This is not a question of preventing patent trolls from patenting the same thing.
Firstly, because AMQP has hundreds or thousands of areas that could be similarly patented: failover, federation, many types of exchange, remote administration, etc. It only takes one patent to hold the whole standard to ransom. Red Hat would have to patent every single technical aspect of the standard, which would be impossible in practical terms.
Secondly, because there are much cheaper ways of stopping patent trolls from patenting obvious things: publish them, register them as prior art at the USPTO.
It's naive to think that the only way patents are used is to 'go after' projects. 99% of the time, patents of this sort are used in discrete discussions with potential clients. "You know, we hold a patent on that... (hint hint)". This is enough to scare the customer into at least not using a rival product, open source or not. Indeed, patents that make it to court tend to die rather faster than patents used under the table.
The irony of this patent is that technically, it's not that interesting. Dynamic message routing on XML is not difficult, but not efficient. It's much faster to pre-calculate routing keys and indices, as the existing AMQP exchanges do.
So I think Red Hat are simply playing the game of collecting software patents like points.
It's pretty difficult to see this story as representative of a legitimate concern, at least of any informed person. Among all of the major distributions of Linux, Red Hat is probably the most Free Software oriented (except perhaps for Debian). As a member of OIN, they contribute patents licensed to other members in order to create a defence against patent lawsuits. They've repeatedly and consistently put their money into Free Software by purchasing desirable products and re-licensing them under the GPL. They're one of the largest contributors of code to the Linux kernel, GNU libc, gcc, GNOME, and other core components of GNU/Linux distributions.
And after all of that, the very notion of Red Hat suiting up to sue Free Software developers is completely ridiculous, because doing so would void their license to distribute the software.
This article is just another troll painting one of the Free Software community's leaders in an undeserved poor light. Whether the author is completely ignorant of the subject matter, or is intentionally trolling, this story deserves a place in the dust bin.
All patenting around open standards is a concern, both to developers of the standards, and users. A patent holder's intentions may, and often do, change over the course of the 20 years the patent may exist.
In this case, Red Hat seem to be seeking "ownership" of areas around the standard. They don't need to sue anyone to establish this, that is a straw man. The simple fact of owning patents is enough to scare potential customers away from competitors.
I've personally worked with Red Hat in fighting software patents in Europe but would not consider this story to be a troll. Any FOSS firm that is willing to spend money on patents, but not the fight against software patents (and I can tell you that to the best of my knowledge RHAT are not funding the main European groups against software patents), is working the wrong side.
So this story seems relevant if only to highlight how behaviour changes when money is involved.
When Red Hat seek software patents around an open standard, that's news.
"What percentage of Windows PCs are 0wn3d by one or other parasite? By multiple parasites? By spammers working with crackers working with corrupt web site designers and pornographers? Enough, I think to ensure that within a short time - say 6 to 12 months - we will hit infection levels of 50% and more. The vast majority of home PCs, happily connected to the Internet, will be hit, and a large proportion of office PCs, insufficiently secured and protected, will also succumb."
This was written in September 2003. And it's just starting to hit the general consciousness now?
I never said Microsoft were evil or monolithic. Try thinking about what I actually said, not what you imagine are people's criticisms of your company.
283 patents in the Linux kernel? Possibly. All complex software hits patents. The question is: are any of these patents enforceable, have they a basis that will stand up in court, and can they beat the huge patent portfolios that IBM is now making available to free software developers. Do you see what I'm saying? Each patent attack by Microsoft against Linux risks a volley of counterattacks from IBM against Windows.
Microsoft's fate is sealed for a simple reason, nothing to do with marketing or opinion. Nothing you say, nothing I say, will change this reason.
Linux repesents something. A sea change in the way software is made. A radical shift. It's not new in itself but the scale and efficiency has been rising exponentially. It was unstoppable in 1999, even long before that.
Microsoft will either adopt that way, or they will be buried under it. There is no alternative.
Think about it. Think about the stacks of CDs containing hundreds of millions of lines of high-quality, working, secure, and useful code. Think about the process that produces this software.
Now think about the pain Microsoft has to produce comparable software. Where is Longhorn? Delayed again? You think patents are going to fix this?
Microsoft is like a wealthy man dying of cancer. Money is no substitute for youth and health.
Actually, it's starting to be sad, seeing people like you "defend" Microsoft when no-one is attacking. There is no hate anymore. We're just watching the old man die, even as he spits and tries to claw at us.
But look... IBM are a big, old, wise, rich company. They certainly have spies deep inside Microsoft. At the very least they knew what was happening and had a strategy in place before the first public announcements from SCO.
Clearly their strategy was to sit tight, stay calm, provide all documents requested by the courts, and allow SCO to beat themselves into silly putty.
They could have done so many other things... settled, bought SCO, bribed someone. But they went through this exercise because they knew that their reputation, and that of their adopted protege, Linux, were on trial.
I'd not put it beyond IBM to have instigated the whole affair from within Microsoft. It just takes one fairly senior manager with a bright idea.
The technical term is "agent provocateur" and it's an old and effective way of getting the opposition to hurt themselves.
IBM are... brutal. Have no illusions. They were born from NCR, who's salesmen carried baseball bats to better smash the cash registers of their competitors.
Happily for us all - except the sad MS astroturfers who lurk here - IBM have decided that their future lies in selling battleships of services floating on a sea of free software.
If both IBM and Microsoft held the same viewpoint wrt to free software, the future for Linux would not be rosy today.
SCO kept us amused for years! What stamina and tenacity. Most shakedown artists get tired after a kneecap and a broken finger or two but SCO just go the whole nine yards.
Also, it was really enjoyable watching SCOX. Sure, all my other stocks went down as well, but when SCOX fell, I knew Microsoft were feeling the pain, and that made everything OK again.
In common usage it refers to an economic system in which land and capital are privately owned and operated for profit and where investments, production, distribution, income, and prices are determined largely through the operation of a free market rather than by centralized state control (as in a command economy)
I believe my statement that the GPL is an expression of pure unfettered capitalism is accurate, though it may irritate many.
Personally I am an ardent admirer both of the GPL and the capitalist society that allows me the freedom to express myself through free software. I believe I understand both very well, having built a successful and enjoyable business by writing free software since 1991 or so.
Governments do have an essential role in capitalism, as in free software, and it's the role you identify: to provide rules that enable the free exchange of goods and punish those who abuse the system and steal.
However, the idea that capitalism is about "accumulation" and "exploitation" is simply laughable. Such a system is properly called an "oligarchy" and it is highly anti-capitalistic, not to mention economically inefficient.
Perhaps IBM wanted the fight. They have invested considerably in Linux. Winning this battle - which they must have known they would - has made that investment a lot more valuable.
1. Loss of a potential weapon against Linux, namely the "you stole IP" accusation.
2. Loss of face. Microsoft paid SCO, SCO turned out to be little better than shakedown artists.
3. Kudos to the opposition as a "worth opponent". Linux survived and became much stronger.
Basically, the SCO case sealed Microsoft's fate as the loser in the commoditization of operating systems. Their only remaining defense is software patentability and if that battle fails in Europe, they are, basically, screwed.
Humans are naturally selfish, yes, but this does not necessarily conflict with free software. Adam Smith pointed out that society is driven by selfishness but still creates large mutually-beneficial collaborations.
Free software is easily misunderstood, even by those who participate. Really, it's not about altruism at all.
When I explain free software to non-technical people I compare it to a sport. Think of a game, in which the players compete to design the most creative and useful inventions, using software as their medium. The players keep score in terms of "kudos" and the best players - the key people (almost always men) behind winning projects - have a very high status, much like stars in any field.
Software is an excellent medium because the costs of entry and of collaboration are so low. It enables a true meritocracy in which teams of any size can join together to attack problems of any size (and share kudos, if they succeed).
Free software is not altruistic. Every player knows that if they hit it big, they will have a valuable consultancy job, book deal, conference gigs, or other lucrative opportunity. The best players sublimate this motivation so they can focus on the "pure play" but that does not mean they don't have the motivation, ultimately. Try getting the best players to join your project and you start to see. It's very much "sports for smart people", and every player is very aware of their value.
The Game is becoming politically sensitive because it has a side-product, namely a cornucopia of increasingly valuable software. This flood of cheap software has started to revolutionise the world and launched some major proxy wars between established players, threatened by it, and those who understand what's happening and want to profit from it. You can almost slice the IT industry into two halves: those who hate the Game, and those on the side-lines, cheering and throwing roses. The amounts of money involved are huge - despite the 'free' label - and already influencing global politics.
Can the Game move into other areas? Yes, in two ways. First, it's always been there. Competitive intellectual effort is what has filled the libraries over the ages. Nothing new here except the scale and speed of the process, on the back of cheap global internet communications. Secondly, more and more traditional intellectual processes become software. Look at Wikipedia. The Game can be played with any process that can be held as "source code".
Free software/open source is not a "model" that can be applied elsewhere... but it is a paradigm (I hate that word, but it's accurate here) that changes the way professionals work. Stop being an employee, become a player. For businesses, sponsoring open source projects can be a cheaper and more reliable way to get essential software than traditional projects.
There is no conflict between free software and capitalism. Indeed, free software expresses the "liberal" ideal of free trade with minimal government intervention. People do things for self-interest but economics is not a zero-sum game. Free software is highly capitalistic, depending the individual's capital of ideas and skills.
Slashdot UIDs are not freely tradeable because you cannot rename them. So they are not really transferrable.
I'd estimate $50 for a low number ID.
And if UIDs were transferrable, up to several hundred $. Possibly more. The karma itself is worth nothing - one can get this in a couple of weeks of intelligent posting. Takes me about 30-50 posts to push a new user id into Excellent.
Hint to Slashdot: create a UID marketplace and charge 20% commission. Enforce a minimum trade value and allow UIDs to be renamed on purchase. You'll make more money than through subscriptions.
On the downside, Microsoft astroturfers would suddenly get themselves lots of kudos.
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict the land available.
Governments control the supply of tobacco and alcohol by requiring licenses for the production and sale of these.
But all of this is beside the point. Governments above all control the supply of money, which is what we trade primarily. Any issuing authority that tries to extract more from a market than it will bear will damage and eventually kill the market.
Governments have tried all the tricks you can imagine to "control" how people earn and hold their wealth. Nothing Sony can do is new, and it's been shown many times that all such tricks are zero-sum games. The only way to profit (for all parties) is to have minimal interference, simply taxation, and to allow the game to play itself.
Quite possibly Sony won't realise this and will do things wrong.
To explain: if Sony tax the game more than is "fair", people will simply stop investing their time in it. It'll happen very rapidly and very obviously.
Think of people leaving a high-inflation country to live somewhere else.
Game goods are simply an intermediate stage on the inevitable route to game currencies, controlled by the game provider. And, inevitably, the floating of these currencies (exactly as a country may float its currency) to allow free exchange with other currencies.
There is no difference at all between what we're seeing here and a classic economic system.
What Sony is doing is acting as the "State", regulating and taxing the trade. It's not making money out of nothing, it's enforcing a certain law and order and charging for it. Like the State, it has a monopoly on power within its domain.
The parent post implied that there was something ficticious about the money being made here. I'm pointing out that this is wrong: it's real money, generated through real trade, and Sony is doing what every tin-pot government has done since the invention of writing: setting-up authority and charging for it.
And if they want to inflate the currency they can do this too. It'll just damage the game economy in the long run.
Don't bother making more calculations to prove me wrong. The money is not coming from thin air. It already exists, in the forms of millions of invested player hours. It's the sign of a "good game" that these hours actually mean something.
Put it another way: if you could buy karma from another poster, and Slashdot would get 10%, would this be making money from "thin air"? Of course not.
There's no difference between trading virtual items and trading any tangible non-essential item. It's a basic economic process: you trade your hours (in the form of money) for someone else's hours (in the form of game goods).
There's a very good reason why realistic online games evolve this kind of trading. Never heard of people selling low-number Slashdot IDs? It's the same thing... people place a value on the virtual goods because they represent an investment in time that they cannot afford.
The obvious rules for virtual goods apply if these are to be traded usefully: a realistic supply (i.e. you can't resell the same item more than once), recourse against fraud, and a semi-official currency that allows abstract exchange.
No difference selling game goods than trading Dollars on forex.
DVD is a mess. Between incompatible formats and cheap and nasty players, I've stopped trying to use DVD at all.
My home DVD player will play most movies but with jitters - skipping through parts of movies, freezing on the occasional disk.
I've switched to using disk & lan for everything except rented DVDs. No backups onto CD or DVD, but instead onto multiple redundant HD servers. Movies in digital form where possible. Music all digital since at least 5 years.
But can you make a cluster of them...?
on
The Not-So-Cool Future
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Not a joke.
The future is multi-core / multi-CPU boards where scaling comes from adding more pieces, not making them individually faster.
Yes, chips will always get faster and hopefully cooler, but it's no longer the key to performance.
If the archive is open for free access, no-one is actually going to pay a premium for commercial versions of it.
People will pay for additional services provided over and on top of the existing material. This is what I call a "living culture". But many people won't provide such services gratis. There has to be at least the possibility of reward.
So banning commercial reuse is actually pointless - because the free archive is already a flat competitor to the Beeb's existing commercial sale of those programmes - and counter-productive - because it turns many potential contributors away.
It's fine for licensing an archive that is unlikely to change.
But if the intention is to create a living culture, restrictions on use are counter-productive.
What the license says is "you can use our stuff". What a really far-sighted license says is "here are a set of rules for creating stuff. Oh, and our stuff falls under these rules too."
For instance, why ban commercial use? To prevent competition? Sure... but competition is what makes the living culture.
It'd be far more valuable to allow commercial use of - e.g. old BBC broadcasts - so long as the vendors also made their derived products freely available under the same conditions.
The term Linux strictly refers to the Linux kernel, but is commonly used to describe entire Unix-like operating systems (also known as GNU/Linux) that are based on the Linux kernel combined with libraries and tools from the GNU project. Linux distributions often bundle large quantities of software with the core system.
When MSFT released w3.1, it really was one of the better products on the market. Perhaps not technically the best, but together with tools like VB, it was a world-class product backed up by brutal tactics.
But today the OS is a "solved problem", much like TCP/IP solved networking 20 years ago. Sure, vendors sold their proprietary stuff for a while longer but even IBM's mainframes are now TCP/IP.
The EU Commission? Unlikely - MSTF 0wns them. The "Big Target" theory? No, not true. Apache is the principle web server in the world, and very complex, yet it's secure.
Windows is insecure because of the way MSTF makes its software. (When I called their stuff well engineered, I was really not being 100% serious.) They build large monolithic systems that aim to provide a maximum of functionality to beat off rivals and lock in customers. It's good business in the short-medium term but it's poor engineering in the long term, and we're now at the stage where it's starting to crack.
MSFT can't produce Longhorn-sized projects on time any longer because they have lost control of the process. Software is notoriously tricky stuff, and it looks like the FOSS approach is one of the few models with long-term viability.
I don't think MSFT will die, of course, but I really, really hope for their sake that they have an alternative than simply to push the "Linux is not a product" line and try to "attack" Linux with patents or whatever, instead of understanding that the nature of world they grew up in has changed and will never be the same again.
Really, there is only one way MSFT can still be alive in 20 years from now, and that is if they embrace commodity software - Linux if you will - fully, and use it to their advantage instead of fighting it.
You cannot stop the rising sea. Kings have tried, in full regalia, and failed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not a question of preventing patent trolls from patenting the same thing.
Firstly, because AMQP has hundreds or thousands of areas that could be similarly patented: failover, federation, many types of exchange, remote administration, etc. It only takes one patent to hold the whole standard to ransom. Red Hat would have to patent every single technical aspect of the standard, which would be impossible in practical terms.
Secondly, because there are much cheaper ways of stopping patent trolls from patenting obvious things: publish them, register them as prior art at the USPTO.
It's naive to think that the only way patents are used is to 'go after' projects. 99% of the time, patents of this sort are used in discrete discussions with potential clients. "You know, we hold a patent on that... (hint hint)". This is enough to scare the customer into at least not using a rival product, open source or not. Indeed, patents that make it to court tend to die rather faster than patents used under the table.
The irony of this patent is that technically, it's not that interesting. Dynamic message routing on XML is not difficult, but not efficient. It's much faster to pre-calculate routing keys and indices, as the existing AMQP exchanges do.
So I think Red Hat are simply playing the game of collecting software patents like points.
However, I really expected better from Red Hat.
It's pretty difficult to see this story as representative of a legitimate concern, at least of any informed person. Among all of the major distributions of Linux, Red Hat is probably the most Free Software oriented (except perhaps for Debian). As a member of OIN, they contribute patents licensed to other members in order to create a defence against patent lawsuits. They've repeatedly and consistently put their money into Free Software by purchasing desirable products and re-licensing them under the GPL. They're one of the largest contributors of code to the Linux kernel, GNU libc, gcc, GNOME, and other core components of GNU/Linux distributions.
And after all of that, the very notion of Red Hat suiting up to sue Free Software developers is completely ridiculous, because doing so would void their license to distribute the software.
This article is just another troll painting one of the Free Software community's leaders in an undeserved poor light. Whether the author is completely ignorant of the subject matter, or is intentionally trolling, this story deserves a place in the dust bin.
All patenting around open standards is a concern, both to developers of the standards, and users. A patent holder's intentions may, and often do, change over the course of the 20 years the patent may exist.
In this case, Red Hat seem to be seeking "ownership" of areas around the standard. They don't need to sue anyone to establish this, that is a straw man. The simple fact of owning patents is enough to scare potential customers away from competitors.
I've personally worked with Red Hat in fighting software patents in Europe but would not consider this story to be a troll. Any FOSS firm that is willing to spend money on patents, but not the fight against software patents (and I can tell you that to the best of my knowledge RHAT are not funding the main European groups against software patents), is working the wrong side.
So this story seems relevant if only to highlight how behaviour changes when money is involved.
When Red Hat seek software patents around an open standard, that's news.
Guilty as charged. Changing userids every few years makes one humble. I think ites is the 4th or 5th one so far.
Another slashdot user predicted this something like a year and a half ago.
"What percentage of Windows PCs are 0wn3d by one or other parasite?
By multiple parasites? By spammers working with crackers working
with corrupt web site designers and pornographers? Enough, I think
to ensure that within a short time - say 6 to 12 months - we will
hit infection levels of 50% and more. The vast majority of home
PCs, happily connected to the Internet, will be hit, and a large
proportion of office PCs, insufficiently secured and protected,
will also succumb."
This was written in September 2003. And it's just starting to hit the general consciousness now?
This from "ihatelinux.blogspot.com"?
ROTFL.
I never said Microsoft were evil or monolithic. Try thinking about what I actually said, not what you imagine are people's criticisms of your company.
283 patents in the Linux kernel? Possibly. All complex software hits patents. The question is: are any of these patents enforceable, have they a basis that will stand up in court, and can they beat the huge patent portfolios that IBM is now making available to free software developers. Do you see what I'm saying? Each patent attack by Microsoft against Linux risks a volley of counterattacks from IBM against Windows.
Microsoft's fate is sealed for a simple reason, nothing to do with marketing or opinion. Nothing you say, nothing I say, will change this reason.
Linux repesents something. A sea change in the way software is made. A radical shift. It's not new in itself but the scale and efficiency has been rising exponentially. It was unstoppable in 1999, even long before that.
Microsoft will either adopt that way, or they will be buried under it. There is no alternative.
Think about it. Think about the stacks of CDs containing hundreds of millions of lines of high-quality, working, secure, and useful code. Think about the process that produces this software.
Now think about the pain Microsoft has to produce comparable software. Where is Longhorn? Delayed again? You think patents are going to fix this?
Microsoft is like a wealthy man dying of cancer. Money is no substitute for youth and health.
Actually, it's starting to be sad, seeing people like you "defend" Microsoft when no-one is attacking. There is no hate anymore. We're just watching the old man die, even as he spits and tries to claw at us.
No, not "set up". Well, maybe not.
But look... IBM are a big, old, wise, rich company. They certainly have spies deep inside Microsoft. At the very least they knew what was happening and had a strategy in place before the first public announcements from SCO.
Clearly their strategy was to sit tight, stay calm, provide all documents requested by the courts, and allow SCO to beat themselves into silly putty.
They could have done so many other things... settled, bought SCO, bribed someone. But they went through this exercise because they knew that their reputation, and that of their adopted protege, Linux, were on trial.
I'd not put it beyond IBM to have instigated the whole affair from within Microsoft. It just takes one fairly senior manager with a bright idea.
The technical term is "agent provocateur" and it's an old and effective way of getting the opposition to hurt themselves.
IBM are... brutal. Have no illusions. They were born from NCR, who's salesmen carried baseball bats to better smash the cash registers of their competitors.
Happily for us all - except the sad MS astroturfers who lurk here - IBM have decided that their future lies in selling battleships of services floating on a sea of free software.
If both IBM and Microsoft held the same viewpoint wrt to free software, the future for Linux would not be rosy today.
SCO kept us amused for years! What stamina and tenacity. Most shakedown artists get tired after a kneecap and a broken finger or two but SCO just go the whole nine yards.
Also, it was really enjoyable watching SCOX. Sure, all my other stocks went down as well, but when SCOX fell, I knew Microsoft were feeling the pain, and that made everything OK again.
From
Wikipedia:
In common usage it refers to an economic system in which land and capital are privately owned and operated for profit and where investments, production, distribution, income, and prices are determined largely through the operation of a free market rather than by centralized state control (as in a command economy)
I believe my statement that the GPL is an expression of pure unfettered capitalism is accurate, though it may irritate many.
Personally I am an ardent admirer both of the GPL and the capitalist society that allows me the freedom to express myself through free software. I believe I understand both very well, having built a successful and enjoyable business by writing free software since 1991 or so.
Governments do have an essential role in capitalism, as in free software, and it's the role you identify: to provide rules that enable the free exchange of goods and punish those who abuse the system and steal.
However, the idea that capitalism is about "accumulation" and "exploitation" is simply laughable. Such a system is properly called an "oligarchy" and it is highly anti-capitalistic, not to mention economically inefficient.
Perhaps IBM wanted the fight. They have invested considerably in Linux. Winning this battle - which they must have known they would - has made that investment a lot more valuable.
1. Loss of a potential weapon against Linux, namely the "you stole IP" accusation.
2. Loss of face. Microsoft paid SCO, SCO turned out to be little better than shakedown artists.
3. Kudos to the opposition as a "worth opponent". Linux survived and became much stronger.
Basically, the SCO case sealed Microsoft's fate as the loser in the commoditization of operating systems. Their only remaining defense is software patentability and if that battle fails in Europe, they are, basically, screwed.
Heavy losses, yes.
...that SCO actually launched this case on their own behalf and with some merit?
I thought it was obvious from very early on that this was a proxy attack on behalf of Microsoft against its two main enemies, IBM and Linux?
Also, clear by now that the attack failed, with heavy losses to Microsoft.
The actual contents of SCO's case seem pretty irrelevant.
Humans are naturally selfish, yes, but this does not necessarily conflict with free software. Adam Smith pointed out that society is driven by selfishness but still creates large mutually-beneficial collaborations.
Free software is easily misunderstood, even by those who participate. Really, it's not about altruism at all.
When I explain free software to non-technical people I compare it to a sport. Think of a game, in which the players compete to design the most creative and useful inventions, using software as their medium. The players keep score in terms of "kudos" and the best players - the key people (almost always men) behind winning projects - have a very high status, much like stars in any field.
Software is an excellent medium because the costs of entry and of collaboration are so low. It enables a true meritocracy in which teams of any size can join together to attack problems of any size (and share kudos, if they succeed).
Free software is not altruistic. Every player knows that if they hit it big, they will have a valuable consultancy job, book deal, conference gigs, or other lucrative opportunity. The best players sublimate this motivation so they can focus on the "pure play" but that does not mean they don't have the motivation, ultimately. Try getting the best players to join your project and you start to see. It's very much "sports for smart people", and every player is very aware of their value.
The Game is becoming politically sensitive because it has a side-product, namely a cornucopia of increasingly valuable software. This flood of cheap software has started to revolutionise the world and launched some major proxy wars between established players, threatened by it, and those who understand what's happening and want to profit from it. You can almost slice the IT industry into two halves: those who hate the Game, and those on the side-lines, cheering and throwing roses. The amounts of money involved are huge - despite the 'free' label - and already influencing global politics.
Can the Game move into other areas? Yes, in two ways. First, it's always been there. Competitive intellectual effort is what has filled the libraries over the ages. Nothing new here except the scale and speed of the process, on the back of cheap global internet communications. Secondly, more and more traditional intellectual processes become software. Look at Wikipedia. The Game can be played with any process that can be held as "source code".
Free software/open source is not a "model" that can be applied elsewhere... but it is a paradigm (I hate that word, but it's accurate here) that changes the way professionals work. Stop being an employee, become a player. For businesses, sponsoring open source projects can be a cheaper and more reliable way to get essential software than traditional projects.
There is no conflict between free software and capitalism. Indeed, free software expresses the "liberal" ideal of free trade with minimal government intervention. People do things for self-interest but economics is not a zero-sum game. Free software is highly capitalistic, depending the individual's capital of ideas and skills.
From the article:
To be clear, all we are doing is facilitating these transactions. We are NOT in the business of selling virtual goods ourselves.
End-quote.
Sony are providing an exchange, exactly like Ebay.
Excellent question.
Slashdot UIDs are not freely tradeable because you cannot rename them. So they are not really transferrable.
I'd estimate $50 for a low number ID.
And if UIDs were transferrable, up to several hundred $. Possibly more. The karma itself is worth nothing - one can get this in a couple of weeks of intelligent posting. Takes me about 30-50 posts to push a new user id into Excellent.
Hint to Slashdot: create a UID marketplace and charge 20% commission. Enforce a minimum trade value and allow UIDs to be renamed on purchase. You'll make more money than through subscriptions.
On the downside, Microsoft astroturfers would suddenly get themselves lots of kudos.
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict the land available.
Governments control the supply of tobacco and alcohol by requiring licenses for the production and sale of these.
But all of this is beside the point. Governments above all control the supply of money, which is what we trade primarily. Any issuing authority that tries to extract more from a market than it will bear will damage and eventually kill the market.
Governments have tried all the tricks you can imagine to "control" how people earn and hold their wealth. Nothing Sony can do is new, and it's been shown many times that all such tricks are zero-sum games. The only way to profit (for all parties) is to have minimal interference, simply taxation, and to allow the game to play itself.
Quite possibly Sony won't realise this and will do things wrong.
To explain: if Sony tax the game more than is "fair", people will simply stop investing their time in it. It'll happen very rapidly and very obviously.
Think of people leaving a high-inflation country to live somewhere else.
Game goods are simply an intermediate stage on the inevitable route to game currencies, controlled by the game provider. And, inevitably, the floating of these currencies (exactly as a country may float its currency) to allow free exchange with other currencies.
There is no difference at all between what we're seeing here and a classic economic system.
I don't think I missed the point at all.
What Sony is doing is acting as the "State", regulating and taxing the trade. It's not making money out of nothing, it's enforcing a certain law and order and charging for it. Like the State, it has a monopoly on power within its domain.
The parent post implied that there was something ficticious about the money being made here. I'm pointing out that this is wrong: it's real money, generated through real trade, and Sony is doing what every tin-pot government has done since the invention of writing: setting-up authority and charging for it.
And if they want to inflate the currency they can do this too. It'll just damage the game economy in the long run.
Don't bother making more calculations to prove me wrong. The money is not coming from thin air. It already exists, in the forms of millions of invested player hours. It's the sign of a "good game" that these hours actually mean something.
Put it another way: if you could buy karma from another poster, and Slashdot would get 10%, would this be making money from "thin air"? Of course not.
There's no difference between trading virtual items and trading any tangible non-essential item. It's a basic economic process: you trade your hours (in the form of money) for someone else's hours (in the form of game goods).
There's a very good reason why realistic online games evolve this kind of trading. Never heard of people selling low-number Slashdot IDs? It's the same thing... people place a value on the virtual goods because they represent an investment in time that they cannot afford.
The obvious rules for virtual goods apply if these are to be traded usefully: a realistic supply (i.e. you can't resell the same item more than once), recourse against fraud, and a semi-official currency that allows abstract exchange.
No difference selling game goods than trading Dollars on forex.
DVD is a mess. Between incompatible formats and cheap and nasty players, I've stopped trying to use DVD at all.
My home DVD player will play most movies but with jitters - skipping through parts of movies, freezing on the occasional disk.
I've switched to using disk & lan for everything except rented DVDs. No backups onto CD or DVD, but instead onto multiple redundant HD servers. Movies in digital form where possible. Music all digital since at least 5 years.
Not a joke.
The future is multi-core / multi-CPU boards where scaling comes from adding more pieces, not making them individually faster.
Yes, chips will always get faster and hopefully cooler, but it's no longer the key to performance.
Allow me to invent that aphorism.
(c) 2005 ites.
A good lesson for the *AA: cut your prices by 10, sell your stuff online, and you'll make more profit than before
Hold on... so individuals and non-profit organisations can take content, use it, and share it, but only within the UK?
LMAO - this is like putting your cat outside and telling it to stay away from the birdie.
Seriously... the content, being freely available, will without the slightest hesitation be spread across the four corners of the internets.
This being self-evident, I start to doubt the sanity of the architects of this license.
If the archive is open for free access, no-one is actually going to pay a premium for commercial versions of it.
People will pay for additional services provided over and on top of the existing material. This is what I call a "living culture". But many people won't provide such services gratis. There has to be at least the possibility of reward.
So banning commercial reuse is actually pointless - because the free archive is already a flat competitor to the Beeb's existing commercial sale of those programmes - and counter-productive - because it turns many potential contributors away.
It's fine for licensing an archive that is unlikely to change.
But if the intention is to create a living culture, restrictions on use are counter-productive.
What the license says is "you can use our stuff". What a really far-sighted license says is "here are a set of rules for creating stuff. Oh, and our stuff falls under these rules too."
For instance, why ban commercial use? To prevent competition? Sure... but competition is what makes the living culture.
It'd be far more valuable to allow commercial use of - e.g. old BBC broadcasts - so long as the vendors also made their derived products freely available under the same conditions.
From linux.org:
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world.
From linux.com:
Linux is an operating system.
From wikipedia:
The term Linux strictly refers to the Linux kernel, but is commonly used to describe entire Unix-like operating systems (also known as GNU/Linux) that are based on the Linux kernel combined with libraries and tools from the GNU project. Linux distributions often bundle large quantities of software with the core system.
When MSFT released w3.1, it really was one of the better products on the market. Perhaps not technically the best, but together with tools like VB, it was a world-class product backed up by brutal tactics.
But today the OS is a "solved problem", much like TCP/IP solved networking 20 years ago. Sure, vendors sold their proprietary stuff for a while longer but even IBM's mainframes are now TCP/IP.
The EU Commission? Unlikely - MSTF 0wns them. The "Big Target" theory? No, not true. Apache is the principle web server in the world, and very complex, yet it's secure.
Windows is insecure because of the way MSTF makes its software. (When I called their stuff well engineered, I was really not being 100% serious.) They build large monolithic systems that aim to provide a maximum of functionality to beat off rivals and lock in customers. It's good business in the short-medium term but it's poor engineering in the long term, and we're now at the stage where it's starting to crack.
MSFT can't produce Longhorn-sized projects on time any longer because they have lost control of the process. Software is notoriously tricky stuff, and it looks like the FOSS approach is one of the few models with long-term viability.
I don't think MSFT will die, of course, but I really, really hope for their sake that they have an alternative than simply to push the "Linux is not a product" line and try to "attack" Linux with patents or whatever, instead of understanding that the nature of world they grew up in has changed and will never be the same again.
Really, there is only one way MSFT can still be alive in 20 years from now, and that is if they embrace commodity software - Linux if you will - fully, and use it to their advantage instead of fighting it.
You cannot stop the rising sea. Kings have tried, in full regalia, and failed.