Reimplementation from scratch or reverse engineering requires tremendous expense by competitors, and therefore patent-based protection is not required.
That's simply not true, though, at least not in many cases. Consider Amazon's one-click patent. Clearly their innovation was not obvious before they created it, but it's pretty obvious now. How long would it take one skilled programmer to implement a one-click shopping cart for his web site? A day? A week? Patent protection for those sorts of innovation is absolutely required, because reimplementing them is essentially trivial.
The rest of your post just comes across as sounding like sour grapes, frankly.
Did you not read my post? I already talked about this. The article you cited-- which came from 2000, by the way-- described what has since come to be called Licensing 6.0. It is possible for companies-- or individuals, I guess, but that doesn't make much sense-- to buy volume licenses for Microsoft products along with a commitment to buy upgrades on a periodic basis. In other words, if you choose (that's the key word) to agree to buy Office n+1, you can get a volume license for Office n for less money.
These volume license packages are options for the buyer, nothing more. You can still buy Office XP or whatever at the Comp-u-hut for the retail price and get a permanent license to use it.
you get no support, no new drivers, no bugfixes, and no upgrades
Those are all ongoing services, though. They're separate and distinct from software. When you buy the software, you get just that: the software. The bits themselves, along with any documentation or whatever that applies to it. If companies are cool, they can offer bug-fixes for free, but they're not under any obligation to. New features? You should expect to pay for those.
You can't call it a temporary software license just because you have to pay for the next release.
Yes, that's certainly true. A $5 CD is an impulse item; a $12 CD not so much. But speaking personally, I don't really find myself at stores that sell CDs very often, so I'm not entirely sure it would affect my buying habits much.
If only Kosmo had worked out. Low cost and immediate gratification; that's the ticket.
The important point here is that you could "go and purchase a shrink-wrap at the store and presumably get a version as long as I choose to run it." Anything above and beyond that is just volume pricing, at which point the vendor can license it to you however they like.
Now that that's out of the way, let's consider the software itself and the service as separate items. The software itself is yours; read your license agreement. You can use it for as long as you like. The service, a period of which comes bundled with the software, provides you with virus definitions. Naturally, you have to pay for the service if you wish to continue using it.
Just to reiterate, the software itself is yours forever and ever. There is no temporary license associated with the software.
I guess I'm making more than you 'cause that 5 minutes to burn a CD would cost me more than $3.
Actually, friend, you spend considerably more than five minutes every day doing things like brushing your teeth and going to the bathroom. Pop the CD in optical drive 1, the blank in optical drive 2, click here and here, then forget about it while you take a shower or something.
Multitasking is the key insight.
Plus you are forgetting the other stuff that comes with a CD or are you printing out color pages of the CD covers....
Strangely enough, I've never given any thought at all to CD covers. If they're important to you, then that's between you and your God.
The meaning of "or" in English is the same as the meaning of "or" in Boolean logic: either this, or that, or both. I think you've got it confused with xor, which means either this or that but not both.
I can't remember where I read it, but years ago I heard this described as the paperback effect. Nobody copies paperback books because it's cheaper and easier to just buy your own. Might have been Negroponte; it sounds like something he'd say.
Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time imagining a price for CDs that's sufficiently cheap that copying them becomes unappealing. On my computer, I can copy a CD in about five minutes (drive to drive), and I can rip one in about three, depending on how much music is on it. I don't generally steal music, but that's because I hardly ever find music that somebody else has that I would like to have but that I don't already have. (Did that make sense?) Even at $3 each, it'd still be possible to copy a CD-- or even download it, if you can find it on the Internet-- faster and less expensively than you could drive to the store and buy it.
Maintenance is a support contract. You don't have to pay it if you don't want support. You can just by Shake, all by itself, for a one-time fee. You get a permanent license for it when you do.
The Gallery web site is not particularly forthcoming on the question of when the software was originally created. Everything on it appears to be dated in the spring of 2002. If that's the case, it's pretty clear that this project was inspired by iPhoto, which has been in the works at Apple for over a year.
If it's all the same with you, I'd rather not get into an argument about the USPTO. Let's just agree that the patent office is not perfect and leave it at that. Otherwise it becomes a big nitpick party, and that's boring.
But in reference to the New Republic article you cited... I would admonish you to be critical of your sources. The editorial slant of that particular outlet is well known. Consider, if you will, a real-world counterexample. My girlfriend is a doctor-- I've mentioned her here on Slashdot many times. She is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon who also does medical research. Right now she's working with a team researching the effectiveness of delivering antibiotics across the eardrum for the purposes of treating severe ear infections. (We've all had minor ear infections, but the really severe ones can cause permanent deafness. They're a big deal.)
Her research is sponsored by... I'm drawing a blank. The drug company that makes Cipro. Hello, Google? Oh, yeah. Bayer. Her research is sponsored by Bayer, and if it plays out just right, that company could be first to market with an effective antibiotic ear-drop that can be used to treat even severe ear infections. The commercial potential of her research has had zero stifling effect on her work. In fact, just last month she submitted an abstract to one of the journals-- don't know which-- describing her work.
In at least this one example, the exact opposite of your assertion is true. Bayer's commercial interest in developing an antibiotic ear-drop has led to their sponsoring academic research that would not have been done without their investment, and that research is being shared with other professionals through the normal channels.
Regardless, the profit motive, was never a significant driver of innovation in computing during it's most innovative periods.
Yes, that's true. I think the computer industry in the 1970's is analogous to the drug industry in the early 1900's; i.e., there basically was no commercial involvement. With the discovery of penicillin, the rush to find new and better drugs began. It slowly picked up steam over the decades to the point where medical research is now about 60% commercial (or at least commercially sponsored) and 40% purely academic. Computing is starting to go through that transition, too. Xerox PARC was, despite its corporate sponsorship, basically a pure research facility, and they came up with ideas that we still depend on today. But now the research is being done in the commercial world, and patents are more important now than ever to encourage the continued growth of that research.
I don't agree with your assertion that patents have been a hinderance to the computing field. I just see no evidence that this is true.
As todays software companies start moving to timed software licenses, open source will be around.
Bzzt. FUD alert. Who, exactly, is moving to temporary software licenses? It's common practice in the commercial world for vendors to issue temporary software licenses until the customer has paid in full-- when you're selling $500,000 cuts of software, it's common for the customer to choose the installment plan-- but at that point, the customer gets a permanent hardware or software license key.
So where do you get the idea that "todays [sic] software companies" are starting to move to temporary licenses? Microsoft has never sold software with a temporary license. Under Licensing 6.0, companies can choose to accept a mandatory upgrade agreement in order to keep up-front costs down, but you can still buy a permanent license for any Microsoft product if you want it.
With open source if the devo team quits, folds, or stops supporting their software you still have all the information to continue to use and improve the software you're using.
Technically that's true, but most companies would not exercise that option. If their open source software vendor-- or guy in his garage, or whatever-- closed up shop, they'd either keep using the software without any support at all, or they'd choose different software. The burden of having to basically start an in-house software engineering group to maintain and modify an abandoned open-source program is pretty unreasonable for most companies.
They've wielded their patents to stifle competition.
Idiot. The purpose of patents is to temporarily stifle competition! That's what they are for! And they are a good thing!
Criticize me all you want. But at least do it from a position of strength. Spouting things like "they've wielded their patents to stifle competition" just makes you look like a moron.
Oh, and I have an IRIX box. It's a poor excuse for a modern *NIX.
You're insane. IRIX scales to 1,024 processors in a single system image. The only other operating system that can claim that feature is UNICOS. IRIX has real-time scheduling features that no other operating system can even touch. These two things alone make IRIX the only operating system suitable for many scientific, technical, visualization, and simulation tasks.
You probably have an Indy or an O2 or something, and you're judging the OS based on the window manager. I can't even remember what the IRIX window manager looks like; I haven't used it since about 1996. SGI workstations are basically novelty items today. The servers are where the really exciting stuff happens.
But then again, you think "both MS and Apple's default window managers don't compare favorablywith many of the X11 WMs out there," so it's clear that your opinion on such matters is highly suspect at best.
Perl is good. I don't like Python, but it's good, too. Bash is a copy of the Bourne Shell. TCL is fine. GCC is nothing new; it's just a compiler. GDB is yet another debugger. XFree86 is a copy of X11. OpenSSH is a copy of SSH. Ogg is evidently an attempt to creat a copy of QuickTime, but it's difficult to be sure because there's basically nothing to Ogg except yet another audio codec right now.
Gnome and KDE have a lot more innovative UI features than Windows or Mac will ever dare to use, because we have the technical users who can understand them and use them. What about all the features in the Linux kernel made by open source developers, not found anywhere else?
Name some examples, please. If there's something new going on in Gnome or KDE, I'd like to know about it. The same for Linux. Last time I looked, I found no non-trivial features unique to Linux. But I'd like to give credit where it's due, so please educate me.
If you refuse that basic philosophy, then you will probably never understand the free or open-source movements, which is perfectly ok.
I mean no offense, but I believe people who associate the words "software" and "philosophy" this closely are usually suffering from mild delusions of grandeur. One might as easily talk about the philosophy of screwdrivers, or the epistemology of motor oil.
And as for your argument about Emacs, I'd like to point out that there has been essentially no notable innovation in Emacs since Greenberg's work in 1979. Since then, it's been coast, coast, coast all the way.
Trying to catch up?? What freaking planet have you been living on for the past 2 years? IRIX's core market, movie animation, has all but vanished due to Linux.
Sigh. SGI's core market has never been "movie animation." At no point in the company's history has Hollywood made up more than 10% of their gross revenue. SGI's core markets are federal systems, scientific and technical computer, and oil and gas. In all of those markets, SGI is still doing very well, while Linux is just starting to penetrate. (SGI as a company isn't doing too well, but that's because they're losing money like crazy in the desktop and workstation markets.) And the features in Linux that allow it to be an acceptable platform for some of those applications-- features like big memory, a scalable filesystem, and support for more than 32 processors-- come from, you guessed it, SGI.
I'm not just an SGI apologist, I'm also a shareholder.
Oh.. please do tell me "how the world actually works". That should be amusing.
Okay. (Dim the lights and cue the old-timey piano music.) Let's say you have an idea for a steam-powered film stretcher. You believe the world needs a steam-powered film stretcher. So you start working on one in your barn.
Six months later, you run out of money. Your idea of a steam-powered film stretcher is in danger of dying on the vine.
So you find yourself an investor, a person with money, literally, to throw away. You tell him that you need $500,000 to build your steam-powered film stretcher. He agrees to give you the money, in return for a cut of your profits from selling steam-powered film stretchers.
With this infusion of new capital, you're able to finish building your steam-powered film stretcher. You take out a few ads and wait for the orders to roll in. For the first few weeks they do, and both you and your investor are happy. Then the orders start to dry up, apparently for no reason. The next day you learn that another company is selling steam-powered film stretchers, functionally identical to yours, for only $39.95. They stole your idea! Oh, well. Nothing to be done about that but to lower your price. But at that rate, every film-stretching plant in the world will have to buy two of your film stretchers before you get anywhere close to making your investor's initial $500,000 back. The investor does the math, realizes his predicament, and reluctantly writes off his investment. You're unhappy, he's unhappy, and most importantly, he's learned his lesson. It'll be a cold day in hell before he sinks any more money into wacky ideas like yours. He'll invest in dependable blue-chips instead, like Congreves Inflammable Powders and US Hay.
If only you'd had a patent on your steam-powered film stretcher. Sure, you personally don't care about the profit of the thing, but inventing costs money, and investors want to see their investments come back to them and then some. If you'd had a patent on your idea, you would have had a temporary monopoly on steam-powered film stretchers, which would have given you enough time to get your investor's money back, plus a tidy profit, which in turn would have encouraged him to invest in the next wacky idea that comes along. In the meantime, economies of scale would have kicked in that allowed you to gradually lower your prices, so that you can be competitive with other companies who simply copy your idea once your patent runs out. But without that all-important patent, your investor is out $500,000, you're out of luck, and you'll never work in this town again.
Patents don't encourage inventors directly. They encourage the investors who make innovation possible. Without patents, all the good ideas in the world won't amount to a hill of beans without the capital to bring them to life.
Um... what the fuck are you talking about? It doesn't seem like my post and your response had anything to do with each other.
Go back and read my post again. I said, basically, that the vast majority of people don't care about having source code. You then talked about a couple of specific examples, which is all fine and good, but it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people don't care about having source code.
Then you started talking about file formats. I have to ask... what does this have to do with anything? Most commercial software supports both open and proprietary formats. Word, to use your example, supports not only the proprietary binary Word file format, but also the open RTF format. Documents created in Word can easily be converted to RTF, if the user so desires, just by doing a "Save As." Heck, you can even save plain ASCII text out of Word. Maya, which is the program I'm using at the moment, supports its own model format, but also virtually every other model file format. No proprietary lock-in here.
Generally speaking, I don't see what your post has to do with mine. I said that your hypothesis was wrong because being "open source" doesn't matter to practically anybody, and when it does matter, it's more of a liability than an asset. Then you started spewing FUD about file formats and, naturally, got moderated up for it. Bewildering.
Oh, so Microsoft is using their patents to encourage innovation?
No. The promise of patents encouraged Microsoft to innovate, because a patent on a popular innovation allows the innovator to recoup his investment more quickly and easily. The net result is that more capital is invested in innovation with the promise of a patent at the end.
Never worked for a start-up company, huh? One of the first questions out of the mouths of the VCs is, "What's your patent situation?" The money is a lot more forthcoming if you have a patent application in the works.
It's been a while since Microsoft has used any of their patents to do anything innovative.
Pfeh. Bash Microsoft all you want, but at least be fair. Microsoft has been one of the big proponents of web services technology, and they invented SOAP; that's a huge innovation. Hailstorm was an innovation, even though it has turned out not to be a popular one. Microsoft, like 'em or not, is innovating like crazy.
I won't even bother responding to your other posts. I have an account here for a reason. Look at my history, and form any opinion about me you'd like. I won't argue with you.
I think, unfortunately, that your hypothesis is wrong in the majority of cases. Whether software comes with source code or not matters to some people, certainly, but not to most. And if it matters at all, it can just as easily be a liability as it can an asset.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred people literally wouldn't know source code if they saw it, so having it is no tangible benefit to them. In fact, it can easily be seen as a liability, because most of the software that is available in source code form is not supported by any vendor. If a company were to adopt a piece of open-source software that was only supported by an individual or a small group, and that individual or group were to stop developing and supporting that software, the company would have no choice but to accept responsibility for supporting the code themselves. (Or to quickly adopt something else.) That's a serious liability to, say, a company that makes point-of-sale systems.
Not every open-source program would be susceptible to such an event. But most of them would, and that-- if anything-- is what non-computer people will associate with the words "open source." "Open source," most often, means flying without a net.
Again, just to emphasize, I'm not talking about facts here. I'm talking about generalities, and the perceptions that are based on those generalities.
The article linked is not a long one; it talks about Microsoft's recent announcement that Office 11 won't run or won't be supported (I'm not entirely sure which) on any MS OS older than Windows 2000. Three people were quoted in the article as saying unhappy things about this announcement.
I think the submitter of this article is reading too much into it. I've done some interviews with the mass media on a few subjects-- most recently on last month's brief but entertaining controversy about Microsoft's fake testimonial ads-- and it's very common for people like myself to agree to speak to reporters on background, or to say things that are not for attribution. "On background" and "not for attribution" have very specific meanings to reporters. If you tell a reporter that what you're about to say is not for attribution, that means the reporter can write about what you say, or even quote you, but mustn't identify you in any way. That's obviously what happened here.
So... why? Well, the first possible reason that springs to mind is that the people being interviewed didn't have the authority to speak officially for their company, even though they were being asked about company reactions to the Microsoft announcement. Rather than having every statement run through corporate public relations, the reporter simply agreed that the interviews would be "not for attribution." That way the reporter gets his quotes, and the interviewee doesn't have to cover his ass.
In other words, just because the author of the story used the phrase "requested anonymity," don't jump to the conclusion that this is some Deep Throat situation, some big cloak-and-dagger thing. It's not even unusual.
There's basically nothing interesting going on here.
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Software patents do not promote progress.
Saying so doesn't make it true. You're going to have to post some pretty compelling evidence if you're going to convince me of that.
Furthermore, software patents trample on first amendment rights.
This issue is so dead it stinks. Software is not speech. It enjoys no first amendment protection at all.
Reimplementation from scratch or reverse engineering requires tremendous expense by competitors, and therefore patent-based protection is not required.
That's simply not true, though, at least not in many cases. Consider Amazon's one-click patent. Clearly their innovation was not obvious before they created it, but it's pretty obvious now. How long would it take one skilled programmer to implement a one-click shopping cart for his web site? A day? A week? Patent protection for those sorts of innovation is absolutely required, because reimplementing them is essentially trivial.
The rest of your post just comes across as sounding like sour grapes, frankly.
Did you not read my post? I already talked about this. The article you cited-- which came from 2000, by the way-- described what has since come to be called Licensing 6.0. It is possible for companies-- or individuals, I guess, but that doesn't make much sense-- to buy volume licenses for Microsoft products along with a commitment to buy upgrades on a periodic basis. In other words, if you choose (that's the key word) to agree to buy Office n+1, you can get a volume license for Office n for less money.
These volume license packages are options for the buyer, nothing more. You can still buy Office XP or whatever at the Comp-u-hut for the retail price and get a permanent license to use it.
you get no support, no new drivers, no bugfixes, and no upgrades
Those are all ongoing services, though. They're separate and distinct from software. When you buy the software, you get just that: the software. The bits themselves, along with any documentation or whatever that applies to it. If companies are cool, they can offer bug-fixes for free, but they're not under any obligation to. New features? You should expect to pay for those.
You can't call it a temporary software license just because you have to pay for the next release.
Yes, that's certainly true. A $5 CD is an impulse item; a $12 CD not so much. But speaking personally, I don't really find myself at stores that sell CDs very often, so I'm not entirely sure it would affect my buying habits much.
If only Kosmo had worked out. Low cost and immediate gratification; that's the ticket.
Yes, thanks. I did neglect to mention that possibility, didn't I?
All of which adds up to this: survey questions that include the word "or" are so ambiguous as to be damn near worthless.
The important point here is that you could "go and purchase a shrink-wrap at the store and presumably get a version as long as I choose to run it." Anything above and beyond that is just volume pricing, at which point the vendor can license it to you however they like.
Now that that's out of the way, let's consider the software itself and the service as separate items. The software itself is yours; read your license agreement. You can use it for as long as you like. The service, a period of which comes bundled with the software, provides you with virus definitions. Naturally, you have to pay for the service if you wish to continue using it.
Just to reiterate, the software itself is yours forever and ever. There is no temporary license associated with the software.
I guess I'm making more than you 'cause that 5 minutes to burn a CD would cost me more than $3.
Actually, friend, you spend considerably more than five minutes every day doing things like brushing your teeth and going to the bathroom. Pop the CD in optical drive 1, the blank in optical drive 2, click here and here, then forget about it while you take a shower or something.
Multitasking is the key insight.
Plus you are forgetting the other stuff that comes with a CD or are you printing out color pages of the CD covers....
Strangely enough, I've never given any thought at all to CD covers. If they're important to you, then that's between you and your God.
The meaning of "or" in English is the same as the meaning of "or" in Boolean logic: either this, or that, or both. I think you've got it confused with xor, which means either this or that but not both.
I can't remember where I read it, but years ago I heard this described as the paperback effect. Nobody copies paperback books because it's cheaper and easier to just buy your own. Might have been Negroponte; it sounds like something he'd say.
Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time imagining a price for CDs that's sufficiently cheap that copying them becomes unappealing. On my computer, I can copy a CD in about five minutes (drive to drive), and I can rip one in about three, depending on how much music is on it. I don't generally steal music, but that's because I hardly ever find music that somebody else has that I would like to have but that I don't already have. (Did that make sense?) Even at $3 each, it'd still be possible to copy a CD-- or even download it, if you can find it on the Internet-- faster and less expensively than you could drive to the store and buy it.
You may like Aqua, but it makes me sick.
De gustibus non disputandum est.
Maintenance is a support contract. You don't have to pay it if you don't want support. You can just by Shake, all by itself, for a one-time fee. You get a permanent license for it when you do.
The Gallery web site is not particularly forthcoming on the question of when the software was originally created. Everything on it appears to be dated in the spring of 2002. If that's the case, it's pretty clear that this project was inspired by iPhoto, which has been in the works at Apple for over a year.
If it's all the same with you, I'd rather not get into an argument about the USPTO. Let's just agree that the patent office is not perfect and leave it at that. Otherwise it becomes a big nitpick party, and that's boring.
But in reference to the New Republic article you cited... I would admonish you to be critical of your sources. The editorial slant of that particular outlet is well known. Consider, if you will, a real-world counterexample. My girlfriend is a doctor-- I've mentioned her here on Slashdot many times. She is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon who also does medical research. Right now she's working with a team researching the effectiveness of delivering antibiotics across the eardrum for the purposes of treating severe ear infections. (We've all had minor ear infections, but the really severe ones can cause permanent deafness. They're a big deal.)
Her research is sponsored by... I'm drawing a blank. The drug company that makes Cipro. Hello, Google? Oh, yeah. Bayer. Her research is sponsored by Bayer, and if it plays out just right, that company could be first to market with an effective antibiotic ear-drop that can be used to treat even severe ear infections. The commercial potential of her research has had zero stifling effect on her work. In fact, just last month she submitted an abstract to one of the journals-- don't know which-- describing her work.
In at least this one example, the exact opposite of your assertion is true. Bayer's commercial interest in developing an antibiotic ear-drop has led to their sponsoring academic research that would not have been done without their investment, and that research is being shared with other professionals through the normal channels.
Regardless, the profit motive, was never a significant driver of innovation in computing during it's most innovative periods.
Yes, that's true. I think the computer industry in the 1970's is analogous to the drug industry in the early 1900's; i.e., there basically was no commercial involvement. With the discovery of penicillin, the rush to find new and better drugs began. It slowly picked up steam over the decades to the point where medical research is now about 60% commercial (or at least commercially sponsored) and 40% purely academic. Computing is starting to go through that transition, too. Xerox PARC was, despite its corporate sponsorship, basically a pure research facility, and they came up with ideas that we still depend on today. But now the research is being done in the commercial world, and patents are more important now than ever to encourage the continued growth of that research.
I don't agree with your assertion that patents have been a hinderance to the computing field. I just see no evidence that this is true.
As todays software companies start moving to timed software licenses, open source will be around.
Bzzt. FUD alert. Who, exactly, is moving to temporary software licenses? It's common practice in the commercial world for vendors to issue temporary software licenses until the customer has paid in full-- when you're selling $500,000 cuts of software, it's common for the customer to choose the installment plan-- but at that point, the customer gets a permanent hardware or software license key.
So where do you get the idea that "todays [sic] software companies" are starting to move to temporary licenses? Microsoft has never sold software with a temporary license. Under Licensing 6.0, companies can choose to accept a mandatory upgrade agreement in order to keep up-front costs down, but you can still buy a permanent license for any Microsoft product if you want it.
With open source if the devo team quits, folds, or stops supporting their software you still have all the information to continue to use and improve the software you're using.
Technically that's true, but most companies would not exercise that option. If their open source software vendor-- or guy in his garage, or whatever-- closed up shop, they'd either keep using the software without any support at all, or they'd choose different software. The burden of having to basically start an in-house software engineering group to maintain and modify an abandoned open-source program is pretty unreasonable for most companies.
They've wielded their patents to stifle competition.
Idiot. The purpose of patents is to temporarily stifle competition! That's what they are for! And they are a good thing!
Criticize me all you want. But at least do it from a position of strength. Spouting things like "they've wielded their patents to stifle competition" just makes you look like a moron.
Oh, and I have an IRIX box. It's a poor excuse for a modern *NIX.
You're insane. IRIX scales to 1,024 processors in a single system image. The only other operating system that can claim that feature is UNICOS. IRIX has real-time scheduling features that no other operating system can even touch. These two things alone make IRIX the only operating system suitable for many scientific, technical, visualization, and simulation tasks.
You probably have an Indy or an O2 or something, and you're judging the OS based on the window manager. I can't even remember what the IRIX window manager looks like; I haven't used it since about 1996. SGI workstations are basically novelty items today. The servers are where the really exciting stuff happens.
But then again, you think "both MS and Apple's default window managers don't compare favorablywith many of the X11 WMs out there," so it's clear that your opinion on such matters is highly suspect at best.
Perl? Python? Bash? Emacs? TCL/TK? GCC? GDB? XFree86? OpenSSH? Ogg?
Perl is good. I don't like Python, but it's good, too. Bash is a copy of the Bourne Shell. TCL is fine. GCC is nothing new; it's just a compiler. GDB is yet another debugger. XFree86 is a copy of X11. OpenSSH is a copy of SSH. Ogg is evidently an attempt to creat a copy of QuickTime, but it's difficult to be sure because there's basically nothing to Ogg except yet another audio codec right now.
Gnome and KDE have a lot more innovative UI features than Windows or Mac will ever dare to use, because we have the technical users who can understand them and use them. What about all the features in the Linux kernel made by open source developers, not found anywhere else?
Name some examples, please. If there's something new going on in Gnome or KDE, I'd like to know about it. The same for Linux. Last time I looked, I found no non-trivial features unique to Linux. But I'd like to give credit where it's due, so please educate me.
If you refuse that basic philosophy, then you will probably never understand the free or open-source movements, which is perfectly ok.
I mean no offense, but I believe people who associate the words "software" and "philosophy" this closely are usually suffering from mild delusions of grandeur. One might as easily talk about the philosophy of screwdrivers, or the epistemology of motor oil.
And as for your argument about Emacs, I'd like to point out that there has been essentially no notable innovation in Emacs since Greenberg's work in 1979. Since then, it's been coast, coast, coast all the way.
Trying to catch up?? What freaking planet have you been living on for the past 2 years? IRIX's core market, movie animation, has all but vanished due to Linux.
Sigh. SGI's core market has never been "movie animation." At no point in the company's history has Hollywood made up more than 10% of their gross revenue. SGI's core markets are federal systems, scientific and technical computer, and oil and gas. In all of those markets, SGI is still doing very well, while Linux is just starting to penetrate. (SGI as a company isn't doing too well, but that's because they're losing money like crazy in the desktop and workstation markets.) And the features in Linux that allow it to be an acceptable platform for some of those applications-- features like big memory, a scalable filesystem, and support for more than 32 processors-- come from, you guessed it, SGI.
I'm not just an SGI apologist, I'm also a shareholder.
Oh.. please do tell me "how the world actually works". That should be amusing.
Okay. (Dim the lights and cue the old-timey piano music.) Let's say you have an idea for a steam-powered film stretcher. You believe the world needs a steam-powered film stretcher. So you start working on one in your barn.
Six months later, you run out of money. Your idea of a steam-powered film stretcher is in danger of dying on the vine.
So you find yourself an investor, a person with money, literally, to throw away. You tell him that you need $500,000 to build your steam-powered film stretcher. He agrees to give you the money, in return for a cut of your profits from selling steam-powered film stretchers.
With this infusion of new capital, you're able to finish building your steam-powered film stretcher. You take out a few ads and wait for the orders to roll in. For the first few weeks they do, and both you and your investor are happy. Then the orders start to dry up, apparently for no reason. The next day you learn that another company is selling steam-powered film stretchers, functionally identical to yours, for only $39.95. They stole your idea! Oh, well. Nothing to be done about that but to lower your price. But at that rate, every film-stretching plant in the world will have to buy two of your film stretchers before you get anywhere close to making your investor's initial $500,000 back. The investor does the math, realizes his predicament, and reluctantly writes off his investment. You're unhappy, he's unhappy, and most importantly, he's learned his lesson. It'll be a cold day in hell before he sinks any more money into wacky ideas like yours. He'll invest in dependable blue-chips instead, like Congreves Inflammable Powders and US Hay.
If only you'd had a patent on your steam-powered film stretcher. Sure, you personally don't care about the profit of the thing, but inventing costs money, and investors want to see their investments come back to them and then some. If you'd had a patent on your idea, you would have had a temporary monopoly on steam-powered film stretchers, which would have given you enough time to get your investor's money back, plus a tidy profit, which in turn would have encouraged him to invest in the next wacky idea that comes along. In the meantime, economies of scale would have kicked in that allowed you to gradually lower your prices, so that you can be competitive with other companies who simply copy your idea once your patent runs out. But without that all-important patent, your investor is out $500,000, you're out of luck, and you'll never work in this town again.
Patents don't encourage inventors directly. They encourage the investors who make innovation possible. Without patents, all the good ideas in the world won't amount to a hill of beans without the capital to bring them to life.
Um... what the fuck are you talking about? It doesn't seem like my post and your response had anything to do with each other.
Go back and read my post again. I said, basically, that the vast majority of people don't care about having source code. You then talked about a couple of specific examples, which is all fine and good, but it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of people don't care about having source code.
Then you started talking about file formats. I have to ask... what does this have to do with anything? Most commercial software supports both open and proprietary formats. Word, to use your example, supports not only the proprietary binary Word file format, but also the open RTF format. Documents created in Word can easily be converted to RTF, if the user so desires, just by doing a "Save As." Heck, you can even save plain ASCII text out of Word. Maya, which is the program I'm using at the moment, supports its own model format, but also virtually every other model file format. No proprietary lock-in here.
Generally speaking, I don't see what your post has to do with mine. I said that your hypothesis was wrong because being "open source" doesn't matter to practically anybody, and when it does matter, it's more of a liability than an asset. Then you started spewing FUD about file formats and, naturally, got moderated up for it. Bewildering.
Oh, so Microsoft is using their patents to encourage innovation?
No. The promise of patents encouraged Microsoft to innovate, because a patent on a popular innovation allows the innovator to recoup his investment more quickly and easily. The net result is that more capital is invested in innovation with the promise of a patent at the end.
Never worked for a start-up company, huh? One of the first questions out of the mouths of the VCs is, "What's your patent situation?" The money is a lot more forthcoming if you have a patent application in the works.
It's been a while since Microsoft has used any of their patents to do anything innovative.
Pfeh. Bash Microsoft all you want, but at least be fair. Microsoft has been one of the big proponents of web services technology, and they invented SOAP; that's a huge innovation. Hailstorm was an innovation, even though it has turned out not to be a popular one. Microsoft, like 'em or not, is innovating like crazy.
I won't even bother responding to your other posts. I have an account here for a reason. Look at my history, and form any opinion about me you'd like. I won't argue with you.
I think, unfortunately, that your hypothesis is wrong in the majority of cases. Whether software comes with source code or not matters to some people, certainly, but not to most. And if it matters at all, it can just as easily be a liability as it can an asset.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred people literally wouldn't know source code if they saw it, so having it is no tangible benefit to them. In fact, it can easily be seen as a liability, because most of the software that is available in source code form is not supported by any vendor. If a company were to adopt a piece of open-source software that was only supported by an individual or a small group, and that individual or group were to stop developing and supporting that software, the company would have no choice but to accept responsibility for supporting the code themselves. (Or to quickly adopt something else.) That's a serious liability to, say, a company that makes point-of-sale systems.
Not every open-source program would be susceptible to such an event. But most of them would, and that-- if anything-- is what non-computer people will associate with the words "open source." "Open source," most often, means flying without a net.
Again, just to emphasize, I'm not talking about facts here. I'm talking about generalities, and the perceptions that are based on those generalities.
The article linked is not a long one; it talks about Microsoft's recent announcement that Office 11 won't run or won't be supported (I'm not entirely sure which) on any MS OS older than Windows 2000. Three people were quoted in the article as saying unhappy things about this announcement.
I think the submitter of this article is reading too much into it. I've done some interviews with the mass media on a few subjects-- most recently on last month's brief but entertaining controversy about Microsoft's fake testimonial ads-- and it's very common for people like myself to agree to speak to reporters on background, or to say things that are not for attribution. "On background" and "not for attribution" have very specific meanings to reporters. If you tell a reporter that what you're about to say is not for attribution, that means the reporter can write about what you say, or even quote you, but mustn't identify you in any way. That's obviously what happened here.
So... why? Well, the first possible reason that springs to mind is that the people being interviewed didn't have the authority to speak officially for their company, even though they were being asked about company reactions to the Microsoft announcement. Rather than having every statement run through corporate public relations, the reporter simply agreed that the interviews would be "not for attribution." That way the reporter gets his quotes, and the interviewee doesn't have to cover his ass.
In other words, just because the author of the story used the phrase "requested anonymity," don't jump to the conclusion that this is some Deep Throat situation, some big cloak-and-dagger thing. It's not even unusual.
There's basically nothing interesting going on here.