Why are you putting up a strawman? He said it was better, he didn't say it was perfect.
I'm sure grandma willy is going to understand when you tell her the Mac is so super secure, and even though all of her pictures are gone, the OS still boots up and relaunches the virus in user space.
... and the OS can be recovered relatively easily compared to the average home M$ windows restore, doubly so if she's backed up her pictures and documents as most home users are trained to do these days.
M$ windows security has been a joke for years and they've mainly got themselves to blame. When they finally install user mode by default and remove some of the more egregarious examples of executing data as code then they might be able to claim some moral high ground. Until then it's the usual marketing lies.
Don't think that every dollar spent on advertising has to show up in next months bank statement as revenue...
The vast majority of modern marketing is a cost, not a benefit, and benefits nobody but the parasitic marketing industry. An arms race with the marketing industry being the arms dealers.
The examples you give are all contrived in that you make the automatic assumption that anybody who has the money to advertise automatically deserves the right to have a louder voice, drowning out alternatives.
There is now so much information available for any one individual that when one information source wins then another must lose.
---
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.
It's part of what allows that content to be there for you in the first place.
No, it pays for nothing. Instead, it's paying twice over. Once in time/attention to watch/avoid the ad, twice in increased price of the product to pay for the ad. Those advertising industry salaries don't come from nowhere.
I prefer to pay for my content directly rather than paying for an advertising middlemen that are actually subtracting value and hiding market signals. Massively subtracting value in the case of network TV, so much so that the net value of most network TV today is approaching zero.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
... but responding to it by doing the wrong thing...
The RIAA's usual self-serving circular reasoning. Make something wrong by apriori definition and then try to argue that it's wrong.
Try to think outside their self-serving box.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Consumers are almost completely incapable of figuring out that 75 cents for 2000 hours is more expensive than $2.50 for 10,000 hours, so the cheaper bulb nearly always wins.
Not true. I understand this but I often still buy the cheaper bulb. Why? Buying cheap reduces the downside risk; I have no way of guaranteeing that what I'm buying will last 10,000 hours.
Profit maximization means that companies often attempt to sell cheap products as if they were high quality and will often allow brands to go downmarket to do this.
We need "truth in advertising" laws that are strongly enforced, rather than the joke they are now, before consumers can make informed choices.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Computers existed in the United States before Windows you know but their usage didn't explode until Microsoft created an operating system that was easy enough to use for just about anyone to pick up.
Historical revisionism. Computer use was exploding with the Apple II, CP/M and assorted other home computers. M$ was just one of many players. M$ was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and rode the wave when IBM decided to join in.
Thus it being open source or not is irrelevant.
It's the difference between having a local, free market and a foreign, monopoly dominated market. Some people think that's relevant.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
You're dedicated to your own principles, even if you don't call them that. They are no different. All they're doing is prioritizing different things from you.
---
Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
Pointing out the example of an XBox as a closed platform where M$ acts as a gatekeeper for every piece of software running on it (for the majority of the population and like other consoles) is not lame.
And to say WGA and TC is not DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management) is just silly.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Nope, nothing to do with twitter. Just somebody sick of people claiming directly or indirectly there's any groupthink at slashdot. If you want true groupthink head over to pretty much any political or major company website. M$ is worse than many mainly because of its marketing, amorality and the ill-defined, ambiguous nature of its products (software).
So I'm a bigot I don't drink the OSS Kool-Aid? Do you even know what a bigot is?
No, you're a bigot in this instance because you've made an accusation that applies equally to all software as if it applies only to open source. Nothing to do with whether you prefer closed or open source.
Commercial software developers are paid to work on the problems customers complain about the most.
Nope, they're paid to work on problems that cost the vendor the most, usually those that prevent the next sale. That's not the same thing.
Thus they get prioritized higher than easy bugs that no one really cares about. Trust me, I work for a major software company (no, not Microsoft, one that is much more open source friendly). When a major customer starts escalating some issue, we are expected to drop everything else we are doing and work on that issue 24/7. Get a job yourself and maybe you'd learn that.
Nonsense. I've been on the vendor and customer end of hundreds of software maintenance contracts for major companies with hundreds of incidents logged. The reality is that while hardware maintenance contracts are sometimes worth the money, vendor software maintenance contracts are an almost complete waste of time and money.
Either the bug is considered to be a feature request and ignored, or the vendor provides a useless work around, or they say it'll be in the next major release in many months time. Almost never an actual solution unless they happened to be working on it at the time for the next release.
Not surprising since software maintenance costs money and like any cost vendors try to minimise it, particularly since it's after the sale has been made. Small companies are sometimes more responsive but that's the exception not the rule.
At least with open source you have the option of paying a third party to do the work for you. With an uncooperative closed source vendor that option does not exist.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
True but it works both ways. I've seen plenty of companies harmed by buying in expensive, specialist software that could easily have replaced themselves by leveraging general purpose tools and their own expertese. Speciality software packages are often steaming POS and many business problems are generic e.g. Change management, data entry or archiving.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I don't mind lending an advertiser my ear if they can advertise tastefully, and in return they provide funding to My Favorite Distracting Thing on Television/Web/Radio(tm) so they can make a few more episodes.
Advertising pays for nothing. All you're doing is paying twice, once in time to watch/skip the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. Not to mention totally destroying the content you thought you were watching.
I prefer to pay once for my media.
And tasteful ad's? Please get real. The whole point of an ad is to be obtrusive, subliminal ad's don't work.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
As I said, if you want to throw your money at the EFF, good for you. Just don't take a "high and mighty" attitude when people disgree that its the best use of their money.
Nobody's being "high and mighty", just trying to convince you of their point of view. Glad to hear you're not a consumer sheep.
Even if DRM doesn't affect you or me directly now many people believe, myself included, that it will have major political implications for the future when we live most of our lives virtually, shaping society in ways that go way beyond limiting "piracy". I don't want to leave my children that society. You disagree, fine.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
This is where I completely disagree with your position. Under most legal standards, to be guilty of anti-competitive "bundling", the "bundled" product must be a clearly distinct product which is not functionally relevant to the market-dominant one.
That's the issue. Software is amorphous. All software could be considered part of the OS.
You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere if you don't want a monopoly supplier of all software and for better or worse the EU have decided that media players and security software are where the line should be drawn.
I don't particularly agree with where they've drawn the line but I do strongly agree that we need anti-trust law that stops incremental market capture as M$ has been doing.
Unfortunately the legal system is hopelessly primitive at the moment; it's largely based on silly "category" reasoning with no good way of defining the categories except for arbitrary language games so it's anybody's guess where this will end up. I live in hope that the legal community will lift their standards and develop more objective, scientifically based law.
Incidentally, bundling has little to do with product improvement. An improved product does the same job better; faster, cheaper, whatever. Bundling adds extra functionality to solve new classes of problems. Enhanced security is arguable however media players definitely solve a new class of problem compared to a base, traditional OS.
Of course then we get into what "class", "problem" and even "OS" mean; with the current legal system we usually end up with arbitrary and fairly meaningless definitions. So, I guess I agree with you in part but I strongly disagree that anti-trust law should not be applicable in this general context.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
When and if Microsoft ever decides to make DRM mandatory in their products, there will be a great migration to other software solutions that don't cram it down their user's throats.
Like XBox you mean?
There never will be "one day" when they make DRM mandatory. They'll just keep on gradually turning up the heat, as they are doing now with things like WGA and TC, until the net value to the consumer is marginally better than zero with M$'s profit maximized. That's the whole point of the boiled frog anecdote.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Anti-competitive practices, especially in this case, are not so clear-cut.
Nonsense. It's called bundling to an unacceptable level. Cross-subsidizing to get into new markets. Something they've been doing for decades.
M$ knows full well what the problem is, in fact better than the commission, it's just that they refuse to accept it. As usual they are gaming the legal system to increase their profits. As you know full well, software, like pornography, is an amorphous entity that the law does not precisely define directly. For decades M$ has been using that fact to leverage into new markets while avoiding anti-trust laws.
I've got no problem with M$ fixing Windows security (something they should've done 25 years ago) and putting Symantec etc. out of business in a market that should never have existed but please, no breast beating about "not knowing what the problem is". Hypocrites.
"When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time."
Yes, thats a fundemental fault with open source software.
Bigot. That's a fundamental fault with all software.
The Geek never quite seems to grasp the basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
And The Lawyer never quite seems to grasp that slashdot is a large community with varying knowledge, experience, ages and opinions.
Most here are quite familiar with the distinction between civil and criminal law. And sometimes have more knowledge of law in non-US jurisdictions than you do.
Broad generalisations are usually wrong.
---
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.
I'd rather spend mine on things that will have actual benefits for people instead of chasing hopeless ideals.
I'd rather spend my money on things that have even a small chance of making the world a better place, rather than incorrectly equating "small chance" with "no chance" and being a consumer sheep.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
I've come to believe that open source works if you're a programmer, but for the rest of the world the promises fall flat.
You haven't looking very far. Open source is used in millions of products.
I can't read code - it means absolutely nothing to me.
So what? It's the whole market that matters, not just you.
So this whole point on OSS being transparent and knowing what the software really does, doesn't apply to me.
It applies to anybody in a functioning free market who wants third parties to verify something that is core to their work. "Trust me" from a vendor is not good enough, as I have found to my regret many times.
Hell, if someone were to show me the source code to both Windows and Linux, I probably wouldn't even be able to tell which OS was which.
So what? There are millions of third parties who can.
All I care about is whether the software does what I need it to do; I don't plan on spending any evenings curled up to the fire reading source code.
Irrelevant. It's third parties doing it for you.
So this leads us to the next pro-OSS argument, that if the program doesn't do what you want you can either make a solution or hire someone to do it for you. I've tried this (several times in fact), and it didn't work. Since I don't program I have to go out and hire someone to code the solution I want. Never mind that finding a coder can often be a royal pain, but each and every time not only has (or would have) it been more expensive to hire someone to code the solution, but it took longer than had I gone out and bought a commercial closed source package (or two) that did do what I want.
Nonsense. People pay for software modification all the time. And when you paid for a closed source package you benefited only yourself, not potentially millions of others.
Lastly, I keep hearing how OSS programs are more nimble and should a bug or needed feature be identified, 'the community' will solve the problem much faster than a closed source solution. That may be for popular projects like Linux or Firefox, but in my experience I find the OSS programs to be less responsive to requests and needs than the closed source solutions.
Depends on the developer. Just like closed source. In my experience closed source vendors are far worse because there's little profit in fixing problems. Brush offs are far cheaper.
As a scientist, I'm all for transparency and free flowing information. However, when push comes to shove, I need programs that work, and, while I really hate to say this, the OSS programs have always fallen short.
You haven't looked very far. You also have a very blinkered viewpoint. Sometimes it's sensible to accept short term sacrifices (higher cost to get what you want) for long term gain (more control over your destiny and a functioning free market).
Also, you claim to be a scientist. If your work is not open, and cannot be reproduced without dependence on hidden closed source tools that may have bugs that your results depend upon, then you are a poor scientist.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Why does DRM exist? Simple. Because people are dishonest bastards and will rob you blind the first chance they get.
Would those be the dishonest bastards buying the software or selling the software?
DRM allows the seller to change the rules after the sale. In a functioning free market economy with so-called property rights that is a very bad thing.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
It's a bit harder to share a physical book with dozens of people than it is to copy something that is digital or comes on media that can be *easily* converted to digital and have unlimited copies made.
Irrelevant. The internet is a tool for both buyer and seller. While it makes it easier for somebody to copy it also makes it easier for the seller to market to a large audience.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Slashdot Mirror
So deleting user data is not a problem?
Why are you putting up a strawman? He said it was better, he didn't say it was perfect.
I'm sure grandma willy is going to understand when you tell her the Mac is so super secure, and even though all of her pictures are gone, the OS still boots up and relaunches the virus in user space.
... and the OS can be recovered relatively easily compared to the average home M$ windows restore, doubly so if she's backed up her pictures and documents as most home users are trained to do these days.
M$ windows security has been a joke for years and they've mainly got themselves to blame. When they finally install user mode by default and remove some of the more egregarious examples of executing data as code then they might be able to claim some moral high ground. Until then it's the usual marketing lies.
---
New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on /.!
Don't think that every dollar spent on advertising has to show up in next months bank statement as revenue...
The vast majority of modern marketing is a cost, not a benefit, and benefits nobody but the parasitic marketing industry. An arms race with the marketing industry being the arms dealers.
The examples you give are all contrived in that you make the automatic assumption that anybody who has the money to advertise automatically deserves the right to have a louder voice, drowning out alternatives.
There is now so much information available for any one individual that when one information source wins then another must lose.
---
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.
It's part of what allows that content to be there for you in the first place.
No, it pays for nothing. Instead, it's paying twice over. Once in time/attention to watch/avoid the ad, twice in increased price of the product to pay for the ad. Those advertising industry salaries don't come from nowhere.
I prefer to pay for my content directly rather than paying for an advertising middlemen that are actually subtracting value and hiding market signals. Massively subtracting value in the case of network TV, so much so that the net value of most network TV today is approaching zero.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The RIAA's usual self-serving circular reasoning. Make something wrong by apriori definition and then try to argue that it's wrong.
Try to think outside their self-serving box.
---
Creating simple artificial scarcity with copyright and patents on things that can be copied billions of times at minimal cost is a fundamentally stupid economic idea.
Consumers are almost completely incapable of figuring out that 75 cents for 2000 hours is more expensive than $2.50 for 10,000 hours, so the cheaper bulb nearly always wins.
Not true. I understand this but I often still buy the cheaper bulb. Why? Buying cheap reduces the downside risk; I have no way of guaranteeing that what I'm buying will last 10,000 hours.
Profit maximization means that companies often attempt to sell cheap products as if they were high quality and will often allow brands to go downmarket to do this.
We need "truth in advertising" laws that are strongly enforced, rather than the joke they are now, before consumers can make informed choices.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
All your XBox arguments apply equally to the PC in the medium to long term. That's why M$ is boiling the frog.
Like most businesses they want more control. Unlike most businesses they are in a strong position to get it.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Computers existed in the United States before Windows you know but their usage didn't explode until Microsoft created an operating system that was easy enough to use for just about anyone to pick up.
Historical revisionism. Computer use was exploding with the Apple II, CP/M and assorted other home computers. M$ was just one of many players. M$ was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and rode the wave when IBM decided to join in.
Thus it being open source or not is irrelevant.
It's the difference between having a local, free market and a foreign, monopoly dominated market. Some people think that's relevant.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
You're dedicated to your own principles, even if you don't call them that. They are no different. All they're doing is prioritizing different things from you.
---
Vista: Billions of marketing words and no delivered product.
Pointing out the example of an XBox as a closed platform where M$ acts as a gatekeeper for every piece of software running on it (for the majority of the population and like other consoles) is not lame.
And to say WGA and TC is not DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management) is just silly.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
Well, being accused of being in a minor clique makes a change from being accused of groupthink.
Having an alternative point of view is not zealotry and anybody who thinks it is is well on the way to being a zealot themselves.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
Nope, nothing to do with twitter. Just somebody sick of people claiming directly or indirectly there's any groupthink at slashdot. If you want true groupthink head over to pretty much any political or major company website. M$ is worse than many mainly because of its marketing, amorality and the ill-defined, ambiguous nature of its products (software).
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
So I'm a bigot I don't drink the OSS Kool-Aid? Do you even know what a bigot is?
No, you're a bigot in this instance because you've made an accusation that applies equally to all software as if it applies only to open source. Nothing to do with whether you prefer closed or open source.
Commercial software developers are paid to work on the problems customers complain about the most.
Nope, they're paid to work on problems that cost the vendor the most, usually those that prevent the next sale. That's not the same thing.
Thus they get prioritized higher than easy bugs that no one really cares about. Trust me, I work for a major software company (no, not Microsoft, one that is much more open source friendly). When a major customer starts escalating some issue, we are expected to drop everything else we are doing and work on that issue 24/7. Get a job yourself and maybe you'd learn that.
Nonsense. I've been on the vendor and customer end of hundreds of software maintenance contracts for major companies with hundreds of incidents logged. The reality is that while hardware maintenance contracts are sometimes worth the money, vendor software maintenance contracts are an almost complete waste of time and money.
Either the bug is considered to be a feature request and ignored, or the vendor provides a useless work around, or they say it'll be in the next major release in many months time. Almost never an actual solution unless they happened to be working on it at the time for the next release.
Not surprising since software maintenance costs money and like any cost vendors try to minimise it, particularly since it's after the sale has been made. Small companies are sometimes more responsive but that's the exception not the rule.
At least with open source you have the option of paying a third party to do the work for you. With an uncooperative closed source vendor that option does not exist.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
I expect to get flamed for this ...
Why? Just because somebody has a different experience from you doesn't mean they're going to flame you.
---
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.
True but it works both ways. I've seen plenty of companies harmed by buying in expensive, specialist software that could easily have replaced themselves by leveraging general purpose tools and their own expertese. Speciality software packages are often steaming POS and many business problems are generic e.g. Change management, data entry or archiving.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I don't mind lending an advertiser my ear if they can advertise tastefully, and in return they provide funding to My Favorite Distracting Thing on Television/Web/Radio(tm) so they can make a few more episodes.
Advertising pays for nothing. All you're doing is paying twice, once in time to watch/skip the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad. Not to mention totally destroying the content you thought you were watching.
I prefer to pay once for my media.
And tasteful ad's? Please get real. The whole point of an ad is to be obtrusive, subliminal ad's don't work.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
As I said, if you want to throw your money at the EFF, good for you. Just don't take a "high and mighty" attitude when people disgree that its the best use of their money.
Nobody's being "high and mighty", just trying to convince you of their point of view. Glad to hear you're not a consumer sheep.
Even if DRM doesn't affect you or me directly now many people believe, myself included, that it will have major political implications for the future when we live most of our lives virtually, shaping society in ways that go way beyond limiting "piracy". I don't want to leave my children that society. You disagree, fine.
---
Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
This is where I completely disagree with your position. Under most legal standards, to be guilty of anti-competitive "bundling", the "bundled" product must be a clearly distinct product which is not functionally relevant to the market-dominant one.
That's the issue. Software is amorphous. All software could be considered part of the OS.
You have to draw a line in the sand somewhere if you don't want a monopoly supplier of all software and for better or worse the EU have decided that media players and security software are where the line should be drawn.
I don't particularly agree with where they've drawn the line but I do strongly agree that we need anti-trust law that stops incremental market capture as M$ has been doing.
Unfortunately the legal system is hopelessly primitive at the moment; it's largely based on silly "category" reasoning with no good way of defining the categories except for arbitrary language games so it's anybody's guess where this will end up. I live in hope that the legal community will lift their standards and develop more objective, scientifically based law.
Incidentally, bundling has little to do with product improvement. An improved product does the same job better; faster, cheaper, whatever. Bundling adds extra functionality to solve new classes of problems. Enhanced security is arguable however media players definitely solve a new class of problem compared to a base, traditional OS.
Of course then we get into what "class", "problem" and even "OS" mean; with the current legal system we usually end up with arbitrary and fairly meaningless definitions. So, I guess I agree with you in part but I strongly disagree that anti-trust law should not be applicable in this general context.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
When and if Microsoft ever decides to make DRM mandatory in their products, there will be a great migration to other software solutions that don't cram it down their user's throats.
Like XBox you mean?
There never will be "one day" when they make DRM mandatory. They'll just keep on gradually turning up the heat, as they are doing now with things like WGA and TC, until the net value to the consumer is marginally better than zero with M$'s profit maximized. That's the whole point of the boiled frog anecdote.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Anti-competitive practices, especially in this case, are not so clear-cut.
Nonsense. It's called bundling to an unacceptable level. Cross-subsidizing to get into new markets. Something they've been doing for decades.
M$ knows full well what the problem is, in fact better than the commission, it's just that they refuse to accept it. As usual they are gaming the legal system to increase their profits. As you know full well, software, like pornography, is an amorphous entity that the law does not precisely define directly. For decades M$ has been using that fact to leverage into new markets while avoiding anti-trust laws.
I've got no problem with M$ fixing Windows security (something they should've done 25 years ago) and putting Symantec etc. out of business in a market that should never have existed but please, no breast beating about "not knowing what the problem is". Hypocrites.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
"When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time."
Yes, thats a fundemental fault with open source software.
Bigot. That's a fundamental fault with all software.
---
Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
The Geek never quite seems to grasp the basic distinctions between civil and criminal law.
And The Lawyer never quite seems to grasp that slashdot is a large community with varying knowledge, experience, ages and opinions.
Most here are quite familiar with the distinction between civil and criminal law. And sometimes have more knowledge of law in non-US jurisdictions than you do.
Broad generalisations are usually wrong.
---
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.
I'd rather spend mine on things that will have actual benefits for people instead of chasing hopeless ideals.
I'd rather spend my money on things that have even a small chance of making the world a better place, rather than incorrectly equating "small chance" with "no chance" and being a consumer sheep.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
I've come to believe that open source works if you're a programmer, but for the rest of the world the promises fall flat.
You haven't looking very far. Open source is used in millions of products.
I can't read code - it means absolutely nothing to me.
So what? It's the whole market that matters, not just you.
So this whole point on OSS being transparent and knowing what the software really does, doesn't apply to me.
It applies to anybody in a functioning free market who wants third parties to verify something that is core to their work. "Trust me" from a vendor is not good enough, as I have found to my regret many times.
Hell, if someone were to show me the source code to both Windows and Linux, I probably wouldn't even be able to tell which OS was which.
So what? There are millions of third parties who can.
All I care about is whether the software does what I need it to do; I don't plan on spending any evenings curled up to the fire reading source code.
Irrelevant. It's third parties doing it for you.
So this leads us to the next pro-OSS argument, that if the program doesn't do what you want you can either make a solution or hire someone to do it for you. I've tried this (several times in fact), and it didn't work. Since I don't program I have to go out and hire someone to code the solution I want. Never mind that finding a coder can often be a royal pain, but each and every time not only has (or would have) it been more expensive to hire someone to code the solution, but it took longer than had I gone out and bought a commercial closed source package (or two) that did do what I want.
Nonsense. People pay for software modification all the time. And when you paid for a closed source package you benefited only yourself, not potentially millions of others.
Lastly, I keep hearing how OSS programs are more nimble and should a bug or needed feature be identified, 'the community' will solve the problem much faster than a closed source solution. That may be for popular projects like Linux or Firefox, but in my experience I find the OSS programs to be less responsive to requests and needs than the closed source solutions.
Depends on the developer. Just like closed source. In my experience closed source vendors are far worse because there's little profit in fixing problems. Brush offs are far cheaper.
As a scientist, I'm all for transparency and free flowing information. However, when push comes to shove, I need programs that work, and, while I really hate to say this, the OSS programs have always fallen short.
You haven't looked very far. You also have a very blinkered viewpoint. Sometimes it's sensible to accept short term sacrifices (higher cost to get what you want) for long term gain (more control over your destiny and a functioning free market).
Also, you claim to be a scientist. If your work is not open, and cannot be reproduced without dependence on hidden closed source tools that may have bugs that your results depend upon, then you are a poor scientist.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Why does DRM exist? Simple. Because people are dishonest bastards and will rob you blind the first chance they get.
Would those be the dishonest bastards buying the software or selling the software?
DRM allows the seller to change the rules after the sale. In a functioning free market economy with so-called property rights that is a very bad thing.
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lockin = Death of the free market.
It's a bit harder to share a physical book with dozens of people than it is to copy something that is digital or comes on media that can be *easily* converted to digital and have unlimited copies made.
Irrelevant. The internet is a tool for both buyer and seller. While it makes it easier for somebody to copy it also makes it easier for the seller to market to a large audience.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.