You've got a good post here, but Id like to pick at this statement. Nobody is forcing ANYONE to use GPL Software, or GPL code in their projects. If you don't like the license you are free to write the code yourself. End of story.
Oh come on... you know exactly why many people dislike the GPL. BTW, I sense that you are the type of person who likes to see everything in black and white. *End of story*
No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use the GPL. But if you don't use the GPL, your competitors will, and you will be nickeled and dimed out of business. Of course if you do use the GPL, you will have sacrificed all your leverage and you will still be nickeled and dimed out of business. It's a Hobson's choice.
BTW, I have my own silly analogy: In a way, DRM is like candy and DRM says "You can eat our candy, but you can only eat it out of approved bowls." If you don't like that, don't take our candy and you are no worse off. none at all.
There has traditionally been a group of people willing to work for free both because it was their hobby/need and/or because it was a way to jump-start the Open Source movement in a world unjustly dominated by monopolistic players. Most of the "infrastructure" software is now mature and many are turning to full-time paid development now that the software meets peoples needs enough to invest further in perfecting it or building solutions upon it.
Oh come on. Where are these people? They certainly aren't posting on Slashdot. The audience here cheers loudly every time some renegade company ruins yet another industry. Most of the people working for free are either zealots (e.g. Stallman), students (young & naive), or academics. The academics are the worst of the lot, because they can spend other people's money (government grants and students' tuition) to help help advance the cause of socialism. Capitalism is based also on scarcity. Information has no scarcity unless you establish laws that artificially create it. And those laws are not free-market forces. Capitalism? Depends on your definition. Your argument that without copyright there is only altruism is still BS, and it is disproven every day by people who produce free information as part of their job.
Capitalism is not specifically based on scarcity; it is based on supply and demand. The fact is, if you abolish all copyright, patents, etc, the demand is still there but you polarize the supply. The material is either created or it isn't. Or it is created but the quality suffers. There may be other reasons why people still create things (desire for fame, curiosity, etc), but it's not capitalism.
BTW, if you wanted to argue that this is better than capitalism, that's a whole different argument. But that's not what you're saying. You are making the mistaken claim that it *is* capitalism. How is it irrelevant? Because it disproves your "only altruism" argument?
I wouldn't say "only altruism", because I tend to avoid extremist arguments. My comment was that you can't prove a statistical argument with a single piece of anecdotal evidence. That's like the old joke: "I just read that 1 in 4 people have some kind of mental disorder. It's not me... so which one of you 3 is it?" Who cares. Industries change and evolve. The economy fluctuates. It's a fact of life. What does this have anything to do with the argument at hand?
Absolutely. But you seem to have the (fairly common) misconception that these things happen arbitrarily. But in fact it is the opposite... the main reason why so many things go in cycles is that people have short memories. When the going is good, they start to believe that money grows on trees and you no longer have to follow the laws of economics.
I think now there's actually a second problem (probably due to the prevalance of number crunching computers), which is that a lot of people are applying meta-logic. That's basically what you are doing. You say that the economy fluctuates and there's nothing you can do about it. But if a significant number of people (or rather a significant portion of the money) start trying to second-guess the trends, they end up change the outcome. That's why the stock market is fluctuating worse than usual these days.
Anyway, I've gone on long enough, so one more comment: And why would the GPL be legislated out of existance any sooner than Microsoft's EULA?
Because while the average/. reader may think that Microsoft's EULA is the most evil thing they have ever seen, most people look at it and think "blah, blah, blah... standard legalese. No worse than what I see on my ski lift ticket or my car rental form." On the other hand, a bad economy affects everyone. Legislators are already making noise about the flood of jobs overseas. They're eventually going to realize that OSS only exacerbates the problem.
The only way in which OSS development works more efficiently than capitalism is by leveraging the large pool of people who are willing to work for free. In other words, it is inherently reliant on altruistic behaviour.
Your statement that "non-market" forces such as copyright are anti-capitalist is based on a mistaken assumption that the most capitalist thing is the absence of all laws. I'm sorry, but that's anarchy. Capitalism is an economic model that is based on a game-theory model of the world in which the desire for money leads people to create useful things, and without copyright you are forced to resort to altruism to explain why people would create things (or external influences like celebrity).
The fact that you are currently making money writing OSS is largely irrelevant. Very few people would claim that it's impossible to make money with OSS. Everyone knows that you can't refute a statistical argument with anecdotal evidence.
I'm not talking about the situation right now. I'm trying to predict the future here. My complaint is that I'm not making as much money as I was 3 years ago. But we experienced developers still have it relatively good. The newgrads are getting screwed.
Anyway, my prediction for the future is that the situation is going to get worse and worse until the GPL is legislated out of existence. SCO probably won't win their case now, but 5 years from now the next SCO will.
Ayn Rand lived and wrote in a very different era from ours. I see no trouble combining the notion of free software with her ideas:
I don't hold Ayn Rand's opinions as sacred, but I have read several of her books and I think you'd have trouble doing that sensibly. She believed that ultimate control of the product should remain with the creator, not the end user (that was the whole theme of the Fountainhead). Free software is not about socialism, or even charity - everybody who writes it is working freely and in their own interest.
Again, if Ayn Rand was alive today, she would most certainly disagree. I suspect she could come up with a neat little parable in which the free software advocates are the Peter Wigands and Elsworth Tooheys.
The GPL mindset is designed, at the very core, with the sole end goal of making the best computer program possible.
I dunno... a lot of OSS contributors seem awfully concerned with fame. Some want to become famous; others just want to bask in celebrity's warm glow. In a way, it's a lot like the irrational obsession some people have with movie stars. They get confused because their philosophy tells them that the way to succeed is to let capitalism optimise everything; but then they see "inefficient", unoptimized, seemingly altruistic open source succeeding, they can't understand why that is.
Actually, I think a lot of OSS advocates have a deep seated belief in capitalism. They believe that capitalism is such an omnipotent force that you can take away patents, copyright, trade secrets, collusion, and any kind of leverage, and capitalism will still prevail. These are the people who become incensed if you suggest that the GPL is not capitalist. (I call those people naive.)
So anyone who says something you disagree with or that you consider inaccurate is a troll? (It seems to me that you're complaining about trolls without understanding what a troll is, which by your logic makes you a troll.)
Hmmm... How ironic for a company called Fountainhead to get press on/. I mean Ayn Rand was pro-patents and pro-copyright, and the plot of the Fountainhead is pretty much anti-thetical to the GPL.
I thought college radio stations had additional restrictions because they aren't commercial. I.e. they can't compete with regular radio stations by playing the same songs, etc. I knew a guy who had a radio show and I vaguely remember him talking about it. I dunno. Is that only in Canada or something?
Um, yeah. I can't memorize programming techniques or phase-noise graphs while sipping coffe at Barnes & Noble.
Oh can't you?
Last year (when I was out of work) I learned several new languages (COM & XSLT) while sipping a coffee at the bookstore. It's not like I couldn't afford the books, but I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands, and it was a good excuse to get out of the house.
No, I didn't memorize entire languages, but I got a good enough grip on them that I could go home and experiment with them. I used the bookstore as a library and the web as a reference manual.
Of course then I got a job where I didn't need either of them:-)
-a
Re:Does adding every ingredient make it better?
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm... It shouldn't matter what the initial value of C is. Perhaps the optimizer messes with the results.
I know on gcc that this code will print -10:
int C=0; cout C++ C--;
-a
Re:Does adding every ingredient make it better?
on
C# 2.0 Spec Released
·
· Score: 1
C++ - C-- == 0
I doubt it. Try running this:
int C; printf("%d\n", C++ - C--);
I don't have a compiler on this machine, but I'll wager 10 to 1 the above code will print "-1". (At least if you run it on gcc.)
Really... 1,100? That's surprising since the story said that only 19 were published after his retirement.
Here's what I don't get: Customers who bought this book also bought:
The Far Side Out To Lunch 2004 Mini Wall Calendar by Gary Larson (Author) (Calendar) Last Chapter and Worse: A Far Side Collection by Gary Larson (Paperback)
So if you just bought the complete Far Side collection, what are you buying all that other crap for?
Look at it this way. To people who don't care that much about the license, either option is equally appealing. But Linux has lots of people hyping it and contributing *because* of the license, so Linux gets more popular.
After that, it's a snowball effect. People start using Linux because of the hype, so Linux gets a bigger userbase. And because of the bigger userbase, they get more developers, more publicity, and more hype.
I think the message asking you whether or not you want to install a program is generated by your browser. So a program shouldn't be able to flip the order of the buttons or ask a tricky double-negative.
Why is Linux so well known? Probably largely because of the dot com bubble. Back then, you didn't need a business case to be successful, and actually if you were losing money, that would earn you bragging rights.
I remember watching an interview with the CEO of Yorkton Securities on CNBC right at the peak of the bubble. He said something (now) laughable like "We are recommending 6 companies to our customers that are worth a total of $300 million. None of them have ever turned a profit but they would still be undervalued at $800 million.
I think it's the license and the hype. From a hobbyist's perspective, BSD and Linux are equally good. But Linux is more appealing to people who want to make a political statment (who also tend to be loud).
On top of that, BSD code can often be incorporated into Linux, but not vice-versa. Linux is usually more cutting edge, so it draws more interest. It's a snowball effect.
Yes, good point. I would also like to see the "Never trust Macromedia". Not because they are evil, but because I there's nothing I want to use that requires Flash and so many damn sites try to install it (in order to display ads).
After all, if MS really cared about dangerous HTML content and the spam problem they'd have added a "parse all incoming emails as text only" option long ago.
Well, Bill Gates did issue a mandate for Microsoft to solve the spam problem... what, 3-4 months ago? Of course they never said they'd do it for free.
I have yet to meet anyone running Gator who knew they were running Gator. The last time it showed up on my Windows machine, I had just visited one of those dodgy sites you reach when you type a URL in wrong. It kept popping up a dialog box saying "Do you want to install somethingorother" (with a certificate from Gator corp) and I kept clicking "no" over and over again and it still somehow ended up installed on my machine.
I found it installed on my dad's machine last month. He had no idea how those mysterious extra toolbars that you can't get rid of suddenly appeared in Internet Explorer. I showed him how to use AdAware and he was very grateful.
Any product that installs without your knowledge and consent is clearly spyware and not adware. I'm not sure why that would be so hard to prove in court.
Quoting eBay is hardly a fair comparison. The link you posted didn't work, but I found another LOTR DVDs for $10. Of course it was used. You can't compare the retail price of a new CD to the auction price of a used DVD.
The cost to make a product is only one of many factors that determines its price. I assume you're being deliberately ignorant about this. Your comment that movies take 200* more to produce is unsubstantiated. (I assume you're including marketing costs for the movies and excluding them for the CDs.) In any case, movies have a wider appeal and they can be performed cheaply in many locations at once. Most movies break even at the box office, so DVDs don't have to recoup the production costs.
As to your last point, that's just tough. Music just seems to depreciate less with age.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got a good post here, but Id like to pick at this statement. Nobody is forcing ANYONE to use GPL Software, or GPL code in their projects. If you don't like the license you are free to write the code yourself. End of story.
Oh come on... you know exactly why many people dislike the GPL. BTW, I sense that you are the type of person who likes to see everything in black and white. *End of story*
No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to use the GPL. But if you don't use the GPL, your competitors will, and you will be nickeled and dimed out of business. Of course if you do use the GPL, you will have sacrificed all your leverage and you will still be nickeled and dimed out of business. It's a Hobson's choice.
BTW, I have my own silly analogy: In a way, DRM is like candy and DRM says "You can eat our candy, but you can only eat it out of approved bowls." If you don't like that, don't take our candy and you are no worse off. none at all.
Now who wants some candy? (didn't think so.)
-a
There has traditionally been a group of people willing to work for free both because it was their hobby/need and/or because it was a way to jump-start the Open Source movement in a world unjustly dominated by monopolistic players.
Most of the "infrastructure" software is now mature and many are turning to full-time paid development now that the software meets peoples needs enough to invest further in perfecting it or building solutions upon it.
Oh come on. Where are these people? They certainly aren't posting on Slashdot. The audience here cheers loudly every time some renegade company ruins yet another industry. Most of the people working for free are either zealots (e.g. Stallman), students (young & naive), or academics. The academics are the worst of the lot, because they can spend other people's money (government grants and students' tuition) to help help advance the cause of socialism.
Capitalism is based also on scarcity. Information has no scarcity unless you establish laws that artificially create it. And those laws are not free-market forces. Capitalism? Depends on your definition. Your argument that without copyright there is only altruism is still BS, and it is disproven every day by people who produce free information as part of their job.
Capitalism is not specifically based on scarcity; it is based on supply and demand. The fact is, if you abolish all copyright, patents, etc, the demand is still there but you polarize the supply. The material is either created or it isn't. Or it is created but the quality suffers. There may be other reasons why people still create things (desire for fame, curiosity, etc), but it's not capitalism.
BTW, if you wanted to argue that this is better than capitalism, that's a whole different argument. But that's not what you're saying. You are making the mistaken claim that it *is* capitalism.
How is it irrelevant? Because it disproves your "only altruism" argument?
I wouldn't say "only altruism", because I tend to avoid extremist arguments. My comment was that you can't prove a statistical argument with a single piece of anecdotal evidence. That's like the old joke: "I just read that 1 in 4 people have some kind of mental disorder. It's not me... so which one of you 3 is it?"
Who cares. Industries change and evolve. The economy fluctuates. It's a fact of life. What does this have anything to do with the argument at hand?
Absolutely. But you seem to have the (fairly common) misconception that these things happen arbitrarily. But in fact it is the opposite... the main reason why so many things go in cycles is that people have short memories. When the going is good, they start to believe that money grows on trees and you no longer have to follow the laws of economics.
I think now there's actually a second problem (probably due to the prevalance of number crunching computers), which is that a lot of people are applying meta-logic. That's basically what you are doing. You say that the economy fluctuates and there's nothing you can do about it. But if a significant number of people (or rather a significant portion of the money) start trying to second-guess the trends, they end up change the outcome. That's why the stock market is fluctuating worse than usual these days.
Anyway, I've gone on long enough, so one more comment:
And why would the GPL be legislated out of existance any sooner than Microsoft's EULA?
Because while the average
-a
The only way in which OSS development works more efficiently than capitalism is by leveraging the large pool of people who are willing to work for free. In other words, it is inherently reliant on altruistic behaviour.
Your statement that "non-market" forces such as copyright are anti-capitalist is based on a mistaken assumption that the most capitalist thing is the absence of all laws. I'm sorry, but that's anarchy. Capitalism is an economic model that is based on a game-theory model of the world in which the desire for money leads people to create useful things, and without copyright you are forced to resort to altruism to explain why people would create things (or external influences like celebrity).
The fact that you are currently making money writing OSS is largely irrelevant. Very few people would claim that it's impossible to make money with OSS. Everyone knows that you can't refute a statistical argument with anecdotal evidence.
I'm not talking about the situation right now. I'm trying to predict the future here. My complaint is that I'm not making as much money as I was 3 years ago. But we experienced developers still have it relatively good. The newgrads are getting screwed.
Anyway, my prediction for the future is that the situation is going to get worse and worse until the GPL is legislated out of existence. SCO probably won't win their case now, but 5 years from now the next SCO will.
-a
Ayn Rand lived and wrote in a very different era from ours. I see no trouble combining the notion of free software with her ideas:
I don't hold Ayn Rand's opinions as sacred, but I have read several of her books and I think you'd have trouble doing that sensibly. She believed that ultimate control of the product should remain with the creator, not the end user (that was the whole theme of the Fountainhead).
Free software is not about socialism, or even charity - everybody who writes it is working freely and in their own interest.
Again, if Ayn Rand was alive today, she would most certainly disagree. I suspect she could come up with a neat little parable in which the free software advocates are the Peter Wigands and Elsworth Tooheys.
-a
The GPL mindset is designed, at the very core, with the sole end goal of making the best computer program possible.
I dunno... a lot of OSS contributors seem awfully concerned with fame. Some want to become famous; others just want to bask in celebrity's warm glow. In a way, it's a lot like the irrational obsession some people have with movie stars.
They get confused because their philosophy tells them that the way to succeed is to let capitalism optimise everything; but then they see "inefficient", unoptimized, seemingly altruistic open source succeeding, they can't understand why that is.
Actually, I think a lot of OSS advocates have a deep seated belief in capitalism. They believe that capitalism is such an omnipotent force that you can take away patents, copyright, trade secrets, collusion, and any kind of leverage, and capitalism will still prevail. These are the people who become incensed if you suggest that the GPL is not capitalist. (I call those people naive.)
-a
So anyone who says something you disagree with or that you consider inaccurate is a troll? (It seems to me that you're complaining about trolls without understanding what a troll is, which by your logic makes you a troll.)
-a
Hmmm... How ironic for a company called Fountainhead to get press on /. I mean Ayn Rand was pro-patents and pro-copyright, and the plot of the Fountainhead is pretty much anti-thetical to the GPL.
-a
I thought college radio stations had additional restrictions because they aren't commercial. I.e. they can't compete with regular radio stations by playing the same songs, etc. I knew a guy who had a radio show and I vaguely remember him talking about it. I dunno. Is that only in Canada or something?
-a
Probably just means that they've discovered how to crack it, so now they want everyone else to use it.
Yeah, that was my immediate reaction when I saw the article. Not that I actually believe that, but it makes for a good conspiracy theory.
-a
Um, yeah. I can't memorize programming techniques or phase-noise graphs while sipping coffe at Barnes & Noble.
Oh can't you?
Last year (when I was out of work) I learned several new languages (COM & XSLT) while sipping a coffee at the bookstore. It's not like I couldn't afford the books, but I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands, and it was a good excuse to get out of the house.
No, I didn't memorize entire languages, but I got a good enough grip on them that I could go home and experiment with them. I used the bookstore as a library and the web as a reference manual.
Of course then I got a job where I didn't need either of them
-a
Hmmm... It shouldn't matter what the initial value of C is. Perhaps the optimizer messes with the results.
I know on gcc that this code will print -10:
int C=0;
cout C++ C--;
-a
C++ - C-- == 0
I doubt it. Try running this:
int C;
printf("%d\n", C++ - C--);
I don't have a compiler on this machine, but I'll wager 10 to 1 the above code will print "-1". (At least if you run it on gcc.)
-a
The idea sounded cool, but I looked at the webcam and all it was was a white square.
-a
Really... 1,100? That's surprising since the story said that only 19 were published after his retirement.
Here's what I don't get:
Customers who bought this book also bought:
The Far Side Out To Lunch 2004 Mini Wall Calendar by Gary Larson (Author) (Calendar)
Last Chapter and Worse: A Far Side Collection by Gary Larson (Paperback)
So if you just bought the complete Far Side collection, what are you buying all that other crap for?
-a
Look at it this way. To people who don't care that much about the license, either option is equally appealing. But Linux has lots of people hyping it and contributing *because* of the license, so Linux gets more popular.
After that, it's a snowball effect. People start using Linux because of the hype, so Linux gets a bigger userbase. And because of the bigger userbase, they get more developers, more publicity, and more hype.
-a
I think the message asking you whether or not you want to install a program is generated by your browser. So a program shouldn't be able to flip the order of the buttons or ask a tricky double-negative.
-a
Why is Linux so well known? Probably largely because of the dot com bubble. Back then, you didn't need a business case to be successful, and actually if you were losing money, that would earn you bragging rights.
I remember watching an interview with the CEO of Yorkton Securities on CNBC right at the peak of the bubble. He said something (now) laughable like "We are recommending 6 companies to our customers that are worth a total of $300 million. None of them have ever turned a profit but they would still be undervalued at $800 million.
-a
I think it's the license and the hype. From a hobbyist's perspective, BSD and Linux are equally good. But Linux is more appealing to people who want to make a political statment (who also tend to be loud).
On top of that, BSD code can often be incorporated into Linux, but not vice-versa. Linux is usually more cutting edge, so it draws more interest. It's a snowball effect.
-a
Yes, good point. I would also like to see the "Never trust Macromedia". Not because they are evil, but because I there's nothing I want to use that requires Flash and so many damn sites try to install it (in order to display ads).
-a
After all, if MS really cared about dangerous HTML content and the spam problem they'd have added a "parse all incoming emails as text only" option long ago.
Well, Bill Gates did issue a mandate for Microsoft to solve the spam problem... what, 3-4 months ago? Of course they never said they'd do it for free.
-a
I have yet to meet anyone running Gator who knew they were running Gator. The last time it showed up on my Windows machine, I had just visited one of those dodgy sites you reach when you type a URL in wrong. It kept popping up a dialog box saying "Do you want to install somethingorother" (with a certificate from Gator corp) and I kept clicking "no" over and over again and it still somehow ended up installed on my machine.
I found it installed on my dad's machine last month. He had no idea how those mysterious extra toolbars that you can't get rid of suddenly appeared in Internet Explorer. I showed him how to use AdAware and he was very grateful.
Any product that installs without your knowledge and consent is clearly spyware and not adware. I'm not sure why that would be so hard to prove in court.
-a
In a sense, this is exactly what makes Linux an ideal server platform: it's not "features" focused, and it's more into substance than style.
No, that's BSD. I mean come on... Linux is as much about hype as anything else.
-a
The most reasoned arguments on
What are you smoking?
If there's one thing that's consistently true about
-a
It's a survey of thousands of people. Did you consider that maybe different people voted for Dubya than those who voted for France?
-a
Quoting eBay is hardly a fair comparison. The link you posted didn't work, but I found another LOTR DVDs for $10. Of course it was used. You can't compare the retail price of a new CD to the auction price of a used DVD.
The cost to make a product is only one of many factors that determines its price. I assume you're being deliberately ignorant about this. Your comment that movies take 200* more to produce is unsubstantiated. (I assume you're including marketing costs for the movies and excluding them for the CDs.) In any case, movies have a wider appeal and they can be performed cheaply in many locations at once. Most movies break even at the box office, so DVDs don't have to recoup the production costs.
As to your last point, that's just tough. Music just seems to depreciate less with age.
-a