Both Conservative and Lib Dem parties had scrapping the ID card in their manifestos. If either one had formed a majority (single party) government, the news today would be the same.
Or, you know, the Tories could have put the measure on the back burner for three years and eventually announced that the situation had changed and the ID scheme was suddenly vital for national security.
Just because it's in their manifestos does not mean they have any intention of doing it. It just means it's something they thought would help get them elected.
A government that actually gives up some power over people. I am speechless.
The wonder of a coalition government. Neither side has the support to hammer through anything too extreme. So they're forced to actually do their jobs, rather than repeatedly kicking the electorate in the nuts and claiming they have a mandate to do so.
It probably won't last, but as long as it does, this current lot may actually accomplish some good for the country.
But you're also not mentioning if the Guardian is making a profit or loss. I can't easily find a URL that backs up your claim, so please provide a reference.
40M a year, or so I assumed. The figure was from a poster on a BBC blog (Rory Clellan-Jones I think) and was itself unreferenced, which is why I said "if true". Neither of us appear to find it particularly implausible
What you (and others) seem to be missing is that if the newspapers disappear because they can't find pre-Internet levels of income then they will disappear and we'll lose them.
And no other sources of news will arise because market forces only work to make bad things happen, so we'll all be without news for ever and ever, and it will all be my fault. I get it, I really do. What you appear to be missing is that, without the need to print and distribute all that inky wood pulp, newspapers won't need pre-Internet pricing models to turn a profit.
Either way, the odds on the paper gaining 200k new online subscribers seem distinctly slim. If 40M a year isn't enough to support the Guardian,
it would foolish for the Times to rely on online subs.
And I really don't see how my pointing this out is going to affect matters.
40M/year seems much more plausible - and that's not enough to sustain it.
Sustain what, exactly? The newspaper or the website? At 40M a year from news already collected and written for the dead-tree edition, I'd expect that to be a useful revenue stream.
You're assuming that the initial subscription will have a cost. Offering a free subscription (for a month, year, whatever) may bring in enough people
I believe the paper has been free since it first appeared online. If it hasn't built a sufficient following in that time, I doubt it will raise many more with a promise to start charging new readers in the near future.
But yeah, I don't think the aim is immediate profit, either. On the other hand, if he can't show a profit, how are they going to persuade others to follow their lead?
As I understand it, that's Murdoch's point (or hope, anyway). He's not been able to make enough money off his news sites through advertisement based revenue streams, so now he's going to try and make people pay for the content and make his money that way
I don't believe that. I think he's hoping to lead a newspaper revolution. He wants all newspapers to go paywalled, so he can try and create an artificial scarcity and maintain pre-internet pricing models.
The scary part is what happens if his model actually works, or at least is better a better source of revenue than the current model?
I read somewhere that the Guardian (another UK national paper) reported advertising income from its web site of 40M. If that's true, Murdoch needs upwards of 200,000 weekly subscribers to match that. I can't see that happening. I think people who have that sort of investment in the Times probably take the dead tree edition, and won't want to pay for the information again. He'll get a handful of corporate subscriptions, of course, but even internationally I can't see that equaling lost revenue.
The casual readers, of course, will stay away in droves
Freely available international news coverage is not something that I want to see in the position of being the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
Isn't going to happen. The trouble with the strategy is that it funnels readers (and therefore ad revenue) to the non-participating papers. The more papers that follow Murdoch's lead, the more profitable it becomes to offer ad-supported news. Even if he's successful beyond all reasonable expectations, there's still going to come an equilibrium point.
Unless he's looking at aggressive takeovers of the dissenting papers, of course. But that's only viable if the number of targets is comparatively small, and I doubt he'll get that many buying into his Master Plan.
I don't see why not. It's been years since "Steamboat Willie" was on general release. Eighty Two of them, in point of fact. I don't think there's much value left in that particular expression of the idea.
That's if we're talking about copyright, of course. Patents happily have yet to be applied to the area, although I'd love to see the application form ("method and apparatus for extracting money from parents by means of an animated anthropomorphic animal").
The trade mark, of course, is rather valuable. But I don't think anyone's discussing abolishing that aspect of IP law. The fashion world already has those, no less than the software industry, and it seems quite adept at monetizing them.
So that only leaves... ermmm... I'm sorry, what was your point, again?
you talk to any of the young, creative designers that are moving things forward, and they will tell you about how all of their designs are being ripped off by mall stores.
And yet I wonder how many of those young independent designers would be in business for themselves if the big chains already held patent thickets to prevent emerging competition. I wonder how many of them would find they could only make a living if they worked directly for one of the big chains in such a world.
And I wonder how many of them would see the change as an improvement, if fashion patents were to be allowed.
The Slashdot crowd may find this hard to believe, but you should be glad that the megacorps in our industry work to protect the IP of the industry's creative people
You are absolutely right. I do find that hard to believe
I thought these two were kinda well behaved and used patents only as a defensive measure, guess I was wrong.
That's a good point. Wasn't it only yesterday that we had a half dozen MS apologists stepping forward to explain how
Microsoft only ever used Patents defensively and would never ever ever use them offensively?
Everyone who made that claim, go stand at the back of the class. You know who you are.
although i don't agree that he just stumbled onto this computers - it's bloody obvious he targeted DoD computers in an attempt to access information he new damn well he didn't have the right to
Well, yeah. I didn't mean to imply he found his way on there by accident. He's a UFO nut and he was looking for evidence that the US military was suppressing information on alien activities or some such.
The point is that a great many of the computers he accessed didn't even have password protection. And while that doesn't excuse McKinnon's intrusion, it does explain why the US armed forces are annoyed about this all. McKinnon made them look like idiots, and so they want to make an example of him in return.
Which, returning to the original point, is why the US is so determined that he not be tried in the UK. They're worried he might get a fair sentence.
I also don't think hard time for this kind of face saving nonesense is right either.
Now I'm interested in anyone's explanation on why would someone have to face a legal process that's not of his country
Well, IIRC, the computers he "hacked into" weren't even password protected for the most part. He wandered blithely through some of the most sensitive computer networks in the US for months, unchallenged, and was only caught when someone noticed the mouse pointer moving by itself on a monitor somewhere.
So, a lot of US brass got egg on their face, and want to throw the book at the poor bastard. The concern is that if he's tried over here, he'll get sent down for five years, be out in three, and end up with job at a security consultancy. Considering that the only harm he's caused is forcing the US military to properly secure a lot of their computer network, that doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Geocities used to popular for example, but it's user base never encountered anything remotely resembling what Facebook currently has.
Then again, MySpace did have a userbase comparable to Facebook. And yet it seems to have gone from being the the place to be to "are you still on myspace?" in a very short space of time.
If social networks function in the same way as (say) eBay, then you'd be right. In that case the size of the user base is itself a resource that draws in more users. But suppose there's a different dynamic at work. Suppose it functions like a fashion accessory. Then users could prove a lot more fickle that you'd expect.
A lot of the people driving adoption for new networks are kids. Then the parents follow so they can keep an eye on the children. Before long everyone's on the new network, and aside from a few die-hards, no-one wants to be seen dead on the old sites. And then the kids start looking for a place to hang out that their mums don't know about, and a new generation is coming up that doesn't want anything to do with what their big sister thinks is cool...
I could be wrong, of course. But it would explain why none of the previous social networks have managed translate users into longevity.
While this excites me for the smaller developers, realistically, I don't see this kind of business model really working for a larger developer like EA.
Quite true. Still, the interesting thing is if you look at why this wouldn't work for EA.
As I understand it, the corporate strategy of EA and their ilk has been to develop increasingly expensive games, in the hopes of raising the barrier to entry into the market. This is why a big game has a credits list like a Holywood movie, and is often developed with a Hollywood scale budget. The rationale, I believe is that if they can raise the expected production values to the point where newcomers can no longer compete, they can prevent competitors from emerging, and keep the price of games set high.
The Humble Bundle, however, demonstrates that this isn't working. It is not only possible to make fun games on a modest budget, but it's possible to make good money in the process.
Now this by itself isn't necessarily a problem for EA. On the other hand, those over-engineered games mean they have to price their games at a certain level. That price point is rather more than a lot of people would happily pay. This encourages piracy, which encourages the studios to adopt ever nastier DRM, which discourages sales.
Meanwhile the Humble Bundle has shown that you can make a profit giving the damn things away, at least so long as you don't have delusions of being a Hollywood Mogul. So we can expect to see more small scale games developed and marketed like this.
The danger, from EA's perspective is of suffering the death of a thousand cuts, ans they lose business to a thousand small developers, each delivering fun games with modest production values, but for a modest price and without the DRM atrocities lately so beloved of the big players.
What's going to be really interesting will to see how EA try and respond to the challenge. Patents, legislation, or close their eyes and hope the problem goes away?
The people ordering ATMs, care a great deal more about their correct and secure operation, than the people ordering voting-machines.
Maybe.
Or maybe they just notice quicker when they get cheated on a daily basis than when it happens once
every four years. The fact that the user can verify the ATM transaction probably speeds awareness, as well.
I think ignorance is more plausible than apathy in this case.
No, with all due respect your paraphrasing is a blatant fabrication
Sorry, my fault. I hadn't realised that your communication skills were so perfect that any misunderstanding could only be explained by malice on the part of the other party.
Tell you what, why don't we resume this discussion in twenty years, after you've grown up?
Well in the Uk we like our humor to be actulay funny
Ah well, I wouldn't know anything about that;)
cruel political cartooning is much more cutting than the US ones look at Steve Bell vs any US editorial cartoonist even doonsbury
Well yeah. And Steve Bell's anger and outrage comes through in every line that he draws. He lashes out against the corrupt and the inept and the pompous. The IT Crowd directs its bile at a couple of guys who major sin is trying to fix computers so the rest of the firm can do their work. It's not like they're trying to defraud the taxpayer or taking hefty backhanders from wealthy businessmen. They're just trying to do their job.
I can understand Steve Bell's rage against the Establishment. Are the transgressions of the computer support profession on the same level? I wouldn't have thought so.
I've demonstrated social ineptitude in the past and I think one of the healthiest things to do about it is to laugh at myself and not take my fuck-up so seriously.
Yeah, I'm not saying we shouldn't laugh at ourselves. I just thought there was something mean spirited about the later episodes in this particular show. Maybe it's a sense of humour failure on my part, but I don't think I would have found that funny regardless of the group it was targeting.
Also... if you're going to make a satire, pick on the powerful or the wealthy, or the famous. Pick on the guys who believe that the sun does indeed shine out of their backside, and who expect the rest of us to fall down and worship at the altar of their magnificence. Don't pick a couple of pimply social outcases with zero self esteem. It's like pulling wings off a fly.
Brilliant. If I had to guess, I'd say you were offended by the programme's portrayal of "IT people as social inadequates", which perhaps means you missed the point a little
Possibly. Although satirising the socially inept seems a bit like priding yourself on your skill at boxing against quadriplegics.
It's not particularly clever or difficult, at least not unless the person doing it is severely disadvantaged in their own right.
With the IT crowd, I'd hoped for a show to poke some affectionate fun at IT professionals. And for the first couple of shows, I though they might have got it right. But by the second series, the jokes seemed more spiteful than anything, as if they were trying to appeal to the "I hate computers and I hate computer professionals" demographic.
Not exactly a cardinal sin, perhaps. but I'm not surprised to find that the show has less than universal acclaim among IT professionals.
Now if you want a show that got it right, check out "Lab Rats".
You: Free Software doesn't attract funding from the business sector because such investments are seen as benefiting competitors more than they benefit the investor.
Me: Well, actually it does see quite a bit of business investment...
You: Those cases do not count. They benefit the business more than its competitors.
So my problem is that I don't think you can demonstrate that "all cats are white" by saying "that cat doesn't count because it is black".
Now if your point was that there are a number of cases where the open nature of free software acts as a disincentive to corporate investment, then I would have to agree with you.
But with all due respect, that isn't what you said.
Have a look back a few posts at my original reply to you. That's the line I'm talking. (Much more specific and limited than you seem to want to widen it to.)
Fair enough:
A million organisations can use a piece of software, and all want the same new feature added. But if any organisation says "add the feature, Joe" they have to pay full price for the change as if they were the only user, because the feature is given free to all the other 999,999 users rather than sharing the cost. So, of course, nobody does -- while the feature might be worth $1,000 to each of the million organisations it's not worth the $10,000 it would cost to develop to any of them. So it never gets developed.
That's your line, right there. The points you'd like to discard are all the cases (which you've conceded occur) where business does in fact invest in Free Software.
The trouble I'm having is that I haven't seen a better justification for discarding them than the fact that they don't support your conclusion, which isn't the way logical inference is supposed to work.
I'm quite happy to believe that I haven't understood your point correctly, but if so, I think you need to explain it a little more carefully.
Which assumption would that be, Rattykins? The only one I made is the assumption that you're not a professional liar.
I have made my living, supported my family, as a content creator since 1989.
See. it sounds to me like you make your money by contributing something useful to the world. As opposed to those tossers who get paid for pissing in the global data pool on a daily basis.
Copyright is not only murder, but it's for the weak-minded, the one-hit wonders
No, no, no, no, no. Copyright is a state enforced monopoly, supposedly of limited term, on the specific expression of an idea. Murder is an act of violence in which a person is deprived of their life. See the difference? Neither of them are very nice, but there are important qualitative distinctions that we would be foolish to ignore.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for copyright abolition, although I'd settle for reform if it was sweeping enough. But if you conflate a widely abused rights framework with an irreversible act of violence, it makes you sound like some wild-eyed fanatic. That damages your credibility, and by extension, that of your argument.
Actually, no. The answer to OpenOffice being behind the times (in some respects) is to buy a copy of Word or use Google Docs, not to roll your own wordprocessor from scratch
I guess everyone's got their own pet feature they'd like to see in OOo. For me it was decent SVG import and export filters. Best of luck getting Microsoft to put that in Word, however.
You can always go proprietary, but that doesn't necessarily represent a saving. The cost of a site licence for 20,000 MS office users is non-trivial, even allowing for the fact that the licencee can probably negotiate some sort of discount. And then there's issues of vendor lock-in and forced upgrade cycles to consider, and there's still no guarantee that you'll get the feature that made you consider paying a dev in the first place.
You also miss out on the opportunity to get the software tailored to your own workflow at a level that you're unlikely to find with any off-the-shelf solution. I think you're being a bit one sided about this.
Nope, economically the changes made to Linux by Novell and IBM are the ones that are expected to produce a positive return on investment to Novell and IBM. (ie, IBM pays for the ones that are worth more to IBM themselves than it costs to make
So what are you saying? That it doesn't count if it actually makes sound business sense? It sounds to me like you've drawn your line first, and now you're discarding all the data points that don't lie on it.
The ones that would produce a positive return across the market in total but not to the company paying for the development don't happen
Difficult to make that stick in the case of Samba, for instance. That's got pretty widespread general support, and yet Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell are both (I believe) paid to work on it. I believe Apache sees a lot of corporate investment as well, and it's hard to see how any of that is going to be tailored so it only benefits one company,
When dealing with an intractable foe, I see nothing wrong with adopting their tactics.
You assume that all tactics favour both sides equally. The IP cartels can afford to employ professional liars, while they don't have much in the way of moral high ground. We have the moral ground, and any lies we might employ will be quickly picked apart and used to discredit us.
Better to play to our strengths and keep it clean.
Not everybody regards the world as the utterly amoral zero sum game that
some economists would like it to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The underlying point stands, however. The coalition is a moderating influence. This seems fairly widely accepted by most political commentators.
Or, you know, the Tories could have put the measure on the back burner for three years and eventually announced that the situation had changed and the ID scheme was suddenly vital for national security.
Just because it's in their manifestos does not mean they have any intention of doing it. It just means it's something they thought would help get them elected.
The wonder of a coalition government. Neither side has the support to hammer through anything too extreme. So they're forced to actually do their jobs, rather than repeatedly kicking the electorate in the nuts and claiming they have a mandate to do so.
It probably won't last, but as long as it does, this current lot may actually accomplish some good for the country.
40M a year, or so I assumed. The figure was from a poster on a BBC blog (Rory Clellan-Jones I think) and was itself unreferenced, which is why I said "if true". Neither of us appear to find it particularly implausible
And no other sources of news will arise because market forces only work to make bad things happen, so we'll all be without news for ever and ever, and it will all be my fault. I get it, I really do. What you appear to be missing is that, without the need to print and distribute all that inky wood pulp, newspapers won't need pre-Internet pricing models to turn a profit.
Either way, the odds on the paper gaining 200k new online subscribers seem distinctly slim. If 40M a year isn't enough to support the Guardian, it would foolish for the Times to rely on online subs. And I really don't see how my pointing this out is going to affect matters.
Sustain what, exactly? The newspaper or the website? At 40M a year from news already collected and written for the dead-tree edition, I'd expect that to be a useful revenue stream.
I believe the paper has been free since it first appeared online. If it hasn't built a sufficient following in that time, I doubt it will raise many more with a promise to start charging new readers in the near future.
But yeah, I don't think the aim is immediate profit, either. On the other hand, if he can't show a profit, how are they going to persuade others to follow their lead?
I don't believe that. I think he's hoping to lead a newspaper revolution. He wants all newspapers to go paywalled, so he can try and create an artificial scarcity and maintain pre-internet pricing models.
I read somewhere that the Guardian (another UK national paper) reported advertising income from its web site of 40M. If that's true, Murdoch needs upwards of 200,000 weekly subscribers to match that. I can't see that happening. I think people who have that sort of investment in the Times probably take the dead tree edition, and won't want to pay for the information again. He'll get a handful of corporate subscriptions, of course, but even internationally I can't see that equaling lost revenue.
The casual readers, of course, will stay away in droves
Isn't going to happen. The trouble with the strategy is that it funnels readers (and therefore ad revenue) to the non-participating papers. The more papers that follow Murdoch's lead, the more profitable it becomes to offer ad-supported news. Even if he's successful beyond all reasonable expectations, there's still going to come an equilibrium point.
Unless he's looking at aggressive takeovers of the dissenting papers, of course. But that's only viable if the number of targets is comparatively small, and I doubt he'll get that many buying into his Master Plan.
I don't see why not. It's been years since "Steamboat Willie" was on general release. Eighty Two of them, in point of fact. I don't think there's much value left in that particular expression of the idea.
That's if we're talking about copyright, of course. Patents happily have yet to be applied to the area, although I'd love to see the application form ("method and apparatus for extracting money from parents by means of an animated anthropomorphic animal").
The trade mark, of course, is rather valuable. But I don't think anyone's discussing abolishing that aspect of IP law. The fashion world already has those, no less than the software industry, and it seems quite adept at monetizing them.
So that only leaves ... ermmm... I'm sorry, what was your point, again?
And yet I wonder how many of those young independent designers would be in business for themselves if the big chains already held patent thickets to prevent emerging competition. I wonder how many of them would find they could only make a living if they worked directly for one of the big chains in such a world.
And I wonder how many of them would see the change as an improvement, if fashion patents were to be allowed.
You are absolutely right. I do find that hard to believe
That's a good point. Wasn't it only yesterday that we had a half dozen MS apologists stepping forward to explain how Microsoft only ever used Patents defensively and would never ever ever use them offensively?
Everyone who made that claim, go stand at the back of the class. You know who you are.
Well, yeah. I didn't mean to imply he found his way on there by accident. He's a UFO nut and he was looking for evidence that the US military was suppressing information on alien activities or some such.
The point is that a great many of the computers he accessed didn't even have password protection. And while that doesn't excuse McKinnon's intrusion, it does explain why the US armed forces are annoyed about this all. McKinnon made them look like idiots, and so they want to make an example of him in return.
Which, returning to the original point, is why the US is so determined that he not be tried in the UK. They're worried he might get a fair sentence.
Yeah. Exactly right.
Well, IIRC, the computers he "hacked into" weren't even password protected for the most part. He wandered blithely through some of the most sensitive computer networks in the US for months, unchallenged, and was only caught when someone noticed the mouse pointer moving by itself on a monitor somewhere.
So, a lot of US brass got egg on their face, and want to throw the book at the poor bastard. The concern is that if he's tried over here, he'll get sent down for five years, be out in three, and end up with job at a security consultancy. Considering that the only harm he's caused is forcing the US military to properly secure a lot of their computer network, that doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Then again, MySpace did have a userbase comparable to Facebook. And yet it seems to have gone from being the the place to be to "are you still on myspace?" in a very short space of time.
If social networks function in the same way as (say) eBay, then you'd be right. In that case the size of the user base is itself a resource that draws in more users. But suppose there's a different dynamic at work. Suppose it functions like a fashion accessory. Then users could prove a lot more fickle that you'd expect.
A lot of the people driving adoption for new networks are kids. Then the parents follow so they can keep an eye on the children. Before long everyone's on the new network, and aside from a few die-hards, no-one wants to be seen dead on the old sites. And then the kids start looking for a place to hang out that their mums don't know about, and a new generation is coming up that doesn't want anything to do with what their big sister thinks is cool...
I could be wrong, of course. But it would explain why none of the previous social networks have managed translate users into longevity.
Quite true. Still, the interesting thing is if you look at why this wouldn't work for EA.
As I understand it, the corporate strategy of EA and their ilk has been to develop increasingly expensive games, in the hopes of raising the barrier to entry into the market. This is why a big game has a credits list like a Holywood movie, and is often developed with a Hollywood scale budget. The rationale, I believe is that if they can raise the expected production values to the point where newcomers can no longer compete, they can prevent competitors from emerging, and keep the price of games set high.
The Humble Bundle, however, demonstrates that this isn't working. It is not only possible to make fun games on a modest budget, but it's possible to make good money in the process.
Now this by itself isn't necessarily a problem for EA. On the other hand, those over-engineered games mean they have to price their games at a certain level. That price point is rather more than a lot of people would happily pay. This encourages piracy, which encourages the studios to adopt ever nastier DRM, which discourages sales.
Meanwhile the Humble Bundle has shown that you can make a profit giving the damn things away, at least so long as you don't have delusions of being a Hollywood Mogul. So we can expect to see more small scale games developed and marketed like this.
The danger, from EA's perspective is of suffering the death of a thousand cuts, ans they lose business to a thousand small developers, each delivering fun games with modest production values, but for a modest price and without the DRM atrocities lately so beloved of the big players.
What's going to be really interesting will to see how EA try and respond to the challenge. Patents, legislation, or close their eyes and hope the problem goes away?
Maybe.
Or maybe they just notice quicker when they get cheated on a daily basis than when it happens once every four years. The fact that the user can verify the ATM transaction probably speeds awareness, as well.
I think ignorance is more plausible than apathy in this case.
Sorry, my fault. I hadn't realised that your communication skills were so perfect that any misunderstanding could only be explained by malice on the part of the other party.
Tell you what, why don't we resume this discussion in twenty years, after you've grown up?
Ah well, I wouldn't know anything about that ;)
Well yeah. And Steve Bell's anger and outrage comes through in every line that he draws. He lashes out against the corrupt and the inept and the pompous. The IT Crowd directs its bile at a couple of guys who major sin is trying to fix computers so the rest of the firm can do their work. It's not like they're trying to defraud the taxpayer or taking hefty backhanders from wealthy businessmen. They're just trying to do their job.
I can understand Steve Bell's rage against the Establishment. Are the transgressions of the computer support profession on the same level? I wouldn't have thought so.
Yeah, I'm not saying we shouldn't laugh at ourselves. I just thought there was something mean spirited about the later episodes in this particular show. Maybe it's a sense of humour failure on my part, but I don't think I would have found that funny regardless of the group it was targeting.
Also ... if you're going to make a satire, pick on the powerful or the wealthy, or the famous. Pick on the guys who believe that the sun does indeed shine out of their backside, and who expect the rest of us to fall down and worship at the altar of their magnificence. Don't pick a couple of pimply social outcases with zero self esteem. It's like pulling wings off a fly.
Possibly. Although satirising the socially inept seems a bit like priding yourself on your skill at boxing against quadriplegics. It's not particularly clever or difficult, at least not unless the person doing it is severely disadvantaged in their own right.
With the IT crowd, I'd hoped for a show to poke some affectionate fun at IT professionals. And for the first couple of shows, I though they might have got it right. But by the second series, the jokes seemed more spiteful than anything, as if they were trying to appeal to the "I hate computers and I hate computer professionals" demographic.
Not exactly a cardinal sin, perhaps. but I'm not surprised to find that the show has less than universal acclaim among IT professionals.
Now if you want a show that got it right, check out "Lab Rats".
Well, as I read it, the exchange went like this:
You: Free Software doesn't attract funding from the business sector because such investments are seen as benefiting competitors more than they benefit the investor.
Me: Well, actually it does see quite a bit of business investment...
You: Those cases do not count. They benefit the business more than its competitors.
So my problem is that I don't think you can demonstrate that "all cats are white" by saying "that cat doesn't count because it is black".
Now if your point was that there are a number of cases where the open nature of free software acts as a disincentive to corporate investment, then I would have to agree with you.
But with all due respect, that isn't what you said.
Fair enough:
That's your line, right there. The points you'd like to discard are all the cases (which you've conceded occur) where business does in fact invest in Free Software.
The trouble I'm having is that I haven't seen a better justification for discarding them than the fact that they don't support your conclusion, which isn't the way logical inference is supposed to work.
I'm quite happy to believe that I haven't understood your point correctly, but if so, I think you need to explain it a little more carefully.
Which assumption would that be, Rattykins? The only one I made is the assumption that you're not a professional liar.
See. it sounds to me like you make your money by contributing something useful to the world. As opposed to those tossers who get paid for pissing in the global data pool on a daily basis.
No, no, no, no, no. Copyright is a state enforced monopoly, supposedly of limited term, on the specific expression of an idea. Murder is an act of violence in which a person is deprived of their life. See the difference? Neither of them are very nice, but there are important qualitative distinctions that we would be foolish to ignore.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for copyright abolition, although I'd settle for reform if it was sweeping enough. But if you conflate a widely abused rights framework with an irreversible act of violence, it makes you sound like some wild-eyed fanatic. That damages your credibility, and by extension, that of your argument.
I guess everyone's got their own pet feature they'd like to see in OOo. For me it was decent SVG import and export filters. Best of luck getting Microsoft to put that in Word, however.
You can always go proprietary, but that doesn't necessarily represent a saving. The cost of a site licence for 20,000 MS office users is non-trivial, even allowing for the fact that the licencee can probably negotiate some sort of discount. And then there's issues of vendor lock-in and forced upgrade cycles to consider, and there's still no guarantee that you'll get the feature that made you consider paying a dev in the first place.
You also miss out on the opportunity to get the software tailored to your own workflow at a level that you're unlikely to find with any off-the-shelf solution. I think you're being a bit one sided about this.
So what are you saying? That it doesn't count if it actually makes sound business sense? It sounds to me like you've drawn your line first, and now you're discarding all the data points that don't lie on it.
Difficult to make that stick in the case of Samba, for instance. That's got pretty widespread general support, and yet Jeremy Allison and Andrew Tridgell are both (I believe) paid to work on it. I believe Apache sees a lot of corporate investment as well, and it's hard to see how any of that is going to be tailored so it only benefits one company,
And that, ladies and gentlemen, nicely illustrates the shortfall between a trained professional and the enthusiastic amateur.
Thank you, your Holiness.I'd say the check is in the mail, but that would ruin your amateur standing, and thereby destroy my point :)
You assume that all tactics favour both sides equally. The IP cartels can afford to employ professional liars, while they don't have much in the way of moral high ground. We have the moral ground, and any lies we might employ will be quickly picked apart and used to discredit us.
Better to play to our strengths and keep it clean. Not everybody regards the world as the utterly amoral zero sum game that some economists would like it to be.