I never derided communism. Go back and re-read my posts.
I see what I see. I'm not going to argue with you about your state of mind. You know,you made so many scattered arguments that I have lost track of what you are saying. All I know is that you hate stallman, you hate the GPL and you are on some kind of a crusade to convince people to embrace communism by donating their labor to the public good.
Hate Stallman: tick Hate the GPL: tick Communist Crusade: huh?
I don't know where you got that idea. I'll have you know that I am a professional software developer. I work on closed source programs and I expect to paid for my work. I don't work for free and I have never released a BSD-licensed program in my life. [It is quite possible that there are a few small freeware apps I wrote in high school or university floating around out there, but that's not really the point.]
I believe in for-profit software. Capitalism is a good way to drive the economy and promote innovation. However, I acknowledge that once a technology advances to a certain level of maturity, it becomes a commodity. At that point, it does no real harm to have a free or cheap alternative.
A BSD/public domain license on the commodity allows everyone to start on an equal footing. Now the innovators can add their custom feature and charge only for that feature, without having to amortize the cost of developing the entire platform. That's why I advocate the BSD/PD license, but only for people who were going to give away their code in the first place.
To call me a communist is ridiculous. I don't believe in unadulterated capitalism either. What I do advocate is pragmatism. The GPL is a Machiavelian plot to bring down the entire software economy. Advocates claim that they are not against people making money, but then they come up with the flimsiest of business cases and sigh "too bad" when the companies go belly up within the year. Some people don't want to let anybody do whatever they want with their code.
Yeah, but it's amazing how 90% of those people lose their ideals when it comes to the ownership of other peoples' music.
Problem. If you have someone using a pirated copy of photoshop, what has adobe lost? Let's take a look. If the person is simply mildly interested in art and doesn't plan to use the software except for a personal webpage or two, or just for fun, do you expect this type of person to EVER BUY PHOTOSHOP? hell no. it's much too expensive for the average person to buy usually. Now, if you are borderline and you might be the type who would buy it, then yea, the pirated version is probably not a good thing. If you would have to possess a copy of the software, no matter if you bought it or not, then yes, you should buy it. by not purchasing it when you would have it anyway you are causing the company to lose money.
That's a rather oversimplistic view of things. If you have one company making one product then the logic seems to apply. But with multiple companies and multiple products, there is a group dynamic that changes the equation.
Imagine there is a company (A) that makes hardware (H) and a company (B) that makes software (S). The hardware and software work together. This is a symbiotic relationship.
Then imagine if both A and B produce competing software and hardware. This is healthy competitions.
But now imagine if A decides they are a hardware company, and they give away their software to sell their hardware. Meanwhile, B decides they are a software company, and they give away their hardware as a loss header to sell their software. This is unhealthy competition; each party undermines the others' business.
Software does not exist in a vacuum. If most people don't need software with the full capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, then there should be a market for Photoship Lite. But if everyone who doesn't need the full Photoshop feels justified in pirating it then there will be no market for Photoshop Lite.
Even if Adobe doesn't plan to create a Photoshop Lite, that is still a niche for another company to fill. If they destroy that niche, that is one less opportunity for some other company to fill. And for every niche you destroy, consider the fact that some other company may be destroying your niche, simply because they don't consider your customers to be their target market.
I don't have anything against it. I just call it what it is which is communism. If you are communist and want to advance the cause of communism then by all means release your code into the public domain.
Now you're not even being consistent with your last message, in which you deride communism.
Aside from that, you didn't even bother to refute my point, which I assume to mean that you've lost the argument.
I have enver heard that on./ but what the fuck who cares.
There's a million variations on the theme of "X is going to happen no matter what you do, so you might as well embrace it." I can't believe you've never heard them.
If you release your code into the public domain you are practising communism and advancing the cause of communism. Communism is working for the greater good.
I don't understand what you have against working for the greater good.
I don't have a problem releasing my code into the public domain, assuming it isn't something I think I can sell. If someone else can make a buck off something I wrote then more power to them. (Although I would appreciate it if they had the courtesy to offer me a job.) I do, however, have a problem with releasing my code only to have it co-opted by a bunch of communists who are hell intent on destroying the software industry.
That's why I disagree with your categorization of BSD/public domain as communism. Communism involves manifestos and propaganda and cults of personality. Communism is about destroying the capitalist establishment; something that public domain code doesn't do.
GPL may not be capitalism in the sense that you perceive capitalism but there is no denying that GPLed code comes with a price.
As I tried to explain before, capitalism is not just about buying goods for money; communist countries have money too. Capitalism is a specific economic system that has certain predictable behaviours (due to game theory). GPL'ed software does not exhibit these properties, but it does bear a strong resemblance to communism (again, in game theory terms).
That's just downright stupid. Do you leave your bike unlocked? DO you leave your house unlocked? Why make it easy or safe for people to steal your labor. That's communism.
As I said, I was only paraphrasing a common/. motto.
If I could somehow preview good-quality music legally from the content producer, then I'd have no use for downloading illegal rips from p2p sources. 'Course, I'm also the guy that bought Photoshop when I graduated from college instead of using the warez version I'd been using up until then... so maybe I'm not the norm.
Hey, you're not so dumb. That, in fact, is exactly why anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. Plenty of people are willing to claim on/. that P2P has caused them to buy more music. But how can I ignore the fact that the vast majority of the people I know who use Kazaa never buy any? Even if only half the P2P users stopped buying music, how many industries do you know that can stand a 50% drop in sales.
The theory is that WEP, although a fairly weak cypher, provides the same level of privacy as unencrypted wired Ethernet. That is, breaking WEP is judged to be approximately as difficult as finding somewhere to jack into a wired Ethernet (i.e. not very).
Yeah, I'm sure they made it weak on purpose... They were all set to publish a stronger algorithm, but then someone said "Hey! This isn't wired *equivalent*, this superior to unencrypted Ethernet."
Unfortunately by that point they were already set on the name. [It was already in all the marketing materials and WEP just has a better ring to it than BWP (Better than Wired Privacy).] So the only solution was to introduce an arcane security flaw.
Yeah, that's so much more plausible than "They fucked up!"
GPL is capitalism public domain and BSD is communism.
Bullshit. Just because you can come up with a flimsy analogy to equate the GPL licence with "charging for their product" doesn't make it capitalism.
Capitalism is a specific economic system which attempts to maximize the wealth of society by a large number of small transactions in which each party acts in his own interest. However, capitalism is not an infallible system. It seeks local maxima, which may not be the true maxima. It can also have negative social and evironmental results.
Communism is a system which seeks to avoid the problem of capitalism (the local maxima) in order to maximize the wealth of society even further. However, communism has many flaws because it requires people to act against their direct self interest. Also, communism espouses equality, which is not a stable state (and therefore it can't be a local maxima).
The flaw in communism is the same as the flaw in the GPL, which is the tragedy of the commons. This doesn't really apply so much to the hobbyists (who could just as easily release their code as BSD), as the businesses who are forced into developing GPL'ed software against their collective self interest.
To paraphrase a/. motto, people are going to steal your code no matter what you do, so you might as well release it as BSD and at least get credit for it.
The only people who hate the GPL are people who want to steal other peoples code.
I don't know what hole you just crawled out of, but apparently you haven't been paying attention. Making unauthorized use of someone else's code is not stealing; it's a copyright violation -- no worse than copying music off Kazaa.
They have a big reason. They don't want to become unpaid volunteers at a corporation. They don't want other people to take their code and make money selling it.
"Why should I release my code as open source? Because it doesn't cost you anything, and you have the benefit of knowing that others are finding your work useful."
I can't count the number of times I've heard this argument espoused on/., but as soon as there's the hint of someone making money, people get all freaked out. What really bugs me is how the GPL advocates think it's ludicrous when people call them communists.
My objection to the GPL has nothing to do with it not being free enough. I just don't like the fact that it is anti-business because it creates unhealthy competition.
As for BSD, I think the license is fine. Having to give credit is not anti-business and it doesn't create unhealthy competition. Unfortunately, the volume of BSD-licensed work out there pales in comparison to the amount of GPL stuff.
If a group of people get together to develop an open source program, they have no real incentive to prefer the GPL license to the BSD one. Unless, of course, they are trying to dupe businesses into developing part of the code for them, against their personal interest. (Which is exactly what they are trying to do.)
But the global economy, at any rate, is a zero-sum game, with two exceptions
Hehe... here we are on/., self-proclaimed home of the free software revolution, and you believe the economy is a zero sum game. Tell me this: if you write a program and distribute it for $0, haven't you increased the global wealth, all without any money changing hands?
After accounting for those two things, the global economy must be a zero-sum game because money is a direct representation of human production.
No, treating money as a direct representation of human production is an economic lemma. Capitalism is a system for optimizing overall wealth with the presumption that money represents human production. When people act against direct self-interest, the lemma no longer applies. That is, incidentally, why free software is anti-capitalist.
Stallman has chosen to push the GPL as "as copyright + extra freedoms" rather than "public domain - extra restrictions". When you think of a program with no real owner, public domain comes to mind, but Stallman used copyright so he could add his extra restrictions. The perspective is flexible if you ask me. He's like a lawyer or a politician who can give you one things and sell it as another.
Stallman claims that the GPL gives you rights and does not take them away. Well, the fact is that the GPL permits you do do certain things and it prohibits you from doing other things. If you want to arbitrarily categorize some of these permissions as rights, that conveys a sense of absolute morality. And while I'm certain that Stallman believes in absolute morality, that's not an opinion that I have much respect for.
SO unless the argument is "THE gpl doesn't apply, so all works available under the GPL are actually in the public domain" there is no argument.
I don't think that's implausible. It may depend on who has the biggest lobby group or whether the present economic climate continues. Did you know that in Red Hat's SEC filing, they list the possibility that the GPL will be found unenforcable as one of their biggest risks of doing business.
"You are talking about copyright. GPL gives you rights, it does not take them away."
Yes, and George Bush is a compassionate conservative, Miller Lite is the great taste that won't fill you up, etc.
You're living proof of the old adage that if you repeat a slogan often enough, people will begin to accept it without using their critical thinking skills.
This has been groupthink. Thanks for participating.
"The second patent, 5,131,941 also details an apparatus and method for initiating chemical reactions, but this time radiation is used to provide the energy kick needed to get the compounds to interact." What? You mean Jiffy Pop popcorn wasn't the first one to patent this technique?
Jiffy Pop was merely improving on the prior art of "popping popcorn via a giant space laser, thus thwarting the evil professor's plans."
It's constantly amazing to me too how many of the Gnu-Uber-Alles folks don't really understand that they are giving their work away for free and can not reasonably expect anything in return. Not a salary, not an occasional trip, not even acknowledgement. Free means free, you can't expect jack in return. Those are the terms you choose when you use the GPL!
I think the problem is that 3-6 years ago, when a lot of these GPL projects were starting out, GPL advocates *were* telling you to switch to an open source business model because it *would* bring in profits beyond your wildest dreams.
5 years ago, if you claimed on/. that the open source business model didn't work, you would be shouted down immediately. Okay, sure now most people will tell you that the GPL is not a way to make money (there are a few exceptions), but this guy's bitterness extends back to a time before the bubble had burst.
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/r/rhat.html [yahoo.com] is not a bad financial for a new millenial tech firm. In fact, looking at the bottom line, I see a profit.
Sure they made a profit. They have cut costs dramatically and they still have several hundred million dollars sitting in the bank accruing interest.
The dirty little secret is that Red Hat is still losing money on an operating basis. That $200 thou they made last quarter is peanuts compared to the $3 million in investment income.
So yes, Red Hat is a (barely) successful financial services company, but they still aren't making money selling software and support.
Okay, so let's say drug research is publicly funded. How do you resolve the stalemate where smaller countries choose to leech off larger ones?
The US is the most populous country in the Western world, and they would presumably contribute the most to drug research. So why should Canada even bother spending any money on drug research? Right now, all these countries have agreements to honour each others' IPR, but I don't think you're going to see them agree to large-scale, binding, per capita spending on drug research.
50 years of China's history is nothing, and the structure of Chinese politics and economics had stronger roots in the feudal tradition than in any kind of socialism that had been practiced to date
50 years of history is also longer than the average citizen's age. It is possible for a culture to change. For example, I'm a Canadian and our culture now has very little to do with fur trading.
It's rather nitpicky. It was in an example: "Whether or not you call it 'stealing', the fact is that music piracy is illegal.". The problem is that the question is not whether or not it's illegal.
I realize that the fact that something *is* illegal doesn't mean it *should be* illegal. You have to take the various arguments in the appropriate context. You can say "Piracy is okay because it's not literally theft" and I can reply "No matter what you call it, it's still illegal. There are specific laws against piracy; it's not just illegal by extension of the laws against theft." If you disagree with a law, that's fine. But before you choose to deliberately break a law, you had better decide how much you disagree with it. The second problem is with your overall essay. Yes, arguing about analogies can be pointless. But, analogies have power. Calling IP violations 'theft' is a way of likening them to physical property crimes, and a cheap and simple way to appeal to people's experiences with physical property crime.
Yes I know that analogies have power. That's why I won't use them. Analogies are often compelling enough that you can use them to support completely baseless arguments. That's part of the reason I won't use them. Let's face it. A lot of/. discussion is about spreading propaganda. It doesn't really matter how you say it as long as you say the right thing.
Personally, I think that piracy *is* akin to stealing. As I pointed out in the essay, I think a counter-analogy would be hiring someone to perform a service and then not paying them. To me, that's stealing their time, which is just as bad as stealing property. When you pirate music, you don't literally steal an artist's time, but statistically speaking you do. Statistical effects are very real. Electrons moving semi-randomly in a wire may create a current. An individual electron may be going in the 'wrong' direction, but taken together the electrons form a current. When you pirate a song, you may not literally be depriving an artist of a sale, but on average you deprive them of 1/5th of a sale or something like that.
To me, these arguments seem very compelling, but to you they may not. I think the second one is more clear because it is the type of analogy that illustrates a fact rather than an opinion. Still, if I'm going to complain about analogies being used as propaganda to prop up otherwise unsupportable arguments, it would be hypocritical for me to use them myself.
"As we can see from the article on China, it's not exactly a musician's paradise." As if China's a paradise for anyone other than the ruling elite.
China has some flaws, but it's clearly not as bad as the American media makes it out to be. I happen to know quite a few recent immigrants from China. They don't think China is a repressive country. After the dot com bubble burst, some of them decided to move back there.
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I never derided communism. Go back and re-read my posts.
,you made so many scattered arguments that I have lost track of what you are saying. All I know is that you hate stallman, you hate the GPL and you are on some kind of a crusade to convince people to embrace communism by donating their labor to the public good.
I see what I see. I'm not going to argue with you about your state of mind.
You know
Hate Stallman: tick
Hate the GPL: tick
Communist Crusade: huh?
I don't know where you got that idea. I'll have you know that I am a professional software developer. I work on closed source programs and I expect to paid for my work. I don't work for free and I have never released a BSD-licensed program in my life. [It is quite possible that there are a few small freeware apps I wrote in high school or university floating around out there, but that's not really the point.]
I believe in for-profit software. Capitalism is a good way to drive the economy and promote innovation. However, I acknowledge that once a technology advances to a certain level of maturity, it becomes a commodity. At that point, it does no real harm to have a free or cheap alternative.
A BSD/public domain license on the commodity allows everyone to start on an equal footing. Now the innovators can add their custom feature and charge only for that feature, without having to amortize the cost of developing the entire platform. That's why I advocate the BSD/PD license, but only for people who were going to give away their code in the first place.
To call me a communist is ridiculous. I don't believe in unadulterated capitalism either. What I do advocate is pragmatism. The GPL is a Machiavelian plot to bring down the entire software economy. Advocates claim that they are not against people making money, but then they come up with the flimsiest of business cases and sigh "too bad" when the companies go belly up within the year.
Some people don't want to let anybody do whatever they want with their code.
Yeah, but it's amazing how 90% of those people lose their ideals when it comes to the ownership of other peoples' music.
-a
Problem. If you have someone using a pirated copy of photoshop, what has adobe lost? Let's take a look. If the person is simply mildly interested in art and doesn't plan to use the software except for a personal webpage or two, or just for fun, do you expect this type of person to EVER BUY PHOTOSHOP? hell no. it's much too expensive for the average person to buy usually. Now, if you are borderline and you might be the type who would buy it, then yea, the pirated version is probably not a good thing. If you would have to possess a copy of the software, no matter if you bought it or not, then yes, you should buy it. by not purchasing it when you would have it anyway you are causing the company to lose money.
That's a rather oversimplistic view of things. If you have one company making one product then the logic seems to apply. But with multiple companies and multiple products, there is a group dynamic that changes the equation.
Imagine there is a company (A) that makes hardware (H) and a company (B) that makes software (S). The hardware and software work together. This is a symbiotic relationship.
Then imagine if both A and B produce competing software and hardware. This is healthy competitions.
But now imagine if A decides they are a hardware company, and they give away their software to sell their hardware. Meanwhile, B decides they are a software company, and they give away their hardware as a loss header to sell their software. This is unhealthy competition; each party undermines the others' business.
Software does not exist in a vacuum. If most people don't need software with the full capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, then there should be a market for Photoship Lite. But if everyone who doesn't need the full Photoshop feels justified in pirating it then there will be no market for Photoshop Lite.
Even if Adobe doesn't plan to create a Photoshop Lite, that is still a niche for another company to fill. If they destroy that niche, that is one less opportunity for some other company to fill. And for every niche you destroy, consider the fact that some other company may be destroying your niche, simply because they don't consider your customers to be their target market.
-a
I don't have anything against it. I just call it what it is which is communism. If you are communist and want to advance the cause of communism then by all means release your code into the public domain.
./ but what the fuck who cares.
Now you're not even being consistent with your last message, in which you deride communism.
Aside from that, you didn't even bother to refute my point, which I assume to mean that you've lost the argument.
I have enver heard that on
There's a million variations on the theme of "X is going to happen no matter what you do, so you might as well embrace it." I can't believe you've never heard them.
-a
If you release your code into the public domain you are practising communism and advancing the cause of communism. Communism is working for the greater good.
/. motto.
I don't understand what you have against working for the greater good.
I don't have a problem releasing my code into the public domain, assuming it isn't something I think I can sell. If someone else can make a buck off something I wrote then more power to them. (Although I would appreciate it if they had the courtesy to offer me a job.) I do, however, have a problem with releasing my code only to have it co-opted by a bunch of communists who are hell intent on destroying the software industry.
That's why I disagree with your categorization of BSD/public domain as communism. Communism involves manifestos and propaganda and cults of personality. Communism is about destroying the capitalist establishment; something that public domain code doesn't do.
GPL may not be capitalism in the sense that you perceive capitalism but there is no denying that GPLed code comes with a price.
As I tried to explain before, capitalism is not just about buying goods for money; communist countries have money too. Capitalism is a specific economic system that has certain predictable behaviours (due to game theory). GPL'ed software does not exhibit these properties, but it does bear a strong resemblance to communism (again, in game theory terms).
That's just downright stupid. Do you leave your bike unlocked? DO you leave your house unlocked? Why make it easy or safe for people to steal your labor. That's communism.
As I said, I was only paraphrasing a common
-a
If I could somehow preview good-quality music legally from the content producer, then I'd have no use for downloading illegal rips from p2p sources. 'Course, I'm also the guy that bought Photoshop when I graduated from college instead of using the warez version I'd been using up until then... so maybe I'm not the norm.
/. that P2P has caused them to buy more music. But how can I ignore the fact that the vast majority of the people I know who use Kazaa never buy any? Even if only half the P2P users stopped buying music, how many industries do you know that can stand a 50% drop in sales.
Hey, you're not so dumb. That, in fact, is exactly why anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything. Plenty of people are willing to claim on
-a
The theory is that WEP, although a fairly weak cypher, provides the same level of privacy as unencrypted wired Ethernet. That is, breaking WEP is judged to be approximately as difficult as finding somewhere to jack into a wired Ethernet (i.e. not very).
Yeah, I'm sure they made it weak on purpose... They were all set to publish a stronger algorithm, but then someone said "Hey! This isn't wired *equivalent*, this superior to unencrypted Ethernet."
Unfortunately by that point they were already set on the name. [It was already in all the marketing materials and WEP just has a better ring to it than BWP (Better than Wired Privacy).] So the only solution was to introduce an arcane security flaw.
Yeah, that's so much more plausible than "They fucked up!"
-a
GPL is capitalism public domain and BSD is communism.
/. motto, people are going to steal your code no matter what you do, so you might as well release it as BSD and at least get credit for it.
Bullshit. Just because you can come up with a flimsy analogy to equate the GPL licence with "charging for their product" doesn't make it capitalism.
Capitalism is a specific economic system which attempts to maximize the wealth of society by a large number of small transactions in which each party acts in his own interest. However, capitalism is not an infallible system. It seeks local maxima, which may not be the true maxima. It can also have negative social and evironmental results.
Communism is a system which seeks to avoid the problem of capitalism (the local maxima) in order to maximize the wealth of society even further. However, communism has many flaws because it requires people to act against their direct self interest. Also, communism espouses equality, which is not a stable state (and therefore it can't be a local maxima).
The flaw in communism is the same as the flaw in the GPL, which is the tragedy of the commons. This doesn't really apply so much to the hobbyists (who could just as easily release their code as BSD), as the businesses who are forced into developing GPL'ed software against their collective self interest.
To paraphrase a
-a
The only people who hate the GPL are people who want to steal other peoples code.
I don't know what hole you just crawled out of, but apparently you haven't been paying attention. Making unauthorized use of someone else's code is not stealing; it's a copyright violation -- no worse than copying music off Kazaa.
-a
They have a big reason. They don't want to become unpaid volunteers at a corporation. They don't want other people to take their code and make money selling it.
/., but as soon as there's the hint of someone making money, people get all freaked out. What really bugs me is how the GPL advocates think it's ludicrous when people call them communists.
"Why should I release my code as open source? Because it doesn't cost you anything, and you have the benefit of knowing that others are finding your work useful."
I can't count the number of times I've heard this argument espoused on
-a
My objection to the GPL has nothing to do with it not being free enough. I just don't like the fact that it is anti-business because it creates unhealthy competition.
As for BSD, I think the license is fine. Having to give credit is not anti-business and it doesn't create unhealthy competition. Unfortunately, the volume of BSD-licensed work out there pales in comparison to the amount of GPL stuff.
If a group of people get together to develop an open source program, they have no real incentive to prefer the GPL license to the BSD one. Unless, of course, they are trying to dupe businesses into developing part of the code for them, against their personal interest. (Which is exactly what they are trying to do.)
-a
This is, of course, the point of the GPL: GPL developers do not want their hard work put into a closed-source product.
And this is, of course, why some people hate the GPL. The closed source developers don't want their hard work converted into a GPL product.
-a
The GPL is viral and takes your rights away. You've heard these tired, inaccurate, slogans before?
Well, no. I've only ever heard "The GPL is viral and anti-business."
Anyway, if you ask me, the GPL is a public domain license that takes away rights, dressed up as a proprietary license that grants them.
-a
But the global economy, at any rate, is a zero-sum game, with two exceptions
/., self-proclaimed home of the free software revolution, and you believe the economy is a zero sum game. Tell me this: if you write a program and distribute it for $0, haven't you increased the global wealth, all without any money changing hands?
Hehe... here we are on
After accounting for those two things, the global economy must be a zero-sum game because money is a direct representation of human production.
No, treating money as a direct representation of human production is an economic lemma. Capitalism is a system for optimizing overall wealth with the presumption that money represents human production. When people act against direct self-interest, the lemma no longer applies. That is, incidentally, why free software is anti-capitalist.
-a
Stallman has chosen to push the GPL as "as copyright + extra freedoms" rather than "public domain - extra restrictions". When you think of a program with no real owner, public domain comes to mind, but Stallman used copyright so he could add his extra restrictions. The perspective is flexible if you ask me. He's like a lawyer or a politician who can give you one things and sell it as another.
-a
Sorry, I don't do semantics.
-a
Go ahead and dispute what I said if you can.
Stallman claims that the GPL gives you rights and does not take them away. Well, the fact is that the GPL permits you do do certain things and it prohibits you from doing other things. If you want to arbitrarily categorize some of these permissions as rights, that conveys a sense of absolute morality. And while I'm certain that Stallman believes in absolute morality, that's not an opinion that I have much respect for.
-a
SO unless the argument is "THE gpl doesn't apply, so all works available under the GPL are actually in the public domain" there is no argument.
I don't think that's implausible. It may depend on who has the biggest lobby group or whether the present economic climate continues. Did you know that in Red Hat's SEC filing, they list the possibility that the GPL will be found unenforcable as one of their biggest risks of doing business.
-a
"You are talking about copyright. GPL gives you rights, it does not take them away."
Yes, and George Bush is a compassionate conservative, Miller Lite is the great taste that won't fill you up, etc.
You're living proof of the old adage that if you repeat a slogan often enough, people will begin to accept it without using their critical thinking skills.
This has been groupthink. Thanks for participating.
-a
"The second patent, 5,131,941 also details an apparatus and method for initiating chemical reactions, but this time radiation is used to provide the energy kick needed to get the compounds to interact."
What? You mean Jiffy Pop popcorn wasn't the first one to patent this technique?
Jiffy Pop was merely improving on the prior art of "popping popcorn via a giant space laser, thus thwarting the evil professor's plans."
-a
It's constantly amazing to me too how many of the Gnu-Uber-Alles folks don't really understand that they are giving their work away for free and can not reasonably expect anything in return. Not a salary, not an occasional trip, not even acknowledgement. Free means free, you can't expect jack in return. Those are the terms you choose when you use the GPL!
I think the problem is that 3-6 years ago, when a lot of these GPL projects were starting out, GPL advocates *were* telling you to switch to an open source business model because it *would* bring in profits beyond your wildest dreams.
5 years ago, if you claimed on
-a
http://biz.yahoo.com/fin/l/r/rhat.html [yahoo.com] is not a bad financial for a new millenial tech firm. In fact, looking at the bottom line, I see a profit.
Sure they made a profit. They have cut costs dramatically and they still have several hundred million dollars sitting in the bank accruing interest.
The dirty little secret is that Red Hat is still losing money on an operating basis. That $200 thou they made last quarter is peanuts compared to the $3 million in investment income.
So yes, Red Hat is a (barely) successful financial services company, but they still aren't making money selling software and support.
-a
Okay, so let's say drug research is publicly funded. How do you resolve the stalemate where smaller countries choose to leech off larger ones?
The US is the most populous country in the Western world, and they would presumably contribute the most to drug research. So why should Canada even bother spending any money on drug research? Right now, all these countries have agreements to honour each others' IPR, but I don't think you're going to see them agree to large-scale, binding, per capita spending on drug research.
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50 years of China's history is nothing, and the structure of Chinese politics and economics had stronger roots in the feudal tradition than in any kind of socialism that had been practiced to date
50 years of history is also longer than the average citizen's age. It is possible for a culture to change. For example, I'm a Canadian and our culture now has very little to do with fur trading.
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It's rather nitpicky. It was in an example: "Whether or not you call it 'stealing', the fact is that music piracy is illegal.". The problem is that the question is not whether or not it's illegal.
I realize that the fact that something *is* illegal doesn't mean it *should be* illegal. You have to take the various arguments in the appropriate context. You can say "Piracy is okay because it's not literally theft" and I can reply "No matter what you call it, it's still illegal. There are specific laws against piracy; it's not just illegal by extension of the laws against theft." If you disagree with a law, that's fine. But before you choose to deliberately break a law, you had better decide how much you disagree with it.
The second problem is with your overall essay. Yes, arguing about analogies can be pointless. But, analogies have power. Calling IP violations 'theft' is a way of likening them to physical property crimes, and a cheap and simple way to appeal to people's experiences with physical property crime.
Yes I know that analogies have power. That's why I won't use them. Analogies are often compelling enough that you can use them to support completely baseless arguments. That's part of the reason I won't use them. Let's face it. A lot of
Personally, I think that piracy *is* akin to stealing. As I pointed out in the essay, I think a counter-analogy would be hiring someone to perform a service and then not paying them. To me, that's stealing their time, which is just as bad as stealing property. When you pirate music, you don't literally steal an artist's time, but statistically speaking you do. Statistical effects are very real. Electrons moving semi-randomly in a wire may create a current. An individual electron may be going in the 'wrong' direction, but taken together the electrons form a current. When you pirate a song, you may not literally be depriving an artist of a sale, but on average you deprive them of 1/5th of a sale or something like that.
To me, these arguments seem very compelling, but to you they may not. I think the second one is more clear because it is the type of analogy that illustrates a fact rather than an opinion. Still, if I'm going to complain about analogies being used as propaganda to prop up otherwise unsupportable arguments, it would be hypocritical for me to use them myself.
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"As we can see from the article on China, it's not exactly a musician's paradise."
As if China's a paradise for anyone other than the ruling elite.
China has some flaws, but it's clearly not as bad as the American media makes it out to be. I happen to know quite a few recent immigrants from China. They don't think China is a repressive country. After the dot com bubble burst, some of them decided to move back there.
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