It's you who trajically misrepresent his position. You act as if the making of money is the important issue to RMS; as if he wants to stop people from making money.
No. What I said was that RMS obviously considers programmers making money to be a very low priority. I also said that distinguishing between a) "actively causing something" and b) "indirectly causing something but not caring" is kind of splitting hairs. If he was against people making money with GNU software he'd have a no-commercial-use clause in the GPL.
RMS definitely wants GPL-licensed code to take over the world, including corporations. He knows that forbidding commercial use would be a black mark against the GPL. He also wants to turn corporations into unwitting pawns by suckering them into contributing.
I've never heard that before!!:-) More generally, most software enables further productivity (consider artist's packages),
Yes, that's one of the points that is often raised: E.g. OSS allows any entrepreneur in the world to cheaply create a website. But again, this also implies there will be stifling competition. The accrued value of a website is proportional to the cost of building a competing one.
I can see what you're trying to achieve, but how many corporations have one and only one IP block? A lot fewer than those with multiple blocks, and certainly fewer than those who don't actually own their block(s) but lease it(them) from larger corporations.
Ummmm... if we're talking about standard client software here, what about the ~90% of companies who run NATs with private addresses on their LANS?
Like pretty much every other analogy I have ever heard. The telephone companies are specifically REQUIRED to allow people who are not thier customers to connect to people that are, as well as lease out thier spare capacity.
Why? Because telephone wires are mostly located on public land. Telephone companies are typically government-sponsored monopolies, and they are not allowed to leverage this status to their advantage.
Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE.
I hadn't be able to come up with a word to describe the/. obsession with filesharing until now: jihad!
Sometimes that's not enough. At my university, the departmental firewall did just fine in blocking the virus, until somebody got their Windows laptop infected at home and brought it to work, behind the firewall. Once again proving that great network security can be easily defeated by poor physical security.
Hard on the outside, soft & crunchy in the middle? The safety monitoring computer for a power system should be accessible only by floppy disk through a terminal in a locked room with pressure sensitive floors, a sound monitor, body heat detectors *AND* laser trip wires on all the ventilation grates. (The floppy disk should be run through a demagnitizer before and after each use.)
Actually, I don't; I really meant that it was working in this case, hence "This is the market working at its best"; I acknowledge that it gets a lot worse.
Capitalism works best when you have a *limited* number of players (e.g. 4-8 for most industries) competing for the same pie. Any more than that and margins start to go to nothing. Globalization will lead to excess competition.
When margins go to nothing, companies go belly up left & right. That certainly doesn't benefit the worker and it doesn't really benefit the consumer either because it stifles the economy. When businesses go bankrupt, you gotta believe that we all pay.
Look at insurance companies. Your insurance premiums probably went up recently, not because of an increase in risk, but rather because the insurance companies lost a lot of money in the stock market. If you live somewhere with electricity deregulation, you are probably suffering the effects of globalization as well.
If you think that more competition will lead to more trickle down, you are practicing voodoo economics. What Ronald Reagan claimed was that tax cuts will lead to trickle down, which was never really proven either.
This is ideal; not only does Open Source encourage growth by bringing down the price of software, it also accelerates the redistributive "trickle down" to those who are less well off, in this case by fascilitating competition. This is the market working at its best.
You seem to have naive and overly idealistic faith in capitalism. In reality, unregulated capitalism is an unstable system. Capitalism doesn't work without a damping factor, be it local laws, collusion, or military force.
Okay, I'm guessing English isn't your first language. When you said "Stallman himself has been selling Emacs for $150 per tape", I thought you meant *currently*.
Oh, and what's so great about the jingoism-insipiring nation states (just witness the stupid government propaganda inspired animosity between the Europe and US) and having borders that make it difficult for people to exercise their natural right to move freely from one place to another?
Patriotism can be dumb, but it's better than anarchy. I still don't see why you value this freedom to move about more than living in a prosperous society. BTW. The word is "dystopian".
By my reading of the article, the study simply concludes that text messaging is the reason why less people are seeing movies. It doesn't say that text messaging is evil and needs to be stopped. This study will influence how the studios make (and sell) movies in the future.
I don't think the IMDB ratings are worth a damn. There's a lot of obvious shilling by the movie companies in the comments. Every time a new Lord of the Rings comes out there's a huge fanboy wank on the opening day to vote it the #1 movie of all time. Disclaimer: I haven't seen Gigli, and I probably won't. Bad movie? Probably from the sounds of it? Worst movie of ALL TIME? Hardly.
The IMDB's rating is based both on average vote and on number of votes. Movies with a lot of votes have a greater chance of making it onto the "best" list and presumably the "worst" list as well.
As for Gigli, movie critics love to complete with each other to see who can write the most scathing, condescending review. It makes for good entertainment, but it's hardly accurate. Roger Ebert (one of the few reviewers who doesn't rely on this crutch) gave it a marginal thumbs down.
Anyone who thinks Gigli is the worst movie ever obviously hasn't spent enough time watching the space channel.
Now, people buying servers want an OS they know they can get compatible software with, So they have an incentive to support (i.e. give money to) a popular distro (i.e. RedHat) so RedHat doesn't go tits up and leave them searching for something else.
No. That is an incentive to save your money, while at the same time loudly telling everyone else to support RedHat. Nowhere did I say that branding would make you the market leader, just that you could make money. Which the original poster was saying you can never do.
The problem is that you're making a Boolean argument where a quantitative argument is called for. It's not enough for the occasional OSS company to make a profit. Unless OSS companies in general can (on average) create an ROI of ~10% per year, investment in selling OSS is going to dry up. IBM can just put support terms in their contract saying stuff like 'you need to have bought x.x version from us, or we laugh in your face', because they can make more money by selling a complete package.
And they will be undercut by some other company that doesn't have this stipulation. The problem with your theory is you believe that customers are gullible rubes and will remain so forever.
As a matter of fact, that's what Microsoft is doing. Little do they know (or care), they could grab BSD just like Apple did, call it Windows XP 2, and release it, and still have market dominance. "Nobody ever gets fired for buying Microsoft" is a result of branding.
It was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" first, and IBM still went through a 10 year sales slump. When it all comes down to it, the business problem that IBM and RedHat solve jointly (and separately, each in his own way) has absolutely nothing to do with Free Software. They have chosen Free Software as the tool they will use to solve the business problems for their customers that they solve.
This may be true for IBM, but it is clearly untrue for RedHat, who are commited to the GPL beyond any practical justification.
Slashdot Mirror
It's you who trajically misrepresent his position. You act as if the making of money is the important issue to RMS; as if he wants to stop people from making money.
No. What I said was that RMS obviously considers programmers making money to be a very low priority. I also said that distinguishing between a) "actively causing something" and b) "indirectly causing something but not caring" is kind of splitting hairs.
If he was against people making money with GNU software he'd have a no-commercial-use clause in the GPL.
RMS definitely wants GPL-licensed code to take over the world, including corporations. He knows that forbidding commercial use would be a black mark against the GPL. He also wants to turn corporations into unwitting pawns by suckering them into contributing.
-a
The way it works is like this:
Higher costs are good for the incumbents, bad for the up-and-comers, because they create a barrier to entry.
Lower costs are bad for the incumbents, good for the up-and-comers, but the up-and-comers have less potential to look forward to.
-a
You have a point, and you've caught me out;
I've never heard that before!!
More generally, most software enables further productivity (consider artist's packages),
Yes, that's one of the points that is often raised: E.g. OSS allows any entrepreneur in the world to cheaply create a website. But again, this also implies there will be stifling competition. The accrued value of a website is proportional to the cost of building a competing one.
-a
I can see what you're trying to achieve, but how many corporations have one and only one IP block? A lot fewer than those with multiple blocks, and certainly fewer than those who don't actually own their block(s) but lease it(them) from larger corporations.
Ummmm... if we're talking about standard client software here, what about the ~90% of companies who run NATs with private addresses on their LANS?
-a
The house analogy is flawed.
Like pretty much every other analogy I have ever heard.
The telephone companies are specifically REQUIRED to allow people who are not thier customers to connect to people that are, as well as lease out thier spare capacity.
Why? Because telephone wires are mostly located on public land. Telephone companies are typically government-sponsored monopolies, and they are not allowed to leverage this status to their advantage.
-a
I was thinking about how difficult the SCO mess is to explain to a layperson
Open source is like an amusement park?!?
Yeah... that ridiculous analogy is really a whole lot clearer to a layperson than explaining to them what software is.
-a
Sadly, that still wasn't enough to stop Tom Cruise from stealing the secret files.
That's the problem. The secure room in Langley didn't have the laser trip wires on the ventilation grates.
-a
Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point
very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to
us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE.
I hadn't be able to come up with a word to describe the
-a
Sometimes that's not enough. At my university, the departmental firewall did just fine in blocking the virus, until somebody got their Windows laptop infected at home and brought it to work, behind the firewall. Once again proving that great network security can be easily defeated by poor physical security.
Hard on the outside, soft & crunchy in the middle? The safety monitoring computer for a power system should be accessible only by floppy disk through a terminal in a locked room with pressure sensitive floors, a sound monitor, body heat detectors *AND* laser trip wires on all the ventilation grates. (The floppy disk should be run through a demagnitizer before and after each use.)
-a
I hope you're not trying to be serious. /. readers can get upset about the strangest things.
-a
Actually, I don't; I really meant that it was working in this case, hence "This is the market working at its best"; I acknowledge that it gets a lot worse.
Capitalism works best when you have a *limited* number of players (e.g. 4-8 for most industries) competing for the same pie. Any more than that and margins start to go to nothing. Globalization will lead to excess competition.
When margins go to nothing, companies go belly up left & right. That certainly doesn't benefit the worker and it doesn't really benefit the consumer either because it stifles the economy. When businesses go bankrupt, you gotta believe that we all pay.
Look at insurance companies. Your insurance premiums probably went up recently, not because of an increase in risk, but rather because the insurance companies lost a lot of money in the stock market. If you live somewhere with electricity deregulation, you are probably suffering the effects of globalization as well.
If you think that more competition will lead to more trickle down, you are practicing voodoo economics. What Ronald Reagan claimed was that tax cuts will lead to trickle down, which was never really proven either.
-a
This is ideal; not only does Open Source encourage growth by bringing down the price of software, it also accelerates the redistributive "trickle down" to those who are less well off, in this case by fascilitating competition. This is the market working at its best.
You seem to have naive and overly idealistic faith in capitalism. In reality, unregulated capitalism is an unstable system. Capitalism doesn't work without a damping factor, be it local laws, collusion, or military force.
-a
Okay, I'm guessing English isn't your first language. When you said "Stallman himself has been selling Emacs for $150 per tape", I thought you meant *currently*.
-a
Oh, and what's so great about the jingoism-insipiring nation states (just witness the stupid government propaganda inspired animosity between the Europe and US) and having borders that make it difficult for people to exercise their natural right to move freely from one place to another?
Patriotism can be dumb, but it's better than anarchy. I still don't see why you value this freedom to move about more than living in a prosperous society.
BTW. The word is "dystopian".
BTW, we were discussing politics, not spelling.
-a
By my reading of the article, the study simply concludes that text messaging is the reason why less people are seeing movies. It doesn't say that text messaging is evil and needs to be stopped. This study will influence how the studios make (and sell) movies in the future.
-a
I don't think the IMDB ratings are worth a damn. There's a lot of obvious shilling by the movie companies in the comments. Every time a new Lord of the Rings comes out there's a huge fanboy wank on the opening day to vote it the #1 movie of all time. Disclaimer: I haven't seen Gigli, and I probably won't. Bad movie? Probably from the sounds of it? Worst movie of ALL TIME? Hardly.
The IMDB's rating is based both on average vote and on number of votes. Movies with a lot of votes have a greater chance of making it onto the "best" list and presumably the "worst" list as well.
As for Gigli, movie critics love to complete with each other to see who can write the most scathing, condescending review. It makes for good entertainment, but it's hardly accurate. Roger Ebert (one of the few reviewers who doesn't rely on this crutch) gave it a marginal thumbs down.
Anyone who thinks Gigli is the worst movie ever obviously hasn't spent enough time watching the space channel.
-a
Hey, not bad. So apparently if I was a cult of personality, I could be making an extra $14k per year!
-a
I'm not totally sure why you are trumpeting your distopian vision.
-a
I have a feeling that you wrote an altogether too informative replay to what was most likely an attempt to be funny with a "The Big Hit" reference.
-a
Finally a government that is willing to take an anti-globalization stance. I'd like to see more countries follow suit.
-a
"What if" ? How about COUNT ON IT...
Agreed.
-a
All the IT jobs are moving to Asia anyway. Who needs retail software jobs? Not me! Would you like some fries with that?
Nonono... it's "would you like noodles with that?"
I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.
-a
Now, people buying servers want an OS they know they can get compatible software with, So they have an incentive to support (i.e. give money to) a popular distro (i.e. RedHat) so RedHat doesn't go tits up and leave them searching for something else.
No. That is an incentive to save your money, while at the same time loudly telling everyone else to support RedHat.
Nowhere did I say that branding would make you the market leader, just that you could make money. Which the original poster was saying you can never do.
The problem is that you're making a Boolean argument where a quantitative argument is called for. It's not enough for the occasional OSS company to make a profit. Unless OSS companies in general can (on average) create an ROI of ~10% per year, investment in selling OSS is going to dry up.
IBM can just put support terms in their contract saying stuff like 'you need to have bought x.x version from us, or we laugh in your face', because they can make more money by selling a complete package.
And they will be undercut by some other company that doesn't have this stipulation. The problem with your theory is you believe that customers are gullible rubes and will remain so forever.
-a
As a matter of fact, that's what Microsoft is doing. Little do they know (or care), they could grab BSD just like Apple did, call it Windows XP 2, and release it, and still have market dominance. "Nobody ever gets fired for buying Microsoft" is a result of branding.
It was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" first, and IBM still went through a 10 year sales slump.
When it all comes down to it, the business problem that IBM and RedHat solve jointly (and separately, each in his own way) has absolutely nothing to do with Free Software. They have chosen Free Software as the tool they will use to solve the business problems for their customers that they solve.
This may be true for IBM, but it is clearly untrue for RedHat, who are commited to the GPL beyond any practical justification.
-a
Very successfully, I'm sure.
-a