The rebuttal completely misses the point. The point of the Forbes article is that the software written using GPL has a market value of near $0, since anyone can download it for free (as in beer) and compile it themselves. That's why you don't see many sw companies writing OSS. The ones that do are usually selling hardware as their primary income (Apple, Sun, and even Linksys). Linksys could probably release all their modified code and probably still make money as the rebuttal insists, but it will make it easiers for competitors to encroach on their business, since besides writing the software, all they're really doing is putting some chips (that they didnt design) on a board without violating any specs. NVidia is in a similar predicament with their closed source drivers. Luckily for them people still use them even though it means their Linux solution is tainted.
"By demanding that licensees publish source code for their own "derivative work" code (in addition to the Linux they're using) the FSF is, in effect, charging a royalty that approaches 100% of the value of the licensee's product."
This is absolutely correct. Code where the source is freely available has a value that approaches zero very quickly. The only people who pay for Linux code, for instance, are those who are too impatient to download it, and then pay for the cds. Everyone else downloads it for free. That isn't to say you can't make money from Linux. Red hat is trying through charging for support and stupid features like up2date, which would be free normally if you paid for the OS. Suse managed to charge Munich millions for free software, which pay for support. However, even though it is possible to make money through support, a company that hires its own support can pay zero for the software legally, which is the value of that software.
"I'll bite! The RIAA and MPAA are limiting the freedoms of individuals for the benefit of corporations. FSF and the GPL are limiting the freedoms of corporations for the benefit of individuals. Rule #1: Always err on the side of the individual. For instance, compare "Undamaged corporations and damaged individuals" versus "damaged corporations and undamaged indiduals". In the broadest possible sense, you're a fool to pick the first over the second. Because if the individuals are undamaged, then by definition, who cares about the corporations?"
Corporations are composed of individuals. Denying these individuals their rights is a sure fire solution to destroy productivity,k as well as an immoral act that supresses freedom. If you promote the freedom of one while denying the freedom of another, you are a hypocrite. Such a policy is only good for you until a govt. arbitrarily puts you in the bad catagory and denies you your rights, at which point I won't shed any tears for you. Giving the govt. the right to selectively enforce rights is the cause of more harm than good.
"Measured relatively, this individual empowerment comes at the expense of the power of governments and large commercial enterprises, reversing a trend toward concentration of power more than a century old which has acted to reduce free citizens and productive individuals to subjects and consumers."
The problem with the above statement is that it assumes the Internet can somehow magically fix problems with the political-social climate. The internet, like television, radio, telephone, etc., is a communication network. In a free society, the only restrictions are practical, based on limited resources. In a controlled society, the restrictions are whatever the govt feels like imposing. For instance, in N. Korea, only the govt broadcasts tv, and your tv is specifically designed to only allow you to tune in the govt. stations. In most countries that are somewhat free, the only restritions on tv broadcast relate to the fact that the bandwidth is limited. There are also obscenity laws depending on the level of censorship, which is why I use the term mostly-free. If you apply this trend to the internet what you find is that as the internet evolves, in free societies, there will still be a free exchange of information. The restrictions you see will involve only content that you don't own the copyright to, or is in some way illegal (child pornography, for instance). Micropayments will only be charged by sites that feel their content is worth the money. Personal identification won't be necessary unless one of the parties insists, at which point the other party can go elsewhaere. Of course in a controlled society, they will use internet tools like TCP to clamp down, but they already block content anyway. My point is, the internet, in any form, can't create freedom if the govt. doesn't want people to have that freedom. They'll simply block the content. Also, I thought the attack on business was somewhat misinformed. In a truly free society, businesses can only offer goods and services, which individuals can accept or refuse. Even in mostly free societies, however, any number of interests can influence govts. to strip people of their freedoms. I don't know why the author singled out big business, since many groups use their influence with the govt. to abuse freedom.
" Apple have obviously selected a good codec, but who designed it? I can't imagine them designing their own codec unless they really needed to."
The codec isn't the issue. AIFF is uncompressed data like that stored on a cd. The audiophiles are interested in how well this signal is converted to analog and amplified. They're concerned about stuff like distortion, S/N ratio, (which determines dynamic range), output power, etc.
"Actually, I found that the CAT-5 cable I rigged up as stereo cable...blows away most commercial wire I've listened to..."
CAT-5 is twisted pair, which may be more impervious to picking up extermal noise (from power lines, for instance). Other than these types of issues, the main performance parameter for speaker wire is the resistance of the line and the quality of the connectors. You can get a good solution for a lot less than $10000
A dual AMD Opteron system gets similar perforamnce when compared with a dual G5 system at a substantially lower cost. Plus you have more options in terms of cases, and may be able to get a rackmount solution.
So someone writes an article saying it's not very practical to run multiple OSs in a work environment solely for security, and probably not more effective since if anything goes down, it'll probably hinder everything. Further he says earlier reports produce no quantitative evidence to show whether or not there will be a cost reduction in pasting together different systems to improve security. Also there is no mention of port 80 in the article. The article's points are reasonable, but not surprisingly slashdot is on a smear campaign that makes the LA Times look objective. Consider this, if Linux was the prevalent OS, would you still make the arguement that people should diversify away from Linux to improve security? If your answer is no, you should consider your opinion biased. Anyway, the anti-MS tirade is getting old, and/. should get some objectivity if they ever want to be considered a credible news source.
Someone who provides a thousands songs for download is not a customer, it's a competitor. The RIAA rightly recognizes that the only way to compete against someone who gives their own product away for free is to sue them, since it is illegal. This is nothing like the Ford case, in which, competitors sued Ford's customers for buying Ford's cars instead of theirs. If Ford stole the competitors cars and gave htem away, and then Ford got sued, then the analogy would be better. If SCO starts suing Linux users, that would be analogous to the Ford case.
It seems today having a landmark paper or two isn't good enough, so he'd have to take a dozen or so papers talking about his ideas on calculus and physics and recycle them into a hundred papers, and then he might get tenure.
I hate to burst your bubble but...
on
Why Only Music?
·
· Score: 1
the whole concept of compulsory licensing is unconsititutional. That's not surprising since it's a direct attack on freedom.
Although I agree that telemarketers don't have the right to call me at home if I don't want them to, I don't like this law because non-profit and politcal organizations are exempt. This is unconstitutional in that it makes a distinction between speech for profit and speech with other agendas. If it's not a free speech issue (as I think), but instead a no free platform for speech issue (i.e. you can have your free speech, but not in my living room), then I should have the right to block political and non-prfit calls as well.
If someone wants to change their web browser to be more intelligent about bad domain names, that's fine. It's not Verisign's place, however, to force a standard, especially without the consent of the community that pays for and uses the system.
This type of case exemplifies the problem you have when you let a govt. grant a monopoly. Once a govt. grants company a the exclusive right to lay down a physical network (cable, phone, power, etc.), that company is a de facto monopoly. Here's how the game works. Govt. grants exclusive rights initially to the company paying for the netwrok to encourage investment in the network with a guaranteed monopoly. Once the network is working well, the monopoly right is taken away, and other comapnies are allowed to use the network at or below cost. This has the immediate effect of screwing the company that owns the network by changing the rules on a whim in the middle of the game. The secondary effect is that incentive to improve the network has been significantly diminished since money invested won't get a return since it benefits your competitors at your expense. Also extending the network to areas outside the current reach is unlikely for the same reason. The only good solution is to allow two or more companies lay redundant networks. The real competition between AT@T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. has vastly improved long distance and lowered the rates. The artificial competition in local phone markets has not reduced cost or improved service substantially, however. Don't expect there to be any improvement in cable service due to this artificial competition.
Here's an interesting rebuttal. The 1st line is "The single biggest security issue facing Linux users at the moment is the misconception perpetuated by highly vocal advocates that Linux is somehow impenetrable to security-based attacks, and in particular, viruses and other malware."
I was worried I'd have to give up on BMG, which would suck given they have the best cd deals around for popular music. Hard to beat the 12 for 1 deal, which averages to $4 or $5 per cd even after all the shipping and handling fees are paid.
" I didn't realize RFID tags could be turned off. Are they not basically passive "reflectors", powered by the scanner's signal?"
There's no reason you can't put information on the carrier to given the RFID command instructions. It would be nice if the started using cryptography on the chips so that the owner of the chip is the only one who could command it. In this case, the library is the only one who can turn on and off the RFID transmitter, thereby eliminating the privacy threat.
If this new BIOS is used by IBM, HP, Dell, etc., they will make sure that the machines boot Linux, since they have a server business model now that relies on Linux. Having said this, it is likely that the new BIOS scheme will likely benefit Linux as well if it improves Windows performance.
This example just goes to show what a mess will be created if the govt. simply collects a pot of money from ISPs and then tries to divy it up to the recording inductry. Everybody and his lawyer will be in line for a piece of the action. In the Soviet Union people stood in lines too for similar reasons, and look how that turned out. The system is inherently unfair because the one who gets the most money will be the one with the best lawyer and the most lobbying money, instead of the person with the most talent and the ability to write something someone wants to hear.
That conspiracy theory is more plausable than the one put forth by the article. Who really believes the MPAA would promote p2p so they can delete your movie files. Without the p2p, you won't have any illegal movie files.
That fact CAGW uses OSS itself is as good an indicator as any that they're not biased against open source. As the article states, they don't want legislation restricting choice. They have nothing against Linux, in particular.
Your making the assumption that the paper is correct. The paper is a thinly veiled attempt to push an agenda of open standards, using security as an excuse. No one in their right mind relies on obscure software for security, but this is what the paper suggests. I don't believe the author believes this either, but was pushing a different agenda, and that is why he was rightly fired.
Since the paper he was fired over was basically a spin on security through obscurity, I don't think it damages @stake's credibility. The arguement of the paper is that with a greater variety of software running on machines, a security problem is less exploitable. Although this is true, it's not a good way to apporach security from an individual's perspective. I shouldn't rely on running obscure software as a security measure. The paper has an alternative agenda of pushing open standards, and claiming security as a valid reason to do so, which is a questionable reason to push your agenda. If I were @stake, I'd be pissed at the guy too for using security as a means to push an agenda that's only marginally related to security.
So now if someone writes a guy drinking a can of Coke into a script, he needs to get a lawyer to determine that the drinking of the Coke isn't misrepresented in the show in terms of the product's value, and the lawyer will need to put in a disclaimer saying the station nether condones nor condemns the drinking of Coke. The industry is self regulating already. If people don't like something, they switch the channel. If I want to write a script where a guy saves the world by drinking a Coke, don't I have some free speech rights, here, or did I lose them all in some contract with the FCC.
Slashdot Mirror
The rebuttal completely misses the point. The point of the Forbes article is that the software written using GPL has a market value of near $0, since anyone can download it for free (as in beer) and compile it themselves. That's why you don't see many sw companies writing OSS. The ones that do are usually selling hardware as their primary income (Apple, Sun, and even Linksys). Linksys could probably release all their modified code and probably still make money as the rebuttal insists, but it will make it easiers for competitors to encroach on their business, since besides writing the software, all they're really doing is putting some chips (that they didnt design) on a board without violating any specs. NVidia is in a similar predicament with their closed source drivers. Luckily for them people still use them even though it means their Linux solution is tainted.
"By demanding that licensees publish source code for their own "derivative work" code (in addition to the Linux they're using) the FSF is, in effect, charging a royalty that approaches 100% of the value of the licensee's product."
This is absolutely correct. Code where the source is freely available has a value that approaches zero very quickly. The only people who pay for Linux code, for instance, are those who are too impatient to download it, and then pay for the cds. Everyone else downloads it for free. That isn't to say you can't make money from Linux. Red hat is trying through charging for support and stupid features like up2date, which would be free normally if you paid for the OS. Suse managed to charge Munich millions for free software, which pay for support. However, even though it is possible to make money through support, a company that hires its own support can pay zero for the software legally, which is the value of that software.
"I'll bite! The RIAA and MPAA are limiting the freedoms of individuals for the benefit of corporations. FSF and the GPL are limiting the freedoms of corporations for the benefit of individuals. Rule #1: Always err on the side of the individual. For instance, compare "Undamaged corporations and damaged individuals" versus "damaged corporations and undamaged indiduals". In the broadest possible sense, you're a fool to pick the first over the second. Because if the individuals are undamaged, then by definition, who cares about the corporations?"
Corporations are composed of individuals. Denying these individuals their rights is a sure fire solution to destroy productivity,k as well as an immoral act that supresses freedom. If you promote the freedom of one while denying the freedom of another, you are a hypocrite. Such a policy is only good for you until a govt. arbitrarily puts you in the bad catagory and denies you your rights, at which point I won't shed any tears for you. Giving the govt. the right to selectively enforce rights is the cause of more harm than good.
"Measured relatively, this individual empowerment comes at the expense of the power of governments and large commercial enterprises, reversing a trend toward concentration of power more than a century old which has acted to reduce free citizens and productive individuals to subjects and consumers."
The problem with the above statement is that it assumes the Internet can somehow magically fix problems with the political-social climate. The internet, like television, radio, telephone, etc., is a communication network. In a free society, the only restrictions are practical, based on limited resources. In a controlled society, the restrictions are whatever the govt feels like imposing. For instance, in N. Korea, only the govt broadcasts tv, and your tv is specifically designed to only allow you to tune in the govt. stations. In most countries that are somewhat free, the only restritions on tv broadcast relate to the fact that the bandwidth is limited. There are also obscenity laws depending on the level of censorship, which is why I use the term mostly-free. If you apply this trend to the internet what you find is that as the internet evolves, in free societies, there will still be a free exchange of information. The restrictions you see will involve only content that you don't own the copyright to, or is in some way illegal (child pornography, for instance). Micropayments will only be charged by sites that feel their content is worth the money. Personal identification won't be necessary unless one of the parties insists, at which point the other party can go elsewhaere. Of course in a controlled society, they will use internet tools like TCP to clamp down, but they already block content anyway. My point is, the internet, in any form, can't create freedom if the govt. doesn't want people to have that freedom. They'll simply block the content. Also, I thought the attack on business was somewhat misinformed. In a truly free society, businesses can only offer goods and services, which individuals can accept or refuse. Even in mostly free societies, however, any number of interests can influence govts. to strip people of their freedoms. I don't know why the author singled out big business, since many groups use their influence with the govt. to abuse freedom.
" Apple have obviously selected a good codec, but who designed it? I can't imagine them designing their own codec unless they really needed to."
The codec isn't the issue. AIFF is uncompressed data like that stored on a cd. The audiophiles are interested in how well this signal is converted to analog and amplified. They're concerned about stuff like distortion, S/N ratio, (which determines dynamic range), output power, etc.
"Actually, I found that the CAT-5 cable I rigged up as stereo cable...blows away most commercial wire I've listened to..."
CAT-5 is twisted pair, which may be more impervious to picking up extermal noise (from power lines, for instance). Other than these types of issues, the main performance parameter for speaker wire is the resistance of the line and the quality of the connectors. You can get a good solution for a lot less than $10000
A dual AMD Opteron system gets similar perforamnce when compared with a dual G5 system at a substantially lower cost. Plus you have more options in terms of cases, and may be able to get a rackmount solution.
So someone writes an article saying it's not very practical to run multiple OSs in a work environment solely for security, and probably not more effective since if anything goes down, it'll probably hinder everything. Further he says earlier reports produce no quantitative evidence to show whether or not there will be a cost reduction in pasting together different systems to improve security. Also there is no mention of port 80 in the article. The article's points are reasonable, but not surprisingly slashdot is on a smear campaign that makes the LA Times look objective. Consider this, if Linux was the prevalent OS, would you still make the arguement that people should diversify away from Linux to improve security? If your answer is no, you should consider your opinion biased. Anyway, the anti-MS tirade is getting old, and /. should get some objectivity if they ever want to be considered a credible news source.
Someone who provides a thousands songs for download is not a customer, it's a competitor. The RIAA rightly recognizes that the only way to compete against someone who gives their own product away for free is to sue them, since it is illegal. This is nothing like the Ford case, in which, competitors sued Ford's customers for buying Ford's cars instead of theirs. If Ford stole the competitors cars and gave htem away, and then Ford got sued, then the analogy would be better. If SCO starts suing Linux users, that would be analogous to the Ford case.
It seems today having a landmark paper or two isn't good enough, so he'd have to take a dozen or so papers talking about his ideas on calculus and physics and recycle them into a hundred papers, and then he might get tenure.
the whole concept of compulsory licensing is unconsititutional. That's not surprising since it's a direct attack on freedom.
Although I agree that telemarketers don't have the right to call me at home if I don't want them to, I don't like this law because non-profit and politcal organizations are exempt. This is unconstitutional in that it makes a distinction between speech for profit and speech with other agendas. If it's not a free speech issue (as I think), but instead a no free platform for speech issue (i.e. you can have your free speech, but not in my living room), then I should have the right to block political and non-prfit calls as well.
The CEOs of Intel and AMD aren't even on the list. I'd think they'd have something to do with setting the tech agenda.
If someone wants to change their web browser to be more intelligent about bad domain names, that's fine. It's not Verisign's place, however, to force a standard, especially without the consent of the community that pays for and uses the system.
This type of case exemplifies the problem you have when you let a govt. grant a monopoly. Once a govt. grants company a the exclusive right to lay down a physical network (cable, phone, power, etc.), that company is a de facto monopoly. Here's how the game works. Govt. grants exclusive rights initially to the company paying for the netwrok to encourage investment in the network with a guaranteed monopoly. Once the network is working well, the monopoly right is taken away, and other comapnies are allowed to use the network at or below cost. This has the immediate effect of screwing the company that owns the network by changing the rules on a whim in the middle of the game. The secondary effect is that incentive to improve the network has been significantly diminished since money invested won't get a return since it benefits your competitors at your expense. Also extending the network to areas outside the current reach is unlikely for the same reason. The only good solution is to allow two or more companies lay redundant networks. The real competition between AT@T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. has vastly improved long distance and lowered the rates. The artificial competition in local phone markets has not reduced cost or improved service substantially, however. Don't expect there to be any improvement in cable service due to this artificial competition.
Here's an interesting rebuttal. The 1st line is "The single biggest security issue facing Linux users at the moment is the misconception perpetuated by highly vocal advocates that Linux is somehow impenetrable to security-based attacks, and in particular, viruses and other malware."
I was worried I'd have to give up on BMG, which would suck given they have the best cd deals around for popular music. Hard to beat the 12 for 1 deal, which averages to $4 or $5 per cd even after all the shipping and handling fees are paid.
" I didn't realize RFID tags could be turned off. Are they not basically passive "reflectors", powered by the scanner's signal?"
There's no reason you can't put information on the carrier to given the RFID command instructions. It would be nice if the started using cryptography on the chips so that the owner of the chip is the only one who could command it. In this case, the library is the only one who can turn on and off the RFID transmitter, thereby eliminating the privacy threat.
If this new BIOS is used by IBM, HP, Dell, etc., they will make sure that the machines boot Linux, since they have a server business model now that relies on Linux. Having said this, it is likely that the new BIOS scheme will likely benefit Linux as well if it improves Windows performance.
This example just goes to show what a mess will be created if the govt. simply collects a pot of money from ISPs and then tries to divy it up to the recording inductry. Everybody and his lawyer will be in line for a piece of the action. In the Soviet Union people stood in lines too for similar reasons, and look how that turned out. The system is inherently unfair because the one who gets the most money will be the one with the best lawyer and the most lobbying money, instead of the person with the most talent and the ability to write something someone wants to hear.
That conspiracy theory is more plausable than the one put forth by the article. Who really believes the MPAA would promote p2p so they can delete your movie files. Without the p2p, you won't have any illegal movie files.
That fact CAGW uses OSS itself is as good an indicator as any that they're not biased against open source. As the article states, they don't want legislation restricting choice. They have nothing against Linux, in particular.
Your making the assumption that the paper is correct. The paper is a thinly veiled attempt to push an agenda of open standards, using security as an excuse. No one in their right mind relies on obscure software for security, but this is what the paper suggests. I don't believe the author believes this either, but was pushing a different agenda, and that is why he was rightly fired.
Since the paper he was fired over was basically a spin on security through obscurity, I don't think it damages @stake's credibility. The arguement of the paper is that with a greater variety of software running on machines, a security problem is less exploitable. Although this is true, it's not a good way to apporach security from an individual's perspective. I shouldn't rely on running obscure software as a security measure. The paper has an alternative agenda of pushing open standards, and claiming security as a valid reason to do so, which is a questionable reason to push your agenda. If I were @stake, I'd be pissed at the guy too for using security as a means to push an agenda that's only marginally related to security.
So now if someone writes a guy drinking a can of Coke into a script, he needs to get a lawyer to determine that the drinking of the Coke isn't misrepresented in the show in terms of the product's value, and the lawyer will need to put in a disclaimer saying the station nether condones nor condemns the drinking of Coke. The industry is self regulating already. If people don't like something, they switch the channel. If I want to write a script where a guy saves the world by drinking a Coke, don't I have some free speech rights, here, or did I lose them all in some contract with the FCC.