One is that MS gives you better licensing when you bundle Windows with all systems from a line.
Yes, restraint of trade by a monopoly and should be illegal.
It would be a tech support nightmare if they did that on main stream, consumer systems.
No it wouldn't. They could easily do it, it just requires slightly more work than "here's an option".
Maybe:
Confirmation web page during the ordering process that says something like "Warning: You have selected Linux as your computer operating system instead of Windows. This is cheaper but most people need Windows to run software including many games and Microsoft office. Would you prefer windows instead? Yes/No/MoreInformation". Deliberately worded so yes gets them Windows.
Some easily accessible Dell site web pages giving more information about their flavour of linux and what it is [not] good for. In particular warnings and hand holding for naive users and what level of support and where to get it that purchasers can expect.
Some fast and automated web mechanism for replacing Linux with Windows. And Windows with Linux.
Their branded linux with startup messages and "getting started" help and where to get support.
Enhance the support scripts to [not] support and re-direct Linux users.
etc.
Not hard or expensive. The biggest problem is M$ monopoly vendor manipulation via price manipulation and the economic network effect, both of which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of the product itself.
Like all monopolies in the absence of market forces their should be government supervision and price controls but unfortunately by historical accident that hasn't happened so far in the software industry. The amorphous and active nature of software in particular and "IP" in general means that it is far too easy to do Hollywood style creative accounting and to play games with pricing.
Don't you guys get tired of being a stereotype? We get it--you don't believe piracy is bad, and any group that speaks out against piracy is wrong. You don't care about artist rights, blah blah blah. Do we really need a "piracy is great" rallying article every single day?
Yes. You're lucky more people aren't doing it. Just a tiny response to the tsunami of propaganda that parasitic middlemen propagate.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Seriously the standard of developers these days seems to have plummeted.
Many of the "questions" and "articles" on slashdot are astroturf designed to get people talking about a particular product. They spam the slashdot editors until something gets through.
Some of the "respondents" are knowledgeable because they were expecting the "question" and have lots of propaganda lined up to direct the "discussion". Some use sock puppets to mod up the propaganda.
The questions are naive because they want to make it easy to read and to make the readers think they're smart, even if they're not. Standard marketing technique. Plus marketers specialize in people manipulation and not actual technical ability and they don't want to spend too much time on each spam so their questions tend to be superficial.
Most people seriously underestimate just how much marketing lowlifes have invaded social networking sites. Scum the lot of them. They should be in jail for fraud.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
A birthday party is *not* at public performance and not subject to royalties.
Depends. Has it been videoed? Has the video been given to others? Are strangers, such as caterers, present?
Imagine your world without copyright. I create a song and sing it pretty well. But someone else can sing it better, all of a sudden my time and investment is taken away and someone else gets the rewards since the better performance will draw the consumers. What's fair about that?
Imagine your world without copyright. I create a business and it does pretty well. But someone else can copy the business better, all of a sudden my time and investment is taken away and someone else gets the rewards since the better performance will draw the consumers. What's fair about that?
Please get out of your intellectual rut of assuming that copyright-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the one-true-way (tm). Copyright is a mechanism, nothing more, for advantaging certain people and disadvantaging others. It has little to do with "fairness". In fact it is highly unfair because it enormously advantages those who have access to the economic network effect (those in with the distribution cartel) and disadvantages others, including the vast majority of creators.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
The problem isn't with getting rid of such a rootkit. You can always physically replace the chip it resides on. The real issue is detecting the rootkit before your credit card number is stolen. By using SMM and VT and not storing any data except on the flash chip itself (which very few users can read from), a rootkit can hide itself from all but the most determined experts.
The same is true for a hard disk. Special tools can read both the hard disk and the flash memory in raw form but a root kit can hide data on both, including using SMM+VT for both. Virus scanners that run inside the system they are checking are snake oil.
Booting off a CD is a convenient way to bypass a hard disk root kit for checking. The so-called anti-virus companies should've created such CD's years ago. The flash memory needs an equivalently convenient mechanism, maybe boot via a protected memory mini-BIOS to CD.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
BIOS flash memory is simply mass storage that, just like the hard disk, retains its contents when switched off.
They didn't talk about it in the article but I'd be surprised if there wasn't some way to recover if it gets corrupted, either deliberately (virus), or accidentally (buggy software). Maybe protected memory that does initial boot or provides a re-flashing mechanism.
If there's no such hardware protected method for recovery then yes, root kit hell.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Your "point by point refutation" is just sad. Pretty much every single one is done by almost all people in ways which break those "exceptions" you quote. Time rich and money poor people (children, students, unemployed, third worlders etc.) even more so.
People pirate. Deal.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Get real. Have you ever sung happy birthday without payment? You're a pirate. Ever recorded music from a friend or for your car or for an amateur production? You're a pirate. Ever lent a TV recording to a friend? You're a pirate. Ever shown a DVD to a party? You're a pirate. Ever saved web pages? You're a pirate. Ever photocopied a textbook? You're a pirate.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
I disagree completely. Go out on the streets, and describe a scenario to random passers-by where I can buy a copy of somebody's book, reproduce it under my name or theirs (at my own discretion), sell their work and never give them a dime. Now ask them if what I'm describing should be legal. (Then for realism's sake go ahead and tell them that in my scenario I'm likely to be a company with huge assets at my disposal and they author is likely to be somebody struggling to even find a publisher--but we'll ignore that for now.) Most of them will oppose that behavior.
Describe to them a scenario where I buy a copy of your band's CD. I take the lyrics, "reverse engineer" the composition with my band mates and re-record it as my own, selling it and pocketing all the money. Ask if that should be legal; most of them will oppose that behavior. And note that in neither case was the original author deprived of his own product nor even of profits from the copy I bought to fuck them over, so it really is an issue that would fall (today) under copyright infringement rather than any kind of theft law, as we so often argue on this site that it should.
Describe to them how I can buy a copy of your software in the store for $50 and then re-sell copies on my own (online) store for $20 in essentially pure profits, with absolutely no work or contributions on my part on the product in question. Do you truly believe most people would say this behavior should be legal? Me, I believe most would oppose the behavior.
You're wrong. Look at primitive societies, children, the third world and others beneath the legal radar to see what really happens when people have not been the subject of enormous amounts of propaganda by entrenched interests. Sharing. On a large scale. With no concept of ownership for intellectual effort at all.
Most people feel that creators are entitled to some reward but not a lot, that people who copy should get only kudo's as a reward and most by their actions show that they do not think that copyright should be the vehicle for giving reward. In other words copyright is not natural or obvious. Even with copyright accepted most people feel they should be able to make any number of copies and derivations for their own use, something that current copyright law doesn't recognize at all.
Your examples are all circular reasoning in that they are people making decisions on whether to create in an existing copyright environment and then having those people be annoyed when their expectations are not fulfilled. This is not surprising.
Off the top of my head here are just some of the other ways "IP" could be organised:
Tax deduction. Itemise the hours worked on "IP" and that can be used as a tax deduction on other work. e.g. Like business deductions.
Government grants. The patronage system. e.g. government research.
Private grants. The patronage system. e.g. private museums.
Tip jars. e.g. web pages.
Sponsorship. e.g. Open source.
Copy tax. Each citizen pays so much per year fixed for legal access. e.g. BBC.
Pre-pay. Creators request payment before starting work. e.g. Stephen King
Limited copyright. Large classes of citizens do not have copyright apply e.g. Children, students, poor, unemployed, retirees
Paid copyright. Creators pay for a copyright or other form of license. Proceeds subsidize institutions that encourage creation. e.g. Pay for the protection of 1000 copies or for 3 months.
Proportional copyright. Value of copyright decreases as more copies are made e.g. more and copies have protection for shorter and shorter periods.
Geographical copyright. Creators pay to control use in a geographical area. e.g. New York.
Usage license. People buy licenses to use any content for a limited time period. Money used to subsidize creators. e.g. Pay for any 1000 copies or for 3 months.
Standards. Like trademarks control is lost if something becomes a standard. e.g. As h
This only applies to the US of course (<5% of the world's population) and just like the third world today was thoroughly ignored in the US for a long time. e.g. US publishers copied European authors like Gilbert and Sullivan and Dickens right up until the 20th century.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
Sure there is, when your entire economic policy is centered on the concept of ownership.
Think about what ownership is. By definition, ownership is simply the right to control. Nothing more. People get so hung on "it's mine" they never ask why "it's mine". A more interesting question is who owns what.
Traditional ownership means you have most rights associated with a single physical object (though even that has limits such as where you can use your gun or who's allowed into your house). Those physical objects have very well delimited boundaries. There are also many forms of partial ownership such as leasing, rental, public ownership, economic zones and many far more complex forms of contract based partial ownership.
Traditional physical ownership, physically delimited control, does not map to "IP" at all well where things have very fuzzy boundaries, can be duplicated for close to zero cost, where creation has a wildly varying cost that does not match well with the creation's total value to society, where "IP" can be created from thin air with almost no infrastructure except precursor "IP", where the economic network effect means that rewards are not, even on average, proportionate to effort or even talent, and completely artificial scarcity means that billions of people can miss out on the benefits of things which cost almost nothing to create and where copyright would benefit only the creator. A broken windows fallacy writ very large indeed.
I don't have all the answers but I do feel that copyright law as it's currently defined is causing a huge loss in cultural enrichment, is benefiting only a very small number of people (like feudalism - the king and barons thought feudalism was great too and only "natural") and maps poorly to the physical reality, which is that copying is easy and low cost. I'd like to see serious research money going into how the law could be structured to encourage creativity proportionately, encourage the maximal use of intellectual effort, minimize the total cost to society so resources can be redirected to where they are most needed (e.g. aged care or sophisticated economic organization). If the result of such research is that copyright-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the best way to go then fine however given the virtually infinite possibilities I think that's unlikely. Just for starters I'd like to see copyright drastically shortened, not apply to anybody on low income or in education and, like trademarks and for much the same reasons, copyright should be lost if it becomes a standard or it's causing sufficient accumulation of wealth (power) to compromise democracy.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
In that context "right" means control, nothing to do with a natural, moral or legal right, though the power may be used to create a legal right. And in any case it's an enumerated power that may no longer make sense or be applicable. In other words it's optional.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Privileges. You can whine all you like but you know it's a privilege, a trade off between the rights of the general population (6.7B people) to free speech and the ability of the author (1 person) to derive extra income on top of author readings, voluntary payments and the like.
Close to 100% of the population pirates, whether it's copying books in the library, MP3's off friends and relatives or dodgy DVD's in the street. And that's ignoring P2P. It's time the law was changed to reflect the reality.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Why should you be allowed to control who gets to use/see/whatever it? You weren't the one who put effort, money, time, and whatever else, into it...
So what? People spend a lot of time and effort creating successful businesses. People copy them.
Copyright is an arbitrary, artificial construct "designed" (I use the word generously) to encourage creation. There's nothing "natural" or obvious about it at all.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Because there are 6,779,433,891+ of us and one (1) of you. Artificial scarcity is a pain when it blocks the free speech rights of 6.7B people so that a single person can increase (not have) their profit. We should abrogate people's free speech rights as little as possible. Because many people create information/entertainment/software with no explicit payment at all and because we are already suffering a massive entertainment/information/software glut it is not at all clear we should have any explicit, additional incentive for people to create at all. Additional incentives on top of kudos and other incentives such as live shows, book readings, mind share etc.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
The problem being when they don't give the user the choice to use the native functionality.
I hear what you're saying. One of my pet peeves is the way high level functionality added to software often masks previously existing, useful low level functionality.
The problem in your case is that OS native functionality often has non-standard interfaces that mean porting to that OS is a one-off exercise that is comparatively costly to do and maintain and that cost means that it may not be done. "non-standard" depends on your point of view of course, it's actually a mismatch between the application and OS and depending on who you talk to that could be the fault of the OS or the application. No easy answers.
---
Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
Good senior developers would try to work with the developer to improve his performance rather than trying to get him fired.
Both. As the peer post says it is best to help a developer to improve however it depends on the situation. Sometimes the weak developer got the job under false pretenses. I've seen that more than once and in that situation they deserve zero consideration. Malicious/political developers who deliberately sabotage ditto. Slack, inflexible and unfocused developers are a problem also but as noted they deserve help and a chance to shape up. Untalented and junior developers need high level guidance but usually there's something for them to do and they will improve over time.
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Yes, this is why Linux is the OS used by the majority, and Windows merely has a ~1% market share.
No, it has little to do with marketing or the worth of the product. Windows is dominant primarily because of the economic network effect and M$'s alleycat ethics. The network effect is particularly strong with "IP" because development costs are fixed and distribution costs approach zero. "IP" markets are usually unstable, winner take all markets because it's always going to be cheaper for one vendor (with development costs of $x) to supply n people than m vendors (with total development costs of $x*m) to each supply n/m people. And we all know what happen with monopolies.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Developers, particularly senior developers, make recommendations to management all the time. There are many ways a developer can let a manager know they feel another developer isn't pulling their weight and management sometimes even listens.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Investigated on an Ubuntu box with OO 3.01 and a grammar checker does not appear to be installed by default. When installed the interface is a deceptive - you need to press F7 twice to get the spell check and then the grammar check.
An OO grammar checker is LanguageTool. Tried it, didn't pick up your example though it has a long list of rules including your/you're and did pick up some other grammar mistakes like doubled words and doubtful phrases. I suspect the "your" rule is buggy.
This is why some cross-platform projects that start on Linux generally end up being pretty weak on other platforms.
Depends what you're after, a consistent interface on the same platform for different applications or a consistent interface for the same application on different platforms. Choose your poison.
They limit themselves to whatever the least common denominator OS can handle.
Yes and no. Packages often replace OS provided functionality with they're own so it's easily possible for an application to have superior functionality to that provided by a particular OS. Doesn't always happen of course.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
Real developers with jobs, use whatever OS and programming language that management tells them to use, if they want to keep their jobs that is.
Real developers work with management to select and use the best tool for the job, whether new or old, and fire incompetents who can't cope with change and continuous process improvement.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Marketing is more relevant than internet word-of-mouth. You don't know what you're talking about at all.
Quality products sell themselves by word of mouth. It's only non-differentiated and inferior products that need significant marketing. Marketing parasites hate to admit that of course.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Slashdot Mirror
One is that MS gives you better licensing when you bundle Windows with all systems from a line.
Yes, restraint of trade by a monopoly and should be illegal.
It would be a tech support nightmare if they did that on main stream, consumer systems.
No it wouldn't. They could easily do it, it just requires slightly more work than "here's an option".
Maybe:
Not hard or expensive. The biggest problem is M$ monopoly vendor manipulation via price manipulation and the economic network effect, both of which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality or otherwise of the product itself.
Like all monopolies in the absence of market forces their should be government supervision and price controls but unfortunately by historical accident that hasn't happened so far in the software industry. The amorphous and active nature of software in particular and "IP" in general means that it is far too easy to do Hollywood style creative accounting and to play games with pricing.
---
I want a free and open market. Do you?
Don't you guys get tired of being a stereotype? We get it--you don't believe piracy is bad, and any group that speaks out against piracy is wrong. You don't care about artist rights, blah blah blah. Do we really need a "piracy is great" rallying article every single day?
Yes. You're lucky more people aren't doing it. Just a tiny response to the tsunami of propaganda that parasitic middlemen propagate.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Seriously the standard of developers these days seems to have plummeted.
Many of the "questions" and "articles" on slashdot are astroturf designed to get people talking about a particular product. They spam the slashdot editors until something gets through.
Some of the "respondents" are knowledgeable because they were expecting the "question" and have lots of propaganda lined up to direct the "discussion". Some use sock puppets to mod up the propaganda.
The questions are naive because they want to make it easy to read and to make the readers think they're smart, even if they're not. Standard marketing technique. Plus marketers specialize in people manipulation and not actual technical ability and they don't want to spend too much time on each spam so their questions tend to be superficial.
Most people seriously underestimate just how much marketing lowlifes have invaded social networking sites. Scum the lot of them. They should be in jail for fraud.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Bleat all you like. It's not reasonable to spend $300,000,000+ to put colored dots on a screen. Completely fails the sniff test.
Rationalize as much as you like but all it is is a symptom of broken market rules and massive market failure.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
A birthday party is *not* at public performance and not subject to royalties.
Depends. Has it been videoed? Has the video been given to others? Are strangers, such as caterers, present?
Imagine your world without copyright. I create a song and sing it pretty well. But someone else can sing it better, all of a sudden my time and investment is taken away and someone else gets the rewards since the better performance will draw the consumers. What's fair about that?
Imagine your world without copyright. I create a business and it does pretty well. But someone else can copy the business better, all of a sudden my time and investment is taken away and someone else gets the rewards since the better performance will draw the consumers. What's fair about that?
Please get out of your intellectual rut of assuming that copyright-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the one-true-way (tm). Copyright is a mechanism, nothing more, for advantaging certain people and disadvantaging others. It has little to do with "fairness". In fact it is highly unfair because it enormously advantages those who have access to the economic network effect (those in with the distribution cartel) and disadvantages others, including the vast majority of creators.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
The problem isn't with getting rid of such a rootkit. You can always physically replace the chip it resides on. The real issue is detecting the rootkit before your credit card number is stolen. By using SMM and VT and not storing any data except on the flash chip itself (which very few users can read from), a rootkit can hide itself from all but the most determined experts.
The same is true for a hard disk. Special tools can read both the hard disk and the flash memory in raw form but a root kit can hide data on both, including using SMM+VT for both. Virus scanners that run inside the system they are checking are snake oil.
Booting off a CD is a convenient way to bypass a hard disk root kit for checking. The so-called anti-virus companies should've created such CD's years ago. The flash memory needs an equivalently convenient mechanism, maybe boot via a protected memory mini-BIOS to CD.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Talk about the setup for the rootkit from hell.
BIOS flash memory is simply mass storage that, just like the hard disk, retains its contents when switched off.
They didn't talk about it in the article but I'd be surprised if there wasn't some way to recover if it gets corrupted, either deliberately (virus), or accidentally (buggy software). Maybe protected memory that does initial boot or provides a re-flashing mechanism.
If there's no such hardware protected method for recovery then yes, root kit hell.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Your "point by point refutation" is just sad. Pretty much every single one is done by almost all people in ways which break those "exceptions" you quote. Time rich and money poor people (children, students, unemployed, third worlders etc.) even more so.
People pirate. Deal.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
See my peer posts for my response.
Close to 100% of the population pirates
Prove that or admit you are a lying scumbag.
Get real. Have you ever sung happy birthday without payment? You're a pirate. Ever recorded music from a friend or for your car or for an amateur production? You're a pirate. Ever lent a TV recording to a friend? You're a pirate. Ever shown a DVD to a party? You're a pirate. Ever saved web pages? You're a pirate. Ever photocopied a textbook? You're a pirate.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
I disagree completely. Go out on the streets, and describe a scenario to random passers-by where I can buy a copy of somebody's book, reproduce it under my name or theirs (at my own discretion), sell their work and never give them a dime. Now ask them if what I'm describing should be legal. (Then for realism's sake go ahead and tell them that in my scenario I'm likely to be a company with huge assets at my disposal and they author is likely to be somebody struggling to even find a publisher--but we'll ignore that for now.) Most of them will oppose that behavior.
Describe to them a scenario where I buy a copy of your band's CD. I take the lyrics, "reverse engineer" the composition with my band mates and re-record it as my own, selling it and pocketing all the money. Ask if that should be legal; most of them will oppose that behavior. And note that in neither case was the original author deprived of his own product nor even of profits from the copy I bought to fuck them over, so it really is an issue that would fall (today) under copyright infringement rather than any kind of theft law, as we so often argue on this site that it should.
Describe to them how I can buy a copy of your software in the store for $50 and then re-sell copies on my own (online) store for $20 in essentially pure profits, with absolutely no work or contributions on my part on the product in question. Do you truly believe most people would say this behavior should be legal? Me, I believe most would oppose the behavior.
You're wrong. Look at primitive societies, children, the third world and others beneath the legal radar to see what really happens when people have not been the subject of enormous amounts of propaganda by entrenched interests. Sharing. On a large scale. With no concept of ownership for intellectual effort at all.
Most people feel that creators are entitled to some reward but not a lot, that people who copy should get only kudo's as a reward and most by their actions show that they do not think that copyright should be the vehicle for giving reward. In other words copyright is not natural or obvious. Even with copyright accepted most people feel they should be able to make any number of copies and derivations for their own use, something that current copyright law doesn't recognize at all.
Your examples are all circular reasoning in that they are people making decisions on whether to create in an existing copyright environment and then having those people be annoyed when their expectations are not fulfilled. This is not surprising.
Off the top of my head here are just some of the other ways "IP" could be organised:
Interesting. I was getting my perspective from the US constitution:
The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
This only applies to the US of course (<5% of the world's population) and just like the third world today was thoroughly ignored in the US for a long time. e.g. US publishers copied European authors like Gilbert and Sullivan and Dickens right up until the 20th century.
---
Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
So telling people it's a privilege is in fact not correct.
Most people would regard a feudal king to be privileged because he had legal rights to control what others did. This is similar.
Also, the parent post was talking about ethical/moral rights, not legal rights:
You make excuses for unethical and immoral behavior and thus are yourself immoral and unethical.
Some people conveniently like to conflate ethical and legal rights however they are not the same.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Sure there is, when your entire economic policy is centered on the concept of ownership.
Think about what ownership is. By definition, ownership is simply the right to control. Nothing more. People get so hung on "it's mine" they never ask why "it's mine". A more interesting question is who owns what.
Traditional ownership means you have most rights associated with a single physical object (though even that has limits such as where you can use your gun or who's allowed into your house). Those physical objects have very well delimited boundaries. There are also many forms of partial ownership such as leasing, rental, public ownership, economic zones and many far more complex forms of contract based partial ownership.
Traditional physical ownership, physically delimited control, does not map to "IP" at all well where things have very fuzzy boundaries, can be duplicated for close to zero cost, where creation has a wildly varying cost that does not match well with the creation's total value to society, where "IP" can be created from thin air with almost no infrastructure except precursor "IP", where the economic network effect means that rewards are not, even on average, proportionate to effort or even talent, and completely artificial scarcity means that billions of people can miss out on the benefits of things which cost almost nothing to create and where copyright would benefit only the creator. A broken windows fallacy writ very large indeed.
I don't have all the answers but I do feel that copyright law as it's currently defined is causing a huge loss in cultural enrichment, is benefiting only a very small number of people (like feudalism - the king and barons thought feudalism was great too and only "natural") and maps poorly to the physical reality, which is that copying is easy and low cost. I'd like to see serious research money going into how the law could be structured to encourage creativity proportionately, encourage the maximal use of intellectual effort, minimize the total cost to society so resources can be redirected to where they are most needed (e.g. aged care or sophisticated economic organization). If the result of such research is that copyright-as-it-is-currently-implemented is the best way to go then fine however given the virtually infinite possibilities I think that's unlikely. Just for starters I'd like to see copyright drastically shortened, not apply to anybody on low income or in education and, like trademarks and for much the same reasons, copyright should be lost if it becomes a standard or it's causing sufficient accumulation of wealth (power) to compromise democracy.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
It's in the US Constitution.
No it isn't. The US constitution (representing a tiny fraction of the world's population incidentally) says:
The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
In that context "right" means control, nothing to do with a natural, moral or legal right, though the power may be used to create a legal right. And in any case it's an enumerated power that may no longer make sense or be applicable. In other words it's optional.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
rights
Privileges. You can whine all you like but you know it's a privilege, a trade off between the rights of the general population (6.7B people) to free speech and the ability of the author (1 person) to derive extra income on top of author readings, voluntary payments and the like.
Close to 100% of the population pirates, whether it's copying books in the library, MP3's off friends and relatives or dodgy DVD's in the street. And that's ignoring P2P. It's time the law was changed to reflect the reality.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
Why should you be allowed to control who gets to use/see/whatever it? You weren't the one who put effort, money, time, and whatever else, into it...
So what? People spend a lot of time and effort creating successful businesses. People copy them.
Copyright is an arbitrary, artificial construct "designed" (I use the word generously) to encourage creation. There's nothing "natural" or obvious about it at all.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
so why should your view trump mine?
Because there are 6,779,433,891+ of us and one (1) of you. Artificial scarcity is a pain when it blocks the free speech rights of 6.7B people so that a single person can increase (not have) their profit. We should abrogate people's free speech rights as little as possible. Because many people create information/entertainment/software with no explicit payment at all and because we are already suffering a massive entertainment/information/software glut it is not at all clear we should have any explicit, additional incentive for people to create at all. Additional incentives on top of kudos and other incentives such as live shows, book readings, mind share etc.
---
It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?
The problem being when they don't give the user the choice to use the native functionality.
I hear what you're saying. One of my pet peeves is the way high level functionality added to software often masks previously existing, useful low level functionality.
The problem in your case is that OS native functionality often has non-standard interfaces that mean porting to that OS is a one-off exercise that is comparatively costly to do and maintain and that cost means that it may not be done. "non-standard" depends on your point of view of course, it's actually a mismatch between the application and OS and depending on who you talk to that could be the fault of the OS or the application. No easy answers.
---
Tax payer funded courses to teach proprietary software product use are an illegal company subsidy.
Good senior developers would try to work with the developer to improve his performance rather than trying to get him fired.
Both. As the peer post says it is best to help a developer to improve however it depends on the situation. Sometimes the weak developer got the job under false pretenses. I've seen that more than once and in that situation they deserve zero consideration. Malicious/political developers who deliberately sabotage ditto. Slack, inflexible and unfocused developers are a problem also but as noted they deserve help and a chance to shape up. Untalented and junior developers need high level guidance but usually there's something for them to do and they will improve over time.
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Yes, this is why Linux is the OS used by the majority, and Windows merely has a ~1% market share.
No, it has little to do with marketing or the worth of the product. Windows is dominant primarily because of the economic network effect and M$'s alleycat ethics. The network effect is particularly strong with "IP" because development costs are fixed and distribution costs approach zero. "IP" markets are usually unstable, winner take all markets because it's always going to be cheaper for one vendor (with development costs of $x) to supply n people than m vendors (with total development costs of $x*m) to each supply n/m people. And we all know what happen with monopolies.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Since when do developers fire anyone?
Developers, particularly senior developers, make recommendations to management all the time. There are many ways a developer can let a manager know they feel another developer isn't pulling their weight and management sometimes even listens.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
they're -> their :-)
Investigated on an Ubuntu box with OO 3.01 and a grammar checker does not appear to be installed by default. When installed the interface is a deceptive - you need to press F7 twice to get the spell check and then the grammar check.
An OO grammar checker is LanguageTool. Tried it, didn't pick up your example though it has a long list of rules including your/you're and did pick up some other grammar mistakes like doubled words and doubtful phrases. I suspect the "your" rule is buggy.
This is why some cross-platform projects that start on Linux generally end up being pretty weak on other platforms.
Depends what you're after, a consistent interface on the same platform for different applications or a consistent interface for the same application on different platforms. Choose your poison.
They limit themselves to whatever the least common denominator OS can handle.
Yes and no. Packages often replace OS provided functionality with they're own so it's easily possible for an application to have superior functionality to that provided by a particular OS. Doesn't always happen of course.
---
The USA is <5% of the world's population. It is statistically insignificant.
Real developers with jobs, use whatever OS and programming language that management tells them to use, if they want to keep their jobs that is.
Real developers work with management to select and use the best tool for the job, whether new or old, and fire incompetents who can't cope with change and continuous process improvement.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because a TCO may be good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Marketing is more relevant than internet word-of-mouth. You don't know what you're talking about at all.
Quality products sell themselves by word of mouth. It's only non-differentiated and inferior products that need significant marketing. Marketing parasites hate to admit that of course.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".