why *any* company would choose to buy a SCO license without knowing exactly what the infringing code is? Someone please play Devil's advocate and explain why a company shouldn't just wait to be sued by SCO. What judge/jury would penalize a company for saying "we were perfectly willing to pay licensing fees, but SCO just made a completely unverfiable (from out POV) claim of ownership. Why should we have paid until they proved they owned it?"
Seems to me that even if SCO is completely right, the most reasonable outcome for a company that refuses to buy a license now is: pay back fees since the license was offered. How is the company worse off in that case? What am I missing?!
This is not just simple correlation. There's an underlying *explanation* and the numbers simply support that explanation. Is it really surprising that with hundreds of people getting sued (high profile with full media coverage) for thousands of dollars each, P2P usage went down drastically?! The points you provide are additional valid explanations, especially (1) which the article points out anyway. But, IMO, your points don't tell the whole story about the huge declines in P2P the article documents, and it'd be silly to ignore the easiest explanation: the lawsuits.
Not to belabor an uninteresting point, but there's still no irony in what happened today. The **AA already knew that ISPs had common carrier status under the DMCA, a provision lobbied for by ISPs and accepted by the **AA as a compromise. But this specific compromise is not what's at issue today. It's not like the **AA was trying to strip common carrier status from ISPs and was prevented from doing so by the DMCA! That would be irony, I suppose.
The DMCA *was* effective at removing all sorts of copyright violations from the web and anon ftp sites (remember all those mp3 web/ftp search engines?). Some things were always going to fall outside the DMCA turbo-subpoena purview and we just found out today that P2P is one of those things.
There's nothing ironic here. The ISPs were never 'liable' for P2P copyright violations. What was at issue was the power to subpoena subscriber names without going through the standard subpoena process (the so-called 'turbocharged subpoena process'), something the DMCA allowed copyright holders to do. The court ruled that this DMCA process does not apply to P2P (DMCA predates wide adoption of P2P, so it wasn't specifically legislated to deal with it).
The copyright holders can still subpoena names from ISPs, but now they have to file 'John Doe' lawsuits and go through the judicial process to obtain the subpoenas. This is much more expensive, which means they won't be issuing them in the hundreds any more.
This is all about default settings for consumer wireless routers. If the average user buys a router, hooks it up, and his laptop gets a wireless internet connection (maybe not even his!), is he really going to look into WEP and resricted MAC access lists? I don't think so.
Having set up a wireless router a couple of months ago for the first time (for a friend), I can attest to the fact that default settings *need* to be user-friendly. Call me a dummy, but I didn't quite get how WEP is implemented at the time: IIRC, the interface on the router and the wireless card driver were a little different, and it wasn't clear to me what to input where (SSID, channel, passphrase, generated key, options to retrieve key automatically, etc.) It's nothing that I can't figure out, but it wasn't obvious even to semi-computer-literate person like me.
I think 'restrict access by MAC address' should be enabled by default *after* a first configuration-wizard run (obviously it can't be enabled *before* initial configuration by the user, and needs to be disabled every time the router is physically reset). The first-run wizard should tell the user, IN BIG LETTERS, that if they want to use a second PC/Laptop with the router, they need to allow access from the first PC by editing the MAC list. The user should also be *prompted* for an SSID and told to enter it into his laptop wireless driver configuration. As for WEP, it should be as easy to set up as picking a passphrase (to be prompted for when a laptop attempts to make a connection) or telling the consumer to copy a generated key to their wireless driver settings.
On the other hand, pervasive and insecure wireless access is something all civil libertarians should appreciate, so I'm not sure I'd want things tightened up too much:)
Apologies for replying to my own post, but I want to clarify a couple of issues that may answer some of the replies.
First, the issue is not Windows or Apple vs Linux (even if that were the intention of the parent posts). It's commercial vs non-commercial software. If you prefer, it's Red Hat vs Debian.
Second, I think (IANAL!) liability, whether legal or 'effective' is largely a matter of reasonable expectations. Nobody expects a hugely complex product like an operating system, or even a web server, to be completely secure. People understand that they will have to patch this type of software and expect its creators to provide timely patches. On the other hand, people expect that Excel will add the contents of two cells correctly, and if they lose money because Excel can't add, I bet we'd see lawsuits by users and settlements offered by Microsoft.
Third, don't discount the profit motive. Altruism, professionalism, and integrity count for a whole lot, but if you're a non-commercial developer, they won't get you to fly "cross country on two hours notice in order to get a system up and working", as one of the replies indicates.
The two parent posts reflect conventional wisdom here in slashdot. Unfortunately, they miss the point, which is that even if there is no strict 'legal' liability (and there are reasons to think even this may not be true), there's always some 'effective' liability imposed by business reality.
For example, suppose TurboTax makes a certain error in filing that affects a certain percentage of its customers, who are then punished with fees/audits by the IRS. If the case is publicized and the error is strictly TurboTax's, could TurboTax really afford to say that they're not liable because of their EULA? What would that do to their sales the following year? And what would consumer recourse be if they used a non-commercial tax package instead of TurboTax? Who would they hit up for their fees and damages?
Additionally, there's no guarantee that all EULAs would stand a legal test in a liability case. I believe that was what UCITA was all about, strengthening EULAs to limit software liability. If EULAs were always legally biniding, UCITA would probably be unnecessary.
I don't claim that commercial software vendors will always be liable, but there are formal and informal ways of accountability available with commercial vendors. It's not fair to claim that businesses are being completely irrational in continuing to believe this.
"SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws."
He then spends the rest of the letter explaining why copyright is great, and why the FSF and Red Hat are evil for opposing copyrights. Fine. But *nowhere* is there any reasoning given why the GPL violates the consitution, copyright law or patent law. In fact, by the end of the letter, McBride is forced to write:
"Based on the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, we believe that adoption and use of the GPL by significant parts of the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws. We believe that responsible corporations throughout the IT industry have advocated use of the GPL without full analysis of its long-term detriment to our economy. We are confident that these corporations will ultimately reverse support for the GPL, and will pursue a more responsible direction."
Note that there's *nothing* about the legality of the GPL. Adopting the GPL may be a "mistake", but nowhere does he even attempt to prove the point that he started with, that the GPL is a violation of the constitution and laws of the US.
Too bad for SCO. The only way they can have a long term money-making plan with Linux is if they get the GPL declared illegal, all developer contributions under it made into code in the public domain (I suppose public domain is against the constitution too?!), then they can assert ownership of the whole product based on whatever proprietary contributions they think were made against their wishes by IBM et al. IANAL, but it ain't gonna happen.
Truth Probably Somewhere in the Middle
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
I think the explanation is a combination of market incentives for complex price and fee structures and corporate unwillingness to work hard to save consumers money.
First, my hypothesis on why certain types of bills are so hard to decipher: in industries with intense competition (long distance, cell phone, credit cards), a complex pricing structure reduces the amount of head-to-head competition you have to face, essentially increasing your monopoly power (I mean that in the technical economic sense of the word) and allowing you to extract more profit from consumers. Think of it this way: If AT&T cost 10 cents/min. flat, and MCI cost 5 cents/min. flat, with no other fees, how many people would continue to use AT&T? But complex pricing structures make it near impossible for consumers to make a head-to-head comparison based on price alone, thus decreasing the effective competition on price in the market.
Complexity in pricing/fee structures inevitably leads to billing errors and/or customer misunderstandings about fees. You can probably design more error-proof billing systems, but the industries won't do that unless it's in their economic benefit to do so: here, as the article points out, is a balance between extra revenue made from those who never complain and extra cost from those who call customer service. As complaints increase, the economic incentive to fix billing, or even simplify it, will increase. But corporations won't take active steps out of the goodness of their hearts to reduce billing errors that benefit them.
So, no conspiracy here, but just a couple of economic incentives interacting.
Which is perfectly sensible, given how complicated this would be. This is not really going to be implemented through the bug tracking system. It's a big idea that requires a big name/organization/company to adopt it. And this will only happen if the idea gets traction (and a lot of discussion) at the grassroots.
What if something like Bugzilla had a system whereby people could make micropayments towards bounties for fixing bugs and implementing features? The final effect would be the same as someone setting up a single large bounty, but the tasks would be prioritized somewhat more democratically.
Setting this up would not be easy: you'd have to have a financial partner (Amazon comes to mind in that they had a system where money was held in escrow or something until the buyer was satisfied), and the system would have to have decent financial auditing to prevent abuse, but it could be done.
Microbounties would also bring back a measure of consumer power to the world of open source development. Projects/tasks that attract donators will also attract developers, and the disconnect we always talk about between what users want and what developers want to work on would become smaller.
And while I'm talking big, let me point out that this model could be adapted to the provision of other information goods. I can imagine a small band setting up a bounty for their next album, with funds not released until the album is complete (in this case, it would be the suppliers setting up the bounties, not the demanders. I guess you'd call them 'ransoms' not 'bounties').
Sombody ought to set up a bounty for the implementation of this idea:)
0) There *is* no contract! Buying a CD is like buying a shirt or a box of chocolate. I suppose you can think about your purchase of a box of chocolate as a principal-agent problem, where you delegate the responsibility to search for good ingredients, find a good recipe, etc. (and you can make all the moral hazard arguments) but I fail to see how this is insightful in any way.
1) Well, I taught college economics for several years, so I guess I should ask myself:). An mp3 is clearly non-rival in consumption. The internet has made it non-exclusive in consumption as well. It is therefore, *by definition*, a pure public good. I don't see where the rivalry or exclusivity are "pretty obvious" as you say. And rather than tell me to 'look it up', why don't you just straight out explain why an mp3 is not a pure public good (if it's so obvious)?!
2) Uh, sales figures count for *everything* in the record industry. To use your example, the only reason the industry cranks out Britney Spears records is because they sell. If they didn't, they'd drop her like a hot potato. Now it might be lamentable that the public's taste in music is so terrible, or that teeny-boppers have become a significant portion of the buyer market, but you can't seriously argue that the record industry doesn't know *exactly* what will sell in this day and age because there are no CD price variations.
3) I've never claimed that consumers can coordinate among themselves to influence the record industry. I've claimed that no such coordination is necessary! It's no more necessary than consumers having to coordinate to influence chocolate manufacturers to stop making shit-flavored chocolate: if it doesn't sell, they'll stop making it.
As for the pure public good model leading to a strategic dead end, that may be true, but I wasn't trying to be normative. An mp3 is either a pure public good or it's not. Until you provide me with a reason why it's not, I'm *forced* to work out the implications of it being one.
And I'm not familiar with Samuelson's argument that there are no pure public goods. Seems ironic given that he wrote "The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure" (review of economics and statistics, 1954) which formally defined pure public goods for the first time. If it's one of those 'all models are false' type arguments, then it applies universally to every economic theory we have (there's no such thing as perfect competition or pure monopoly either. Doesn't make those models any less useful in analyazing the world)
BTW, James Buchanan and Ronald Coase, both of whom wrote about the private provision of public goods, have also won the Nobel prize:)
Casting the relationship between consumers and record labels as a principal-agent problem with moral hazard is both incorrect and completely misses the point. The author seems to be aware that asymmetric information between principal and agent is necessary for moral hazard to exist, but the asymmetries the author points out are either not unique to the music industry or just plain wrong. let me explain.
The author asks "So what if, under such a contract, the interests of the record labels (the agent) diverge from the interests of the listeners (the principal)?" Well duh! *Any* industry can be thought of in an asymmetric information principal-agent context with respect to consumers (do you know exactly how every good and service you buy is produced?!), and their interests will trivially conflict (businesses maximize profit, consumers maximize their satisfaction). What's so special about the music industry here? How is the industry's attempt "to impose costs beyond the actual search and production costs for which listeners are actually interesting in paying just to feed the bottom line" different from *any* other for-profit business? Since when do consumers need to know the exact production costs of everything they buy for markets to function well?
Furthermore, the reasons the author gives for the information asymmetries in the music industry are bogus. He claims that under uniform pricing schemes "prices do not serve their usual function of providing an informational feedback loop between labels and listeners". I suppose he never heard of 'sales figures' as an information feedback loop! The author claims that information problems are compounded because "music is an experience good - its value is not directly knowable to buyers until they have begun to consume it." True, but irrelevant! Most people have the opportunity to know more about the CD they buy before they buy it than they can know about most other goods they buy; they can listen to singles on the radio and TV, listen to 30-second samples of every song on sites like Amazon, listen to the whole album in the music store or even borrow the CD from a friend. If there's a problem, it's not that we don't know whether an album has crappy songs, it's that we're forced to buy the crappy ones with the one or two good ones that we like. It's *not* an information problem. Further, consumers need *not* "coordinate amongst themselves" to influence labels any more than they need to "coordinate amongst themselves" to influence any other manufacturer: sales and commercial success speak for themselves.
What *is* unique about the music industry, the movie industry, the software industry and information goods in general is that the internet has transformed them into *pure public goods*, like, for example, national defense. There are two characteristics that define pure public goods: (1) their consumption is non-rival (my consumption of one unit does not affect the ability of anyone else to consume the good. Think of the effect on your neighbor's consumption of his music if you digitally copy one of his CDs, or his consumption of national defense if you increase your household consumption of it by having a baby, compared to the effect on his consumption if you drive away in his car) (2) their consumption is non-exclusive (you cannot prevent a newborn from 'consuming' national defense, and it's difficult or impossible to prevent people from copying information in the internet age, whereas it's possible for your neighbor to prevent you from using his car). Another way to think about pure public goods is that they have high fixed costs of production for the first unit and zero marginal costs of producing additional units.
Pure public goods are a well-understood type of market failure (you'll see them discussed with 'externalities' in most Economics textbooks). The producers of information goods have attempted to solve this problem by making information goods 'exclusive' (a.k.a. DRM) which is sufficient to solve the market failure and eliminate the 'free-ri
First, let me point out that this is not anything particular to geeks; some people simply have trouble throwing stuff away. Second, no storage solution by itself will succeed in the long run; retained junk will increase to fill any available storage space. It's like hard drives, except that you don't have the option of swapping out your old basement/garage and putting in a bigger one. Third, storing old stuff is not really 'free'. There are costs in terms of messiness, increased difficulty of finding what you want, and lost storage space for stuff that might matter more than your 10-year-old computer power supply. Fourth, seriously consider the replacement cost of any item you intend to store. I've seen fully operational pentium PCs selling for under $50 in used PC stores; when you need an old part, just buy one and cannibalize it to your heart's content.
I do wish I could practice what I preach though...:)
Many people argue that one of Linux's greatest strengths is its flexibility and diversity. You can choose from a couple hundred different distributions (or create your own) and pretty much customize your system the way you like it. In fact, this is only half right: A flexible and diverse base install directly implies a rigid and centralized upgrade and application install process for most users.
As a user, once you pick up your distro from one of the stalls of the vibrant and diverse 'bazaar', that stall now becomes your 'cathedral'. You like that shiny new app in that stall over there? Better head to your cathedral to check whether your high priests have compiled a version for you. Is that an available upgrade that you see two stalls over? Better pray that your one true distro has decided to upgrade as well. Did your high priests just take off their ceremonial red hats, don their fedoras and close your cathedral down? Too bad you'll have to find another cathedral to pray at. Sure you can try to learn the incantations and join the priesthood, or even build your own cathedral, but not everyone has the strength of will to take a vow of poverty and give up sex:)
Ok, ok, so I went a little overboard with the metaphor, but you get the idea. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that users, like developers, prefer the freedom of the bazaar. It seems to me users won't get this freedom unless developers are willing to give up some of theirs.
Of course the GPL gives developers 'freedom', namely the freedom to see and modify the source of the software on which they base their work. The cost of that 'freedom' is simply that it be available to the next developer who comes along to base his/her work on that by the current developer.
Your point correctly applies to the very first developer who started to write code from scratch, but what percentage of current FOSS code falls in this category?
And saying GPL == Communism is nonsense. Software, and more generally information goods, are naturally what (capitalist!) economists call 'pure public goods'. You might as well call government provision of national defense 'Communism'! All the copy protection and copyright laws we have are merely artificial attempts to shoe-horn information goods into a private-good mold so the well understood market failures associated with pure public goods can be avoided.
.. play the same game Trillian played with AOL a year or two back? It seemed that the technical cards were stacked in Trillian's favor, and it could patch its client quite quickly to adapt to any AOL blocks. The lack of legal response by AOL seems to show that Trillian wasn't breaking any laws by doing this.
Could someone explain why the situation with MSN Messenger is different?
[Quote] Finally, note that the official Media Player Classic site is down or moved or something. I liked to a trustable source to download the application [/Quote]
Media Player Classic is a SourceForge project. Here's the SourceForge project page with links to the latest source and binaries:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
Also, I second the recommendation. MPC will play almost every video file out there (the only exception I can think of is the newest QuickTime mp4 format).
"Four days later, four companies sent us an e-mail indicating they knew we were looking for a new mortgage". Four days!! With the myriad layers of 'affiliates', 'lead generators', and 'spammers' operating in legally grey areas and distributed all over the world, it's amazing that it takes only this long to get a response. I mean, sometimes it takes longer to get a response from legitimate online tech support!
The article opens by saying "There wouldn't be spam if there wasn't money in spam". Truer words were never uttered. And there wouldn't be money in spam if consumer demand didn't exist. All 'solutions' to the spam problem that fail to take this 'demand' problem into account are, IMO, doomed to failure.
I'm glad at least one person bothered to look up the term 'public good' before posting (actually, there's at least one other comment that brings up the same issues). The parent's mod points are well deserved, and I considered adding my own but decided to follow up on the comment instead.
I want to make two points. First, the 'excludability' of software (or more generally, information goods) is not obvious. I think it's fair to say that the only programs that continue to be 'excludable' are the ones that are not popular enough to warrant cracker attention. Otherwise, you can go onto your favorite website, P2P network, Usenet newsgroup, or IRC channel and download the latest cracked/keygenned version. Legislating excludability and enforcing it are not the same thing and as Microsoft's 'Darknet' paper demonstrates (google on 'darknet microsoft'), it's not likely that legislation, no matter how draconian, will provide 'excludability' to software. Ditto for technological excludability solutions like DRM.
The second point I want to make is that even if software (information goods) is a pure public good (both non-rival and non-excludable), it doesn't necessarily imply that the government has to supply it. Everyone should go to their library and read Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase's classic: "The Lighthouse in Economics, 17 Journal of Law and Economics 357-376 (1974)" (sorry, economics articles are not popular enough to be found on the 'darknet';)). It shows that every economist's favorite example of a pure public good, a lighthouse, has been historically provided through private market forces. There's practically an academic subfield within Public Finance devoted to the problem of 'private provision of public goods', with many innovative solutions, some of which could be adapted to the private provision of information goods such as software.
Did the writeup on this story remind anyone else of the expensive, ongoing, and utterly ineffective war on drugs?
The war on drugs in the US deals with the problem almost entirely as a 'supply' issue. Decades of failure should convince anyone that you can't solve what is essentially a 'demand' issue by stifling 'supply'. It seems that spam is no different...
The question is, do you go with a 'just-say-no' campaign to educate email consumers about spam, or do you accept spam as a (legitimate) fact of life, and work on (government and self) regulations to make it manageable?
Is the Linux kernel free from copyright and patent problems? If the answer is "yes", what can the kernel developers *actively* do to counter the continuing FUD? If the answer is "no", what are they doing to fix the problems? And if the answer is "it's impossible to tell", then how can we claim that 'go-slow' or 'wait-and-see' advice to corporate IT departments is anything but prudent?
I don't think this has anything to do with proprietary software not allowing it. Think of it this way: If you publish something and claim copyright on it, you don't go checking every single published piece of work out there to make sure you're not infringing. The burden of proof is always on the party claiming *infringement*. Legally, SCO still has to prove copyright infringement in court.
But in the court of public (or corporate) opinion, SCO's claims against Linux have a lot of weight because no single person or specific list of people stand accused of infringement. We don't know who to look for to stand up and say "this is *my* code, I didn't copy it from anyone and SCO is full of shit". Auditing the kernel would provide such a list, who can then collectively tell SCO to shove it.
Remember, my point was never about what needs to be done legally. It was about responding to the SCO allegations in the court of public opinion. Linus Torvalds recently claimed in an interview
that the "Linux process is already the most transparent process in the whole industry". That may be, but until an average person can point to a piece of code in the kernel, ask "who wrote this?" and have an answer within a few mouseclicks, that claim is empty.
Please don't confuse stock market bubbles with what's happening to SCO's stock price, which is simply responding to new information. Take a look at the charts at
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX&d=t
and you could probably match significant rises and drops to specific developments in their case against IBM and Linux. Even if the probability of SCO beating IBM or taking control of Linux is very small, the payoff would be so large that even when discounted by a tiny probability, the current stock price, which reflects expected (in the probabilistic sense) profits looks reasonable.
Slashdot Mirror
why *any* company would choose to buy a SCO license without knowing exactly what the infringing code is? Someone please play Devil's advocate and explain why a company shouldn't just wait to be sued by SCO. What judge/jury would penalize a company for saying "we were perfectly willing to pay licensing fees, but SCO just made a completely unverfiable (from out POV) claim of ownership. Why should we have paid until they proved they owned it?"
Seems to me that even if SCO is completely right, the most reasonable outcome for a company that refuses to buy a license now is: pay back fees since the license was offered. How is the company worse off in that case? What am I missing?!
This is not just simple correlation. There's an underlying *explanation* and the numbers simply support that explanation. Is it really surprising that with hundreds of people getting sued (high profile with full media coverage) for thousands of dollars each, P2P usage went down drastically?! The points you provide are additional valid explanations, especially (1) which the article points out anyway. But, IMO, your points don't tell the whole story about the huge declines in P2P the article documents, and it'd be silly to ignore the easiest explanation: the lawsuits.
Not to belabor an uninteresting point, but there's still no irony in what happened today. The **AA already knew that ISPs had common carrier status under the DMCA, a provision lobbied for by ISPs and accepted by the **AA as a compromise. But this specific compromise is not what's at issue today. It's not like the **AA was trying to strip common carrier status from ISPs and was prevented from doing so by the DMCA! That would be irony, I suppose.
:)
The DMCA *was* effective at removing all sorts of copyright violations from the web and anon ftp sites (remember all those mp3 web/ftp search engines?). Some things were always going to fall outside the DMCA turbo-subpoena purview and we just found out today that P2P is one of those things.
In any case, I think we agree on the facts
There's nothing ironic here. The ISPs were never 'liable' for P2P copyright violations. What was at issue was the power to subpoena subscriber names without going through the standard subpoena process (the so-called 'turbocharged subpoena process'), something the DMCA allowed copyright holders to do. The court ruled that this DMCA process does not apply to P2P (DMCA predates wide adoption of P2P, so it wasn't specifically legislated to deal with it).
The copyright holders can still subpoena names from ISPs, but now they have to file 'John Doe' lawsuits and go through the judicial process to obtain the subpoenas. This is much more expensive, which means they won't be issuing them in the hundreds any more.
This is all about default settings for consumer wireless routers. If the average user buys a router, hooks it up, and his laptop gets a wireless internet connection (maybe not even his!), is he really going to look into WEP and resricted MAC access lists? I don't think so.
:)
Having set up a wireless router a couple of months ago for the first time (for a friend), I can attest to the fact that default settings *need* to be user-friendly. Call me a dummy, but I didn't quite get how WEP is implemented at the time: IIRC, the interface on the router and the wireless card driver were a little different, and it wasn't clear to me what to input where (SSID, channel, passphrase, generated key, options to retrieve key automatically, etc.) It's nothing that I can't figure out, but it wasn't obvious even to semi-computer-literate person like me.
I think 'restrict access by MAC address' should be enabled by default *after* a first configuration-wizard run (obviously it can't be enabled *before* initial configuration by the user, and needs to be disabled every time the router is physically reset). The first-run wizard should tell the user, IN BIG LETTERS, that if they want to use a second PC/Laptop with the router, they need to allow access from the first PC by editing the MAC list. The user should also be *prompted* for an SSID and told to enter it into his laptop wireless driver configuration. As for WEP, it should be as easy to set up as picking a passphrase (to be prompted for when a laptop attempts to make a connection) or telling the consumer to copy a generated key to their wireless driver settings.
On the other hand, pervasive and insecure wireless access is something all civil libertarians should appreciate, so I'm not sure I'd want things tightened up too much
Apologies for replying to my own post, but I want to clarify a couple of issues that may answer some of the replies.
First, the issue is not Windows or Apple vs Linux (even if that were the intention of the parent posts). It's commercial vs non-commercial software. If you prefer, it's Red Hat vs Debian.
Second, I think (IANAL!) liability, whether legal or 'effective' is largely a matter of reasonable expectations. Nobody expects a hugely complex product like an operating system, or even a web server, to be completely secure. People understand that they will have to patch this type of software and expect its creators to provide timely patches. On the other hand, people expect that Excel will add the contents of two cells correctly, and if they lose money because Excel can't add, I bet we'd see lawsuits by users and settlements offered by Microsoft.
Third, don't discount the profit motive. Altruism, professionalism, and integrity count for a whole lot, but if you're a non-commercial developer, they won't get you to fly "cross country on two hours notice in order to get a system up and working", as one of the replies indicates.
The two parent posts reflect conventional wisdom here in slashdot. Unfortunately, they miss the point, which is that even if there is no strict 'legal' liability (and there are reasons to think even this may not be true), there's always some 'effective' liability imposed by business reality.
For example, suppose TurboTax makes a certain error in filing that affects a certain percentage of its customers, who are then punished with fees/audits by the IRS. If the case is publicized and the error is strictly TurboTax's, could TurboTax really afford to say that they're not liable because of their EULA? What would that do to their sales the following year? And what would consumer recourse be if they used a non-commercial tax package instead of TurboTax? Who would they hit up for their fees and damages?
Additionally, there's no guarantee that all EULAs would stand a legal test in a liability case. I believe that was what UCITA was all about, strengthening EULAs to limit software liability. If EULAs were always legally biniding, UCITA would probably be unnecessary.
I don't claim that commercial software vendors will always be liable, but there are formal and informal ways of accountability available with commercial vendors. It's not fair to claim that businesses are being completely irrational in continuing to believe this.
Probably a variation on number 10 on the Real Insurance Reports jokes that circulated in email a few years back.
"10. The telephone pole was approaching fast. I was attempting to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end."
Some of the other ones are really funny.
In the second paragraph, McBride writes:
"SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws."
He then spends the rest of the letter explaining why copyright is great, and why the FSF and Red Hat are evil for opposing copyrights. Fine. But *nowhere* is there any reasoning given why the GPL violates the consitution, copyright law or patent law. In fact, by the end of the letter, McBride is forced to write:
"Based on the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court, we believe that adoption and use of the GPL by significant parts of the software industry was a mistake. The positions of the Free Software Foundation and Red Hat against proprietary software are ill-founded and are contrary to our system of copyright and patent laws. We believe that responsible corporations throughout the IT industry have advocated use of the GPL without full analysis of its long-term detriment to our economy. We are confident that these corporations will ultimately reverse support for the GPL, and will pursue a more responsible direction."
Note that there's *nothing* about the legality of the GPL. Adopting the GPL may be a "mistake", but nowhere does he even attempt to prove the point that he started with, that the GPL is a violation of the constitution and laws of the US.
Too bad for SCO. The only way they can have a long term money-making plan with Linux is if they get the GPL declared illegal, all developer contributions under it made into code in the public domain (I suppose public domain is against the constitution too?!), then they can assert ownership of the whole product based on whatever proprietary contributions they think were made against their wishes by IBM et al. IANAL, but it ain't gonna happen.
I think the explanation is a combination of market incentives for complex price and fee structures and corporate unwillingness to work hard to save consumers money.
First, my hypothesis on why certain types of bills are so hard to decipher: in industries with intense competition (long distance, cell phone, credit cards), a complex pricing structure reduces the amount of head-to-head competition you have to face, essentially increasing your monopoly power (I mean that in the technical economic sense of the word) and allowing you to extract more profit from consumers. Think of it this way: If AT&T cost 10 cents/min. flat, and MCI cost 5 cents/min. flat, with no other fees, how many people would continue to use AT&T? But complex pricing structures make it near impossible for consumers to make a head-to-head comparison based on price alone, thus decreasing the effective competition on price in the market.
Complexity in pricing/fee structures inevitably leads to billing errors and/or customer misunderstandings about fees. You can probably design more error-proof billing systems, but the industries won't do that unless it's in their economic benefit to do so: here, as the article points out, is a balance between extra revenue made from those who never complain and extra cost from those who call customer service. As complaints increase, the economic incentive to fix billing, or even simplify it, will increase. But corporations won't take active steps out of the goodness of their hearts to reduce billing errors that benefit them.
So, no conspiracy here, but just a couple of economic incentives interacting.
Thanks for the link. Bugzilla says:
Status: RESOLVED
Resolution: WONTFIX
Which is perfectly sensible, given how complicated this would be. This is not really going to be implemented through the bug tracking system. It's a big idea that requires a big name/organization/company to adopt it. And this will only happen if the idea gets traction (and a lot of discussion) at the grassroots.
What if something like Bugzilla had a system whereby people could make micropayments towards bounties for fixing bugs and implementing features? The final effect would be the same as someone setting up a single large bounty, but the tasks would be prioritized somewhat more democratically.
:)
Setting this up would not be easy: you'd have to have a financial partner (Amazon comes to mind in that they had a system where money was held in escrow or something until the buyer was satisfied), and the system would have to have decent financial auditing to prevent abuse, but it could be done.
Microbounties would also bring back a measure of consumer power to the world of open source development. Projects/tasks that attract donators will also attract developers, and the disconnect we always talk about between what users want and what developers want to work on would become smaller.
And while I'm talking big, let me point out that this model could be adapted to the provision of other information goods. I can imagine a small band setting up a bounty for their next album, with funds not released until the album is complete (in this case, it would be the suppliers setting up the bounties, not the demanders. I guess you'd call them 'ransoms' not 'bounties').
Sombody ought to set up a bounty for the implementation of this idea
Umair:
:). An mp3 is clearly non-rival in consumption. The internet has made it non-exclusive in consumption as well. It is therefore, *by definition*, a pure public good. I don't see where the rivalry or exclusivity are "pretty obvious" as you say. And rather than tell me to 'look it up', why don't you just straight out explain why an mp3 is not a pure public good (if it's so obvious)?!
:)
0) There *is* no contract! Buying a CD is like buying a shirt or a box of chocolate. I suppose you can think about your purchase of a box of chocolate as a principal-agent problem, where you delegate the responsibility to search for good ingredients, find a good recipe, etc. (and you can make all the moral hazard arguments) but I fail to see how this is insightful in any way.
1) Well, I taught college economics for several years, so I guess I should ask myself
2) Uh, sales figures count for *everything* in the record industry. To use your example, the only reason the industry cranks out Britney Spears records is because they sell. If they didn't, they'd drop her like a hot potato. Now it might be lamentable that the public's taste in music is so terrible, or that teeny-boppers have become a significant portion of the buyer market, but you can't seriously argue that the record industry doesn't know *exactly* what will sell in this day and age because there are no CD price variations.
3) I've never claimed that consumers can coordinate among themselves to influence the record industry. I've claimed that no such coordination is necessary! It's no more necessary than consumers having to coordinate to influence chocolate manufacturers to stop making shit-flavored chocolate: if it doesn't sell, they'll stop making it.
As for the pure public good model leading to a strategic dead end, that may be true, but I wasn't trying to be normative. An mp3 is either a pure public good or it's not. Until you provide me with a reason why it's not, I'm *forced* to work out the implications of it being one.
And I'm not familiar with Samuelson's argument that there are no pure public goods. Seems ironic given that he wrote "The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure" (review of economics and statistics, 1954) which formally defined pure public goods for the first time. If it's one of those 'all models are false' type arguments, then it applies universally to every economic theory we have (there's no such thing as perfect competition or pure monopoly either. Doesn't make those models any less useful in analyazing the world)
BTW, James Buchanan and Ronald Coase, both of whom wrote about the private provision of public goods, have also won the Nobel prize
Tamer
Casting the relationship between consumers and record labels as a principal-agent problem with moral hazard is both incorrect and completely misses the point. The author seems to be aware that asymmetric information between principal and agent is necessary for moral hazard to exist, but the asymmetries the author points out are either not unique to the music industry or just plain wrong. let me explain.
The author asks "So what if, under such a contract, the interests of the record labels (the agent) diverge from the interests of the listeners (the principal)?" Well duh! *Any* industry can be thought of in an asymmetric information principal-agent context with respect to consumers (do you know exactly how every good and service you buy is produced?!), and their interests will trivially conflict (businesses maximize profit, consumers maximize their satisfaction). What's so special about the music industry here? How is the industry's attempt "to impose costs beyond the actual search and production costs for which listeners are actually interesting in paying just to feed the bottom line" different from *any* other for-profit business? Since when do consumers need to know the exact production costs of everything they buy for markets to function well?
Furthermore, the reasons the author gives for the information asymmetries in the music industry are bogus. He claims that under uniform pricing schemes "prices do not serve their usual function of providing an informational feedback loop between labels and listeners". I suppose he never heard of 'sales figures' as an information feedback loop! The author claims that information problems are compounded because "music is an experience good - its value is not directly knowable to buyers until they have begun to consume it." True, but irrelevant! Most people have the opportunity to know more about the CD they buy before they buy it than they can know about most other goods they buy; they can listen to singles on the radio and TV, listen to 30-second samples of every song on sites like Amazon, listen to the whole album in the music store or even borrow the CD from a friend. If there's a problem, it's not that we don't know whether an album has crappy songs, it's that we're forced to buy the crappy ones with the one or two good ones that we like. It's *not* an information problem. Further, consumers need *not* "coordinate amongst themselves" to influence labels any more than they need to "coordinate amongst themselves" to influence any other manufacturer: sales and commercial success speak for themselves.
What *is* unique about the music industry, the movie industry, the software industry and information goods in general is that the internet has transformed them into *pure public goods*, like, for example, national defense. There are two characteristics that define pure public goods: (1) their consumption is non-rival (my consumption of one unit does not affect the ability of anyone else to consume the good. Think of the effect on your neighbor's consumption of his music if you digitally copy one of his CDs, or his consumption of national defense if you increase your household consumption of it by having a baby, compared to the effect on his consumption if you drive away in his car) (2) their consumption is non-exclusive (you cannot prevent a newborn from 'consuming' national defense, and it's difficult or impossible to prevent people from copying information in the internet age, whereas it's possible for your neighbor to prevent you from using his car). Another way to think about pure public goods is that they have high fixed costs of production for the first unit and zero marginal costs of producing additional units.
Pure public goods are a well-understood type of market failure (you'll see them discussed with 'externalities' in most Economics textbooks). The producers of information goods have attempted to solve this problem by making information goods 'exclusive' (a.k.a. DRM) which is sufficient to solve the market failure and eliminate the 'free-ri
First, let me point out that this is not anything particular to geeks; some people simply have trouble throwing stuff away.
... :)
Second, no storage solution by itself will succeed in the long run; retained junk will increase to fill any available storage space. It's like hard drives, except that you don't have the option of swapping out your old basement/garage and putting in a bigger one.
Third, storing old stuff is not really 'free'. There are costs in terms of messiness, increased difficulty of finding what you want, and lost storage space for stuff that might matter more than your 10-year-old computer power supply.
Fourth, seriously consider the replacement cost of any item you intend to store. I've seen fully operational pentium PCs selling for under $50 in used PC stores; when you need an old part, just buy one and cannibalize it to your heart's content.
I do wish I could practice what I preach though
Many people argue that one of Linux's greatest strengths is its flexibility and diversity. You can choose from a couple hundred different distributions (or create your own) and pretty much customize your system the way you like it. In fact, this is only half right: A flexible and diverse base install directly implies a rigid and centralized upgrade and application install process for most users.
:)
As a user, once you pick up your distro from one of the stalls of the vibrant and diverse 'bazaar', that stall now becomes your 'cathedral'. You like that shiny new app in that stall over there? Better head to your cathedral to check whether your high priests have compiled a version for you. Is that an available upgrade that you see two stalls over? Better pray that your one true distro has decided to upgrade as well. Did your high priests just take off their ceremonial red hats, don their fedoras and close your cathedral down? Too bad you'll have to find another cathedral to pray at. Sure you can try to learn the incantations and join the priesthood, or even build your own cathedral, but not everyone has the strength of will to take a vow of poverty and give up sex
Ok, ok, so I went a little overboard with the metaphor, but you get the idea. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that users, like developers, prefer the freedom of the bazaar. It seems to me users won't get this freedom unless developers are willing to give up some of theirs.
Of course the GPL gives developers 'freedom', namely the freedom to see and modify the source of the software on which they base their work. The cost of that 'freedom' is simply that it be available to the next developer who comes along to base his/her work on that by the current developer.
Your point correctly applies to the very first developer who started to write code from scratch, but what percentage of current FOSS code falls in this category?
And saying GPL == Communism is nonsense. Software, and more generally information goods, are naturally what (capitalist!) economists call 'pure public goods'. You might as well call government provision of national defense 'Communism'! All the copy protection and copyright laws we have are merely artificial attempts to shoe-horn information goods into a private-good mold so the well understood market failures associated with pure public goods can be avoided.
.. play the same game Trillian played with AOL a year or two back? It seemed that the technical cards were stacked in Trillian's favor, and it could patch its client quite quickly to adapt to any AOL blocks. The lack of legal response by AOL seems to show that Trillian wasn't breaking any laws by doing this.
Could someone explain why the situation with MSN Messenger is different?
[Quote]
Finally, note that the official Media Player Classic site is down or moved or something. I liked to a trustable source to download the application
[/Quote]
Media Player Classic is a SourceForge project. Here's the SourceForge project page with links to the latest source and binaries:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
Also, I second the recommendation. MPC will play almost every video file out there (the only exception I can think of is the newest QuickTime mp4 format).
"Four days later, four companies sent us an e-mail indicating they knew we were looking for a new mortgage". Four days!! With the myriad layers of 'affiliates', 'lead generators', and 'spammers' operating in legally grey areas and distributed all over the world, it's amazing that it takes only this long to get a response. I mean, sometimes it takes longer to get a response from legitimate online tech support!
The article opens by saying "There wouldn't be spam if there wasn't money in spam". Truer words were never uttered. And there wouldn't be money in spam if consumer demand didn't exist. All 'solutions' to the spam problem that fail to take this 'demand' problem into account are, IMO, doomed to failure.
I'm glad at least one person bothered to look up the term 'public good' before posting (actually, there's at least one other comment that brings up the same issues). The parent's mod points are well deserved, and I considered adding my own but decided to follow up on the comment instead.
;)). It shows that every economist's favorite example of a pure public good, a lighthouse, has been historically provided through private market forces. There's practically an academic subfield within Public Finance devoted to the problem of 'private provision of public goods', with many innovative solutions, some of which could be adapted to the private provision of information goods such as software.
I want to make two points. First, the 'excludability' of software (or more generally, information goods) is not obvious. I think it's fair to say that the only programs that continue to be 'excludable' are the ones that are not popular enough to warrant cracker attention. Otherwise, you can go onto your favorite website, P2P network, Usenet newsgroup, or IRC channel and download the latest cracked/keygenned version. Legislating excludability and enforcing it are not the same thing and as Microsoft's 'Darknet' paper demonstrates (google on 'darknet microsoft'), it's not likely that legislation, no matter how draconian, will provide 'excludability' to software. Ditto for technological excludability solutions like DRM.
The second point I want to make is that even if software (information goods) is a pure public good (both non-rival and non-excludable), it doesn't necessarily imply that the government has to supply it. Everyone should go to their library and read Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase's classic: "The Lighthouse in Economics, 17 Journal of Law and Economics 357-376 (1974)" (sorry, economics articles are not popular enough to be found on the 'darknet'
Did the writeup on this story remind anyone else of the expensive, ongoing, and utterly ineffective war on drugs?
...
The war on drugs in the US deals with the problem almost entirely as a 'supply' issue. Decades of failure should convince anyone that you can't solve what is essentially a 'demand' issue by stifling 'supply'. It seems that spam is no different
The question is, do you go with a 'just-say-no' campaign to educate email consumers about spam, or do you accept spam as a (legitimate) fact of life, and work on (government and self) regulations to make it manageable?
Is the Linux kernel free from copyright and patent problems? If the answer is "yes", what can the kernel developers *actively* do to counter the continuing FUD? If the answer is "no", what are they doing to fix the problems? And if the answer is "it's impossible to tell", then how can we claim that 'go-slow' or 'wait-and-see' advice to corporate IT departments is anything but prudent?
I don't think this has anything to do with proprietary software not allowing it. Think of it this way: If you publish something and claim copyright on it, you don't go checking every single published piece of work out there to make sure you're not infringing. The burden of proof is always on the party claiming *infringement*. Legally, SCO still has to prove copyright infringement in court.
4 0, 00.asp
But in the court of public (or corporate) opinion, SCO's claims against Linux have a lot of weight because no single person or specific list of people stand accused of infringement. We don't know who to look for to stand up and say "this is *my* code, I didn't copy it from anyone and SCO is full of shit". Auditing the kernel would provide such a list, who can then collectively tell SCO to shove it.
Remember, my point was never about what needs to be done legally. It was about responding to the SCO allegations in the court of public opinion. Linus Torvalds recently claimed in an interview
http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3668,a=437
that the "Linux process is already the most transparent process in the whole industry". That may be, but until an average person can point to a piece of code in the kernel, ask "who wrote this?" and have an answer within a few mouseclicks, that claim is empty.
Please don't confuse stock market bubbles with what's happening to SCO's stock price, which is simply responding to new information. Take a look at the charts at
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SCOX&d=t
and you could probably match significant rises and drops to specific developments in their case against IBM and Linux. Even if the probability of SCO beating IBM or taking control of Linux is very small, the payoff would be so large that even when discounted by a tiny probability, the current stock price, which reflects expected (in the probabilistic sense) profits looks reasonable.