great interest), "Well, I understand you're wondering why you pay me so much money to get a record played. And you're wondering, is it really true that I can get a record played. But the question you need to be asking yourself is, can I STOP a record from being played?"
Did you think the music business was fair? That is where the money goes. The RIAA actually _is_ feeling the pinch, but this is because it's under the gun of independent promotion and has to pay protection money to get anything played on radio. That's the way it's been for decades, that's the way it is. That's also the reason indie internet musicians won't ever get on radio (and I think we shouldn't bother even trying- waste of energy).
At no point are we talking real advertising here. It's advertising the way Mob shakedowns are 'insurance'. Sure it's organised crime, your point?
Oh, and your figure for artist pay seems _very_ high- you're not counting the accounting tricks that get played (I can detail them if you like) and you're not counting recouping. In practice, artists don't get paid, they just get the label to take them into the studio without charging them directly and up-front. Even that's on the decline.
Re:GIMP has it's work cut out for it...
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GIMP And OS X
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What _version_ do they run? I run Photoshop 4 and can still do some things you can't do on the GIMP (can you import a PhotoCD image from YCC space into LAB colorspace and run an unsharp mask filter- or highpass- on the luminance channel alone? Don't try and outgeek a Photoshop GFX geek, you don't even know what you don't know... maybe the guys in your office are Photoshop lusers and don't know how to use it to its limit)
Oh, by the way, I _also_ write open source software- Free software, to be specific, GPL. So you should be _happy_ that there are people out there who know more about Photoshop than you do, because some of them are on your side- and in the long run, they will bring everything that they talk about to GIMP, or to some comparable program that will arise.
I wouldn't want to see GIMP evolve to match Photoshop 7 or 12 or whatever it's up to. I choose not to buy those for a REASON- they're bloated, less stable, too big. I'd like to see GIMP evolve to match Photoshop _4_. And while I can still use Photoshop 4 itself, when I move to OSX (as I'm eager to do, I like the concept), I won't have that as an option (not _native_). And that's when I'll be looking at what else is out there, and I suspect most of the options will be really dumb toys for lusers with digital cameras.
But there's always free software- meaning that if I have no other choice, I can _take_ something and Do It Myself.
Well, that's the thing- Photoshop is that entrenched. Why? Because _certain_ _versions_ of it have been phenomenally good, just fantastic. I think Photoshop 3 and 4 may have been the best in terms of being lean mean wildly capable programs.
Note that I'm not citing recenter versions! It's pretty widely accepted that there's been little for Adobe to DO anymore to the program, so they add pointless web crap that is irrelevant to the serious digital artist, and was always available by third party extensions anyway. In doing so, they lose some of the impressive focus Photoshop had.
Here's the deal: the GIMP is open source, but Photoshop is not. I'm not sure if the source for Photoshop 3 even exists, for instance- it's privately held and could have been discarded at some point. In order to take Photoshop to OSX, the only option is to take THE MOST RECENT one to OSX. Not some older better-loved version, but the feature creep version! This is a competitive disadvantage.
I would say that the GIMP needs to evolve a NATIVE Aqua version, or even a Cocoa version. Count on it, there's someone out there writing an OSX application like that, and it may eat both the GIMP's lunch and Photoshop's if done properly. You need it to not be a downgrade- for instance, Photoshop does internal calculations in LAB color (Luminance/A/B) which is a broader colorspace than RGB (If you don't understand that part, you're not competitive with Photoshop no matter how fast your app is- this is about writing the highest of high end digital bitmap editing, it's _specialized_). Those basics have to be in place or it's like running GNU apps on a windows kernel- unclear on the concept.
However, there is no reason whatsoever this can't be done. My personal suspicion is that Open Source and Free software will gradually, steadily overtake proprietary software, because software is functional ideas and cooperative idea-developing only needs continued new sources, which is happening, and time, which is passing.
So, this is only a bare beginning. I am delighted to see it happening!:)
You're assuming a society in which people are interacting with others familiar to them.
Human society outgrew that LONG ago.
Read some Desmond Morris with particular attention to the way in which human society grew from 'tribe' status, in which humans knew the vast majority of other humans they interacted with, to 'super-tribe' status, in which it's more often the case that you deal with people totally unknown to you.
This is hardly novel information- you're just not applying it, or choosing not to see it.
In the modern world (already!) and in the world of the future, most of your interactions are with strangers, and this is where your default assumptions break down, and why the original poster's theories do not hold in the real world.
They are based on a 'village' model in which people customarily have familiarity with, and free information about, those with which they do business.
That doesn't happen anymore- indeed, we have some parts of UCITA that would prohibit true information even being exchanged. Even if UCITA is struck down, the basic social reality is that the vast majority of people do business with strangers. Do you KNOW the waitress to whom you hand your credit card? The programmer who codes the back-end of your favorite website?
Please lose the naivete. The world is bigger than you know- and that's a reality that won't go away no matter how much you pretend you can be aware of everyone you interact with. It's basic sociology as applied to super-populations such as human beings.
If you really believe what you say- move to a small town NOW.
The following is taken from my airwindows/studio page- slightly out of date but with some effective ideas in it- especially mass-loading the case walls with aluminum tape.
"Finally, before we get into instruments, here's a glance over the ways Airwindows controls ambient noise. The
main computer's case is heavily reinforced with aluminum tape to damp and weight it (several pounds worth)
and the front bezel is concrete-filled. Extensive internal damping on both computers is used to cut drive and fan
noise. Finally, and as shown here, the fans from the computers are run into acrylic fur lined ducts (applied to the
outside as well for amusement value and minor sound absorption) that powerfully damp and absorb fan and air
handling noise, as well as block direct sound paths from inside the computer. On the far right you can see the
humidifier Airwindows runs (in the kitchen, as part of maintaining a comfortable environment, particularly for
vocalists) and that, too, makes use of a large duct which cuts its noise down by more than half. It's shut off for
serious work or monitoring: the main computer, which cannot be, is approximately twice as loud as the ticking of
the (also sound-damped!) clock in the room, and the MIDI sequencing computer is about half again as loud as the
ticking of the clock. To give a reference for what this is like, both computers running simultaneously are not as
loud as the ordinary, not-especially-loud refrigerator in the other room- they're roughly as loud as water running
through pipes elsewhere in the building, which is slightly louder than the ticking of the clock. A more pro-audio
reference: neither computer is as loud as a running ADAT with head spinning and tape loaded."
"The average life expectancy in 1900 was 47 years. Today it is 77, and rising." This is simply the advance of medical technology and old-age care, owing nothing to your political system. And average life expectancy of what- inner-city blacks? Or wealthy white upper-class senior citizens?
"The infant-mortality rate has dropped from 1 in 10 to 1 in 150." Again, technology. And clearly you're not measuring it in Santiago, Chile, where laissez-faire freemarket capitalism led to pollution levels that made hospitals keep tons of oxygen masks ready, to put on asphixiating babies- dozens brought in each day, at the point of death from breathing air. I don't think you're measuring _those_ infants. Perhaps you're measuring the infant mortality of Beverly Hills.
""Poor" Americans today have routine access to a quality of housing, food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Rockefellers could only dream of." Yeah, poor americans can drop everything and fly to Paris to sip wine. What the _hell_ are you thinking? Hung up on the fact that Andrew Carnegie couldn't have a Palm Pilot? This is an _obscene_ suggestion.
"A farmer a century ago could produce only one-hundredth of what his counterpart is capable of growing and harvesting today." The farmer a century ago _owned_ his farm and supported himself by it. His counterpart is an employee, probably doesn't own the land he works, or his equipment- if he is not an outright employee, then the bank owns the stuff and he's paying it off. Hell, man, the modern farmer doesn't own the SEED he plants. He has no capacity for subsistence at all. I'm sorry, this is a _major_ gaffe on your part. It's as bad as the 'Vanderbilt' nonsense.
"In the 19th century, almost all teenagers toiled in factories or fields. Now, 9 in 10 attend high school."...where they are taught to drink Pepsi(tm), work at Wal-Mart, and on the whole have less collective bargaining power than the factory workers had- which is why they are so easily discarded when the teenagers of _Korea_ prove to be able to do the same work, at a quarter the cost. Oh, and they stand a better chance of being shot, blown up, spied on, beat up or having bad things put on their permanent record than the factory workers had.
"Today's Americans have three times more leisure time than their great-grandparents did." And barely comprehend what the concept 'leisure' even means anymore because they're running so hard on the treadmill. I'm sorry, this sounds like someone made it up whole cloth.
"The price of food relative to wages has plummeted: In the early part of this century the average American had to work two hours to earn enough to purchase a chicken, compared with 20 minutes today." In the early part of this century, a fair number of average Americans _raised_ fscking chickens! You're counting the self-sufficient ones as consumers! You're out of your mind if you think that makes sense. The consumer class was a product of the 50s and kicked off the horrible dependence modern Americans are stuck with. If nobody sold food, those early Americans would be _fine_. If nobody sold food, your modern consumer would _starve_. And you are arguing that the very dependency that's made what was once a luxury item (a store-bought chicken) a staple (at a corresponding price drop) shows that the modern consumer is wealthier! That's obscene.
And if you define 'State' pragmatically rather than using some sort of shell-game political definition, you may be off the chart entirely, or social Anarchist:)
If a corporation can see to it that I never work in this town again (because it owns the town and controls all commerce), then it counts as The State. If a corporation can seize the tollbooths of the information superhighway and take the ability to communicate globally _away_ from me because I won't pay tribute, I can still choose to not pay tribute, but I'll be awful lonely- and again, that counts as The State.
I have to agree with Deskpoet that Slashdot tends to veer wildly to the right. It's just _radical_ right, which is why it's not always seen as such. Wishing to turn over the reins of world power to corporations and cartels with blind faith in some sort of magical market forces based on people being smart, well-informed, and loaded with foresight and the ability to put off instant gratification for longterm goals... is so wildly Right-wing that it's almost a self-parody. Normal people do not cultivate this sort of faith in economic theories.
It's also a really good way to overspecialise and powerdive for extinction.
The sabertooth tiger could clobber _any_ human, one on one. What the sabretooth tiger could _not_ do was be omnivorous, develop societies to protect the weaker members of the species so they could sit around inventing things like spears and guns and anarchocapitalism.
Note how there aren't any sabretooth tigers around anymore. Now, why would you want to emulate their markedly inferior capacity for tribal defense and protection? Human civilisation is _based_ on the tribe, a system of trading status for obligation. The head of the tribe takes on the responsibility of protecting the weakest members. This is a winning evolutionary strategy.
Any political system that depends on the winner getting to eat up the losers may be a very simple system, and it may look great to winners and would-be winners (whee, no obligation! I can spell 'Darwin'!) but it's a recipe for overspecialisation and extinction. Don't go there. Study Desmond Morris, not just Darwin. Think tribes, not individuals.
Because what makes us humans is the ability to cooperate, to communicate, to take care of the whole tribe and the old ladies and the little kids. A little kid is the weakest thing out there, but it's also the future. Granny sucks at hunting, but she was probably the one who invented sticking seeds under ground and growing cultivated plants for food- the hunters were busy hunting.
Our needs as a culture, as a _global_ and wildly diverse species, depend on our keeping the diversity to be able to adapt to whatever the upcoming millenia will throw at us. That means we don't have the option to just cull the herd until only the best survival strategies for THIS year (or decade, or century) are left alive. We've got to do what we can for the whole tribe because to narrow and evolve ourselves into one little niche is species suicide. And doing this can also be described as 'making the world a better place', and often is.
And why exactly are you impressed by UINs? Because they identify people who were quick to take notice of something that became very important? If that is so, you might want to look again at what Ian is saying- and the reasons I'm backing him up here.
Because he is taking notice of something that IS becoming increasingly important. So am I. Are you going to be quick to understand this too- or really, really slow?
Nonsense. The way to get a lot of money is to club somebody and take it. Producing something that people want is _much_ less efficient- social Darwinism is as real as we make it, and you can be quite confident that the people 'producing something that people want' WILL lose, because that takes a lot of work.
I don't know how to better explain this- it's so basic that if you won't accept it, there's no communication. Crime pays. Theft works. If you knock someone down and take their money, you have their money and they don't. The way to make lots of money is to take it from people. Producing something people want is a really inefficient way of doing that, and will ALWAYS lose to any competitor with more willingness to use the cosh.
Oh, you cite law? There is no law. It was part of governments and justice and all that stuff. It's not what it used to be.
"However, I don't understand when Slashdot went communist."
Easy. It happened when news article after news article illustrated the practical result of modern corporate capitalism and how it interferes with a choice-rich, thriving market.
The fact that many/most Slashdot readers are users of Linux, which is targeted for destruction by Microsoft (a trend-setting corporation that is much imitated), surely helped. Those slashdot readers have had many chances to consider the ways in which corporations can attack and damage the social infrastructure to benefit only themselves.
Finally, many Slashdot readers are young, traditionally a time for liberal and radical views and a desire for egalatarianism- when you're young you are shall we say LESS in favor of having a few old white haired geezers running the world. When you're old, mysteriously it starts to seem more suitable for those like you to rule;)
To top all this off, many Slashdot readers are intelligent and capable of pursuing logical thought. Forced to practice this thinking just to maintain their computer systems (largely self-maintained), they tend to apply it to all problems they see. When faced with problems of power dynamics in the world, they are capable of putting together the implications of laissez-fair free-market capitalism, the ability of third world countries to produce sweatshops and out-produce more civilised countries (civil liberties are a LOCAL ordinance), and the requirements of fiduciary duty on intellectual systems defined entirely by rules and regulations, and they come out with an answer that stuns them: government is on the way out, corporate totalitarianism is on the way in. Decentralised Stalin. Global electronic 'Kristallnacht'.
THAT is why so many Slashdotters have seemingly gone Communist. Of course, you should also remember that many have gone Socialist, or Social Anarchist, and that some have decided to side with where the power's going to be, and have gone Anarcho-Capitalist or Randite. (Not to be confused with social libertarian!)
No no no, you're not getting the spirit of the thing! Africa _should_ be killed, and the bodies sold to the five largest american companies to make soap with, which can then be sold in Wal-Mart! You're not properly appreciating the Darwinism of it all, Mike. What's your body fat content? Maybe you'd be more profitable to the economy as soap;)
Your historical perspective is, ah, a little off. Corporations have _always_ had the capacity to raise private armies and go out and kill people they don't like. One of the best ways to make them not like you has been to try and organise a union, but there is no reason it need stop there. The only thing, the ONLY thing that stops a corporation is the law that it is made out of, its sole weakness and defining structure.
Once corporations become so much more powerful than governments that they have no such restrictions, they will war on each other in all the ways of governments. Rather than nVidia warring on 3dfx in the courts, it will simply hire mercs and shoot the 3dfx engineers. Rather than Microsoft releasing lots of PR nonsense to fight open source, it will simply have RMS shot. There's loads of historical precedent. To think otherwise is hopelessly naive and requires wilful refusal to face known historical fact. The only difference is in magnitude. The corporate rulers of the future you suggest will be _worse_ than the atrocities of the Industrial Age. For one, they'll be infinitely more able to spy on you, and will have total access to all your resources, which will be electronic and stored on servers that they own.
What's wrong with general partnerships, limited partnerships, and sole proprietorships with the astonishing new concept of *tadah!* employees?
Sorry, but there is NO justification for corporations on those grounds. If I get a mob together to storm Redmond, this does not legally make us a composite entity with legal rights and exempt from individual responsibility. _Why_ does Redmond deserve legal rights and exemption from personal responsibility to storm _us_ and deprive me of my free market choices?
Sure it is. It's harder to wage war on a corporation. Also, governments exist to give something to citizens (even if only controlledness!). Corporations only exist to take. Period. You can't maintain an economy if some of the players are seizing the resources and squirrelling them away, hoarding the money. It's got to be in circulation. Corporations get in the way of that- the money flow is strictly one-way.
First of all, because my older Mac basically does what I want in a style I like. I won't give Microsoft a penny- we're not talking about that, so that's moot, we're talking about Linux platforms. I also won't give Intel a penny if I have a choice- and am seriously questioning whether it's good to give nVidia money either at this point. They'll only use it to impede progress, they are already doing it, strong-arming vendors.
Second of all, the CPUs are so different anyway that it seems crazy to try and compare them. It's like the x86 are model airplane engines screaming at 60,000 rpm and the PPC is a truck rumbling at 2000 rpm. It's a difference between top-end horsepower and bottom-end torque. PPC is register-rich and has a relatively shallow pipeline. I daresay the version of GCC used could have been better, but even if it was fully optimised, the 'torque curves' of the chips are DIFFERENT!
The x86 has been designed for years to scream for doing certain very narrow tasks- the simple repetitive processing of games, the focussed processing of well optimised OS routines. In many ways this is the most common situation (though I tell you, I've seen PCs sag and go unresponsive... admittedly running windows...). However, PPCs are a decent general purpose tool for _broader_ tasks. Anything that can use all the registers at once, slog through really big amounts of data in complicated ways... hence, the way Photoshop filters keep coming into the spotlight.
I don't know what all this proves, nor do I especially care since any of it is 'good enough'. I guess the bottom line for me is that I can't see performance metrics as being the end of the story. When you look beyond the actual performance and consider what happens as a result of your buying decisions, it becomes clear that the better immediate information people have, and the more prone they are to consider nothing whatever but raw results defined as narrowly as possible, you see the real reason why Microsoft is choking IT to death, why nVidia is currently threatening vendors to cut off the air supply of competing 3D chipmakers, why Intel destroyed other choice for so many years.
The end result of "X>Y, therefore all your base are belong to X" is cartels, stagnation, and the choking off of true progress. This is the case even when X is indeed >Y. You can't have a market if you're only allowed to buy one thing- and if you're not free to do whatever the hell you want, for any or no reason, you're being restricted by your own anal-retentive perfectionism and playing right into their hands. Two years from now these CPUs will ALL look like crap, but if you can successfully and publically make the case that there is only one greatest choice and nothing else will do- why, you are part of a market force handing complete dominance to that choice (like with Microsoft) and trusting it to keep on deserving your support AFTER it has no competition left and can do what it wants: and when have we EVER seen ANY company deserve our trust after it has controlled its market? It's not in their nature.
Which is to say- I'd still get a Mac. And people can do as they please, but I really can't have much respect for those who'd denigrate me for my choices- I have enough time and patience to run an older 300Mhz G3 machine in relative comfort, so that counts as 'enough', plus I cannot forget the larger situation, all these companies busily trying as hard as they can to do away with all capitalism and become the single source for whatever it is they do. That disgusts me- it's not what I call a suitable model for society. So rather than whine or write long dissertations about it, I ACT in accordance with my beliefs.
If any of you guys REALLY believe that PPC should go away- you should be running Windows, not Linux. People have all kinds of motivations for what they do, and in the larger scheme of things, 50% or 80% or even 300% processing speed disparity is pretty insignificant. Have some historical perspective.
Great answer. I especially love the bit about break-even point. If you don't know what break-even point is, you're not ready to operate a business no matter _how_ good your game is.
Where the heck do you get 'the middle of a display Microsoft had paid huge money to rent'? Makes it sound like they climbed into the MS booth or something.
I read it as the entranceway TO THE HALL. The fact that MS put a big inflated thingie there hardly grants them ownership of the whole fscking building.
If they were doing it outside the entrance, on the street, would you still consider it Microsoft's private property?
Ah- nice detective work! And a fair question- what about Iomega and those clicker things, and so on? Is it true that no other vendors ever give out tchochkes away from their booths?
And yet, and yet... it doesn't really matter, does it? MS is not the only one that can fight dirty. I think the 'free-in' (like a sit in only you give people your free stuff) was a brilliant move PR-wise, intentionally or not. Why?
"You can't pass out free software here!"
You couldn't _pay_ for a more damaging line... and who really gives a fsck if it suggests a nepotism and unfairness that didn't really exist? Ballmer is going to great lengths to lie his ass off that using open source... USING it... forces you to give out all the source code for everything you do. He put together his little remarks very carefully, I think. The implication is plain, it's the most direct reading of his statement, and it happens to be flat nonsense and propaganda.
Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. At a recent trade show, Microsoft reps cried "You can't pass out free software here!" and went to get building security to drive the peaceful Linux people away, and prevent them from even _giving_ their stuff to attendees, much less selling it. That's the story, that's the spin, that's the way it is perceived.
Now- you can argue we should be _nobler_ than Microsoft- but isn't it interesting that without any effort at all, Microsoft can damage its position as easily as it can prop it up? This is because what MS is fighting is a difficult thing to hate- people sharing, cooperating, giving to each other willingly. So, MS has to cling to technicalities in order to try and block this cooperating and giving- and you get "You can't pass out free software here!" at the trade show- easily interpreted as indicating Microsoft's _real_ wishes, that _nobody_ should be allowed to pass out free software under any circumstances.
I'm sorry- whether they were in the right or not, this was a colossal PR foot-shooting on Microsoft's part. They ought to fire the guy who was damnfool enough to give the world THAT quote, because it's going to haunt them, taken out of context- and so it should. War is war.
Slashdot Mirror
The GPL is for extending to _every_ end user the CAPACITY to become another coder or distributor. Without exception. To free software there is NO such thing as an 'end user' distinct from a developer. This is a sharp difference from proprietary software, to say the least...
For that reason, the GPL applies to the end user in the sense that, at ANY point the end user can become a developer or distributor, with no further authorization than the GPL itself. Any or all end users can do this and are encouraged to.
That's why this confusion arises: to the GPL and those who wrote it, there's no such thing as a passive end user. It is a philosophical distinction that rejects the idea of a 'consumer' and instead asserts that every person who comes in contact with the software may have something to offer and thus needs to be included in the licensing arrangement in case they feel like lending a hand.
So, it's true that you can use GPLed stuff all day without being bound by the terms of the GPL, just by not doing ANY activities that the GPL makes available to you- but to a large extent this misses the point, and more importantly you always have the _option_ of adding those activities and accepting the terms with which they're granted. At no point are you ever limited to 'consumer' interaction, no matter how stubbornly you avoid coding or distributing. Getting more involved is always an option, and if you do, the terms become relevant to your situation.
Think about it...
_Nobody_ gets $750,000. Hell, damned few get $75,000, including independent promo (bribes and payola).
I think I know where they got that. They took the _total_ payola they spent, which for the top few acts totals more than half their revenue... and divided it by their total number of acts to make it seem that they GAVE ARTISTS ADVANCES like that.
Lies, crap, bullshit, nonsense, deliberate deception, trickery, hype, more lies. Bullshit. Don't ever take these people at their word or believe what they seem to be suggesting.
In other words, what else is new?
Boy, do you have _that_ right! It's a good example of what happens. Now where's that -1 Offtopic? Surely comment about the mechanics of HOW THIS CAME ABOUT is far from the desired topic of bitching about the RIAA ;)
The only remaining concern is: if unsigned artists own the music they write (which they do), how do they get it played? And this is where the attention needs to be: internet access to unsigned musicians is a threat to the big labels because it could bleed off potential sales of Britney etc. Expect concerted efforts to eat up or destroy the internet services that offer music hosting (mp3.com is already done for- it is sold to Universal, and the contract has been changed under the artists' noses to a very dangerous one). Anything publically held is at risk: anything linked to the Big Five (like Farmclub) is like a 'honey trap', a snare for the unwary or stupid. It really is "take stuff off the market" land out there.
Yet, at the same time, the musicians are still out there, many with technical resources as good as what the majors use these days- and some of the internet sites are still there too. BeSonic is still there. Ampcast is not only still there, it's just gone live with its own CD order-fulfillment service. Some of these places (like Ampcast) are built on the mission of being an alternative rather than seizing the market: Ampcast's mission statement is all about being a useful indie alternative to the major labels, it's very informed of the cartel-like conditions that exist. More importantly, if Ampcast _did_ get taken over somehow (dunno how, it's not publically held and I'm not sure if it's even a corporation or holds stock), its contract continues to allow artists to bail out taking their music with them and taking the rights back- unlike mp3.com, where the place keeps a right to your stuff forever even if you bail.
The main thing is to keep the alternate routes alive. I feel the existing industry will go beyond the letter and spirit of the law in attempts to destroy even poorly-resourced, unpromoted indie musicians: for instance, I could imagine mp3s being made illegal through manipulating and paying off the government, and a new format decreed where you have to pay $60,000 to get one of the 12 licenses for generating the encrypted whatever-it-is. This is of course a shocking, extreme suggestion, but the point is that IT WOULD WORK as much as anything would (i.e. sort of...). Only the geekiest musicians would have the savvy or connections to be able to generate that format themselves through stolen encoders- and here's the BIG point- in doing so they would be BREAKING THE LAW! If the only public format is NOT a public format, you can't seek a public audience for your content unless you are legally allowed to generate the media.
That is the REAL killer: people burning bootleg CDs would be perfectly safe, but musicians with a legitimate reason to generate the format using their own content could be legally blocked from entering the market on the grounds of DMCA violation, illegal use of methods to circumvent copyright violation. It's the TOOLS that would land them in jail, their music would remain harmless and they'd have a right to it, but they would no longer have a right to put out their own media in the cartel-owned popular format.
Let's see to it that this never happens- continue to demand and support the original CD Audio (Red Book) format, because it is permissible to generate that without paying a controlling authority- and dare I say it, support mp3 despite Fraunhofer and the KNOWN legal problems with mp3. Something tells me Fraunhofer have their hands full with the problem of keeping their format relevant. Proposed alternatives could be much, much worse. Ideally we could switch to Ogg Vorbis: remains to be seen whether this can be practical. I hope so, mp3 is booby-trapped in a way that Red Book is not.
"Independent Promotion" means (and I quote/paraphrase from the words OF an independent promoter as reported IN 'Hit Men' which I own and have read with great interest), "Well, I understand you're wondering why you pay me so much money to get a record played. And you're wondering, is it really true that I can get a record played. But the question you need to be asking yourself is, can I STOP a record from being played?"
Did you think the music business was fair? That is where the money goes. The RIAA actually _is_ feeling the pinch, but this is because it's under the gun of independent promotion and has to pay protection money to get anything played on radio. That's the way it's been for decades, that's the way it is. That's also the reason indie internet musicians won't ever get on radio (and I think we shouldn't bother even trying- waste of energy).
At no point are we talking real advertising here. It's advertising the way Mob shakedowns are 'insurance'. Sure it's organised crime, your point?
Oh, and your figure for artist pay seems _very_ high- you're not counting the accounting tricks that get played (I can detail them if you like) and you're not counting recouping. In practice, artists don't get paid, they just get the label to take them into the studio without charging them directly and up-front. Even that's on the decline.
Oh, by the way, I _also_ write open source software- Free software, to be specific, GPL. So you should be _happy_ that there are people out there who know more about Photoshop than you do, because some of them are on your side- and in the long run, they will bring everything that they talk about to GIMP, or to some comparable program that will arise.
I wouldn't want to see GIMP evolve to match Photoshop 7 or 12 or whatever it's up to. I choose not to buy those for a REASON- they're bloated, less stable, too big. I'd like to see GIMP evolve to match Photoshop _4_. And while I can still use Photoshop 4 itself, when I move to OSX (as I'm eager to do, I like the concept), I won't have that as an option (not _native_). And that's when I'll be looking at what else is out there, and I suspect most of the options will be really dumb toys for lusers with digital cameras.
But there's always free software- meaning that if I have no other choice, I can _take_ something and Do It Myself.
That's the future.
Note that I'm not citing recenter versions! It's pretty widely accepted that there's been little for Adobe to DO anymore to the program, so they add pointless web crap that is irrelevant to the serious digital artist, and was always available by third party extensions anyway. In doing so, they lose some of the impressive focus Photoshop had.
Here's the deal: the GIMP is open source, but Photoshop is not. I'm not sure if the source for Photoshop 3 even exists, for instance- it's privately held and could have been discarded at some point. In order to take Photoshop to OSX, the only option is to take THE MOST RECENT one to OSX. Not some older better-loved version, but the feature creep version! This is a competitive disadvantage.
I would say that the GIMP needs to evolve a NATIVE Aqua version, or even a Cocoa version. Count on it, there's someone out there writing an OSX application like that, and it may eat both the GIMP's lunch and Photoshop's if done properly. You need it to not be a downgrade- for instance, Photoshop does internal calculations in LAB color (Luminance/A/B) which is a broader colorspace than RGB (If you don't understand that part, you're not competitive with Photoshop no matter how fast your app is- this is about writing the highest of high end digital bitmap editing, it's _specialized_). Those basics have to be in place or it's like running GNU apps on a windows kernel- unclear on the concept.
However, there is no reason whatsoever this can't be done. My personal suspicion is that Open Source and Free software will gradually, steadily overtake proprietary software, because software is functional ideas and cooperative idea-developing only needs continued new sources, which is happening, and time, which is passing.
So, this is only a bare beginning. I am delighted to see it happening! :)
Human society outgrew that LONG ago.
Read some Desmond Morris with particular attention to the way in which human society grew from 'tribe' status, in which humans knew the vast majority of other humans they interacted with, to 'super-tribe' status, in which it's more often the case that you deal with people totally unknown to you.
This is hardly novel information- you're just not applying it, or choosing not to see it.
In the modern world (already!) and in the world of the future, most of your interactions are with strangers, and this is where your default assumptions break down, and why the original poster's theories do not hold in the real world.
They are based on a 'village' model in which people customarily have familiarity with, and free information about, those with which they do business.
That doesn't happen anymore- indeed, we have some parts of UCITA that would prohibit true information even being exchanged. Even if UCITA is struck down, the basic social reality is that the vast majority of people do business with strangers. Do you KNOW the waitress to whom you hand your credit card? The programmer who codes the back-end of your favorite website?
Please lose the naivete. The world is bigger than you know- and that's a reality that won't go away no matter how much you pretend you can be aware of everyone you interact with. It's basic sociology as applied to super-populations such as human beings.
If you really believe what you say- move to a small town NOW.
I did! *G*
The following is taken from my airwindows/studio page- slightly out of date but with some effective ideas in it- especially mass-loading the case walls with aluminum tape.
"Finally, before we get into instruments, here's a glance over the ways Airwindows controls ambient noise. The main computer's case is heavily reinforced with aluminum tape to damp and weight it (several pounds worth) and the front bezel is concrete-filled. Extensive internal damping on both computers is used to cut drive and fan noise. Finally, and as shown here, the fans from the computers are run into acrylic fur lined ducts (applied to the outside as well for amusement value and minor sound absorption) that powerfully damp and absorb fan and air handling noise, as well as block direct sound paths from inside the computer. On the far right you can see the humidifier Airwindows runs (in the kitchen, as part of maintaining a comfortable environment, particularly for vocalists) and that, too, makes use of a large duct which cuts its noise down by more than half. It's shut off for serious work or monitoring: the main computer, which cannot be, is approximately twice as loud as the ticking of the (also sound-damped!) clock in the room, and the MIDI sequencing computer is about half again as loud as the ticking of the clock. To give a reference for what this is like, both computers running simultaneously are not as loud as the ordinary, not-especially-loud refrigerator in the other room- they're roughly as loud as water running through pipes elsewhere in the building, which is slightly louder than the ticking of the clock. A more pro-audio reference: neither computer is as loud as a running ADAT with head spinning and tape loaded."
- "The average life expectancy in 1900 was 47 years. Today it is 77, and rising." This is simply the advance of medical technology and old-age care, owing nothing to your political system. And average life expectancy of what- inner-city blacks? Or wealthy white upper-class senior citizens?
- "The infant-mortality rate has dropped from 1 in 10 to 1 in 150." Again, technology. And clearly you're not measuring it in Santiago, Chile, where laissez-faire freemarket capitalism led to pollution levels that made hospitals keep tons of oxygen masks ready, to put on asphixiating babies- dozens brought in each day, at the point of death from breathing air. I don't think you're measuring _those_ infants. Perhaps you're measuring the infant mortality of Beverly Hills.
- ""Poor" Americans today have routine access to a quality of housing, food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Rockefellers could only dream of." Yeah, poor americans can drop everything and fly to Paris to sip wine. What the _hell_ are you thinking? Hung up on the fact that Andrew Carnegie couldn't have a Palm Pilot? This is an _obscene_ suggestion.
- "A farmer a century ago could produce only one-hundredth of what his counterpart is capable of growing and harvesting today." The farmer a century ago _owned_ his farm and supported himself by it. His counterpart is an employee, probably doesn't own the land he works, or his equipment- if he is not an outright employee, then the bank owns the stuff and he's paying it off. Hell, man, the modern farmer doesn't own the SEED he plants. He has no capacity for subsistence at all. I'm sorry, this is a _major_ gaffe on your part. It's as bad as the 'Vanderbilt' nonsense.
- "In the 19th century, almost all teenagers toiled in factories or fields. Now, 9 in 10 attend high school."
...where they are taught to drink Pepsi(tm), work at Wal-Mart, and on the whole have less collective bargaining power than the factory workers had- which is why they are so easily discarded when the teenagers of _Korea_ prove to be able to do the same work, at a quarter the cost. Oh, and they stand a better chance of being shot, blown up, spied on, beat up or having bad things put on their permanent record than the factory workers had.
- "Today's Americans have three times more leisure time than their great-grandparents did." And barely comprehend what the concept 'leisure' even means anymore because they're running so hard on the treadmill. I'm sorry, this sounds like someone made it up whole cloth.
- "The price of food relative to wages has plummeted: In the early part of this century the average American had to work two hours to earn enough to purchase a chicken, compared with 20 minutes today." In the early part of this century, a fair number of average Americans _raised_ fscking chickens! You're counting the self-sufficient ones as consumers! You're out of your mind if you think that makes sense. The consumer class was a product of the 50s and kicked off the horrible dependence modern Americans are stuck with. If nobody sold food, those early Americans would be _fine_. If nobody sold food, your modern consumer would _starve_. And you are arguing that the very dependency that's made what was once a luxury item (a store-bought chicken) a staple (at a corresponding price drop) shows that the modern consumer is wealthier! That's obscene.
Cato-quoting fantasizer... >:(If a corporation can see to it that I never work in this town again (because it owns the town and controls all commerce), then it counts as The State. If a corporation can seize the tollbooths of the information superhighway and take the ability to communicate globally _away_ from me because I won't pay tribute, I can still choose to not pay tribute, but I'll be awful lonely- and again, that counts as The State.
I have to agree with Deskpoet that Slashdot tends to veer wildly to the right. It's just _radical_ right, which is why it's not always seen as such. Wishing to turn over the reins of world power to corporations and cartels with blind faith in some sort of magical market forces based on people being smart, well-informed, and loaded with foresight and the ability to put off instant gratification for longterm goals... is so wildly Right-wing that it's almost a self-parody. Normal people do not cultivate this sort of faith in economic theories.
The sabertooth tiger could clobber _any_ human, one on one. What the sabretooth tiger could _not_ do was be omnivorous, develop societies to protect the weaker members of the species so they could sit around inventing things like spears and guns and anarchocapitalism.
Note how there aren't any sabretooth tigers around anymore. Now, why would you want to emulate their markedly inferior capacity for tribal defense and protection? Human civilisation is _based_ on the tribe, a system of trading status for obligation. The head of the tribe takes on the responsibility of protecting the weakest members. This is a winning evolutionary strategy.
Any political system that depends on the winner getting to eat up the losers may be a very simple system, and it may look great to winners and would-be winners (whee, no obligation! I can spell 'Darwin'!) but it's a recipe for overspecialisation and extinction. Don't go there. Study Desmond Morris, not just Darwin. Think tribes, not individuals.
If the statement is true, where is your difference now?
Our needs as a culture, as a _global_ and wildly diverse species, depend on our keeping the diversity to be able to adapt to whatever the upcoming millenia will throw at us. That means we don't have the option to just cull the herd until only the best survival strategies for THIS year (or decade, or century) are left alive. We've got to do what we can for the whole tribe because to narrow and evolve ourselves into one little niche is species suicide. And doing this can also be described as 'making the world a better place', and often is.
And why exactly are you impressed by UINs? Because they identify people who were quick to take notice of something that became very important? If that is so, you might want to look again at what Ian is saying- and the reasons I'm backing him up here.
Because he is taking notice of something that IS becoming increasingly important. So am I. Are you going to be quick to understand this too- or really, really slow?
I don't know how to better explain this- it's so basic that if you won't accept it, there's no communication. Crime pays. Theft works. If you knock someone down and take their money, you have their money and they don't. The way to make lots of money is to take it from people. Producing something people want is a really inefficient way of doing that, and will ALWAYS lose to any competitor with more willingness to use the cosh.
Oh, you cite law? There is no law. It was part of governments and justice and all that stuff. It's not what it used to be.
Easy. It happened when news article after news article illustrated the practical result of modern corporate capitalism and how it interferes with a choice-rich, thriving market.
The fact that many/most Slashdot readers are users of Linux, which is targeted for destruction by Microsoft (a trend-setting corporation that is much imitated), surely helped. Those slashdot readers have had many chances to consider the ways in which corporations can attack and damage the social infrastructure to benefit only themselves.
Finally, many Slashdot readers are young, traditionally a time for liberal and radical views and a desire for egalatarianism- when you're young you are shall we say LESS in favor of having a few old white haired geezers running the world. When you're old, mysteriously it starts to seem more suitable for those like you to rule ;)
To top all this off, many Slashdot readers are intelligent and capable of pursuing logical thought. Forced to practice this thinking just to maintain their computer systems (largely self-maintained), they tend to apply it to all problems they see. When faced with problems of power dynamics in the world, they are capable of putting together the implications of laissez-fair free-market capitalism, the ability of third world countries to produce sweatshops and out-produce more civilised countries (civil liberties are a LOCAL ordinance), and the requirements of fiduciary duty on intellectual systems defined entirely by rules and regulations, and they come out with an answer that stuns them: government is on the way out, corporate totalitarianism is on the way in. Decentralised Stalin. Global electronic 'Kristallnacht'.
THAT is why so many Slashdotters have seemingly gone Communist. Of course, you should also remember that many have gone Socialist, or Social Anarchist, and that some have decided to side with where the power's going to be, and have gone Anarcho-Capitalist or Randite. (Not to be confused with social libertarian!)
Got it? And which side are _you_ on? >:)
No no no, you're not getting the spirit of the thing! Africa _should_ be killed, and the bodies sold to the five largest american companies to make soap with, which can then be sold in Wal-Mart! You're not properly appreciating the Darwinism of it all, Mike. What's your body fat content? Maybe you'd be more profitable to the economy as soap ;)
Once corporations become so much more powerful than governments that they have no such restrictions, they will war on each other in all the ways of governments. Rather than nVidia warring on 3dfx in the courts, it will simply hire mercs and shoot the 3dfx engineers. Rather than Microsoft releasing lots of PR nonsense to fight open source, it will simply have RMS shot. There's loads of historical precedent. To think otherwise is hopelessly naive and requires wilful refusal to face known historical fact. The only difference is in magnitude. The corporate rulers of the future you suggest will be _worse_ than the atrocities of the Industrial Age. For one, they'll be infinitely more able to spy on you, and will have total access to all your resources, which will be electronic and stored on servers that they own.
Sorry, but there is NO justification for corporations on those grounds. If I get a mob together to storm Redmond, this does not legally make us a composite entity with legal rights and exempt from individual responsibility. _Why_ does Redmond deserve legal rights and exemption from personal responsibility to storm _us_ and deprive me of my free market choices?
Sure it is. It's harder to wage war on a corporation. Also, governments exist to give something to citizens (even if only controlledness!). Corporations only exist to take. Period. You can't maintain an economy if some of the players are seizing the resources and squirrelling them away, hoarding the money. It's got to be in circulation. Corporations get in the way of that- the money flow is strictly one-way.
First of all, because my older Mac basically does what I want in a style I like. I won't give Microsoft a penny- we're not talking about that, so that's moot, we're talking about Linux platforms. I also won't give Intel a penny if I have a choice- and am seriously questioning whether it's good to give nVidia money either at this point. They'll only use it to impede progress, they are already doing it, strong-arming vendors.
Second of all, the CPUs are so different anyway that it seems crazy to try and compare them. It's like the x86 are model airplane engines screaming at 60,000 rpm and the PPC is a truck rumbling at 2000 rpm. It's a difference between top-end horsepower and bottom-end torque. PPC is register-rich and has a relatively shallow pipeline. I daresay the version of GCC used could have been better, but even if it was fully optimised, the 'torque curves' of the chips are DIFFERENT!
The x86 has been designed for years to scream for doing certain very narrow tasks- the simple repetitive processing of games, the focussed processing of well optimised OS routines. In many ways this is the most common situation (though I tell you, I've seen PCs sag and go unresponsive... admittedly running windows...). However, PPCs are a decent general purpose tool for _broader_ tasks. Anything that can use all the registers at once, slog through really big amounts of data in complicated ways... hence, the way Photoshop filters keep coming into the spotlight.
I don't know what all this proves, nor do I especially care since any of it is 'good enough'. I guess the bottom line for me is that I can't see performance metrics as being the end of the story. When you look beyond the actual performance and consider what happens as a result of your buying decisions, it becomes clear that the better immediate information people have, and the more prone they are to consider nothing whatever but raw results defined as narrowly as possible, you see the real reason why Microsoft is choking IT to death, why nVidia is currently threatening vendors to cut off the air supply of competing 3D chipmakers, why Intel destroyed other choice for so many years.
The end result of "X>Y, therefore all your base are belong to X" is cartels, stagnation, and the choking off of true progress. This is the case even when X is indeed >Y. You can't have a market if you're only allowed to buy one thing- and if you're not free to do whatever the hell you want, for any or no reason, you're being restricted by your own anal-retentive perfectionism and playing right into their hands. Two years from now these CPUs will ALL look like crap, but if you can successfully and publically make the case that there is only one greatest choice and nothing else will do- why, you are part of a market force handing complete dominance to that choice (like with Microsoft) and trusting it to keep on deserving your support AFTER it has no competition left and can do what it wants: and when have we EVER seen ANY company deserve our trust after it has controlled its market? It's not in their nature.
Which is to say- I'd still get a Mac. And people can do as they please, but I really can't have much respect for those who'd denigrate me for my choices- I have enough time and patience to run an older 300Mhz G3 machine in relative comfort, so that counts as 'enough', plus I cannot forget the larger situation, all these companies busily trying as hard as they can to do away with all capitalism and become the single source for whatever it is they do. That disgusts me- it's not what I call a suitable model for society. So rather than whine or write long dissertations about it, I ACT in accordance with my beliefs.
If any of you guys REALLY believe that PPC should go away- you should be running Windows, not Linux. People have all kinds of motivations for what they do, and in the larger scheme of things, 50% or 80% or even 300% processing speed disparity is pretty insignificant. Have some historical perspective.
End long, rambling, crotchety ol 'rant ;)
Great answer. I especially love the bit about break-even point. If you don't know what break-even point is, you're not ready to operate a business no matter _how_ good your game is.
I read it as the entranceway TO THE HALL. The fact that MS put a big inflated thingie there hardly grants them ownership of the whole fscking building.
If they were doing it outside the entrance, on the street, would you still consider it Microsoft's private property?
And yet, and yet... it doesn't really matter, does it? MS is not the only one that can fight dirty. I think the 'free-in' (like a sit in only you give people your free stuff) was a brilliant move PR-wise, intentionally or not. Why?
"You can't pass out free software here!"
You couldn't _pay_ for a more damaging line... and who really gives a fsck if it suggests a nepotism and unfairness that didn't really exist? Ballmer is going to great lengths to lie his ass off that using open source... USING it... forces you to give out all the source code for everything you do. He put together his little remarks very carefully, I think. The implication is plain, it's the most direct reading of his statement, and it happens to be flat nonsense and propaganda.
Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. At a recent trade show, Microsoft reps cried "You can't pass out free software here!" and went to get building security to drive the peaceful Linux people away, and prevent them from even _giving_ their stuff to attendees, much less selling it. That's the story, that's the spin, that's the way it is perceived.
Now- you can argue we should be _nobler_ than Microsoft- but isn't it interesting that without any effort at all, Microsoft can damage its position as easily as it can prop it up? This is because what MS is fighting is a difficult thing to hate- people sharing, cooperating, giving to each other willingly. So, MS has to cling to technicalities in order to try and block this cooperating and giving- and you get "You can't pass out free software here!" at the trade show- easily interpreted as indicating Microsoft's _real_ wishes, that _nobody_ should be allowed to pass out free software under any circumstances.
I'm sorry- whether they were in the right or not, this was a colossal PR foot-shooting on Microsoft's part. They ought to fire the guy who was damnfool enough to give the world THAT quote, because it's going to haunt them, taken out of context- and so it should. War is war.