you are arguing for a rise in the price of software, games, DVDs etc. If we sell a tenth as many units, we need 10 times the price.
You are trying to argue that different market realities will not lead to different business tradeoffs and different efficiencies. That's incorrect. Apart from anything else code reuse should be much more widespread than it now is - code is not reused in large part because of the inefficiencies inherent in current law. A lawyer almost has to be monitoring every transaction. That's crazy.
"People have been sharing and copying with friends and acquaintances since the dawn of time"
yes. friends. not a random list of 3000 people across the globe in their emule queue. Thats the difference.
I can share stuff with maybe 20,000 people within months now. That NEVER happened before.
Just like the vendor can sell to 20,000 people within months now. That NEVER happened before.
In any case things like minstrel tunes, language and technology ideas were copied over wide areas, albeit on longer time scales.
Surely you must see its a whole order-of-magnitude difference.
It's proportional and makes very little difference. The net is a tool that makes file sharers more efficient. That same tool makes vendors equally more efficient also. I see no reason why vendors should be given a privileged position.
"Most people would agree that software vendors are entitled to some reward for their efforts"
SOME? how generous of you. How about people who make furniture, do they get 'some' or what they can command in a free market. what is it about people making digital products that means they must act like beggars?
What is it about digital product vendors that thinks the rest of society owes them a living? You have been given the rather extreme privilege called copyright, something that gives you massive benefits compared to the rest of society - potentially billions of people have been denied the right to copy what they possess to give one, count them, one, vendor total control.
That privilege was given in the hope that it would encourage the creation of intellectual products (actually, originally, it was just jobs for the boys by the king at the time).
I think it's time that privilege was severely moderated as it's clear it's not working too well in the digital age and doesn't reflect reasonable tradeoffs.
"Personally, I'd like to see it legally mandated that all software sales must include the source"
insane.
You have no idea. You ignored the examples I gave of present day, high value industries which are completely "source included" and yet seem to operate just fine.
I rpesume you would like all electronic products to be sold with complete schematics and manufacturing instructions too.
Funny you should say that. Most electrical devices up until the mid seventies (e.g. radio's, tv's, kitchen appliances) had schematics either in the back of them or in the manual. Then those companies got infested by lawyers trying to justify their existence and it generally stopped. You still occasionally see mass market devices with full schematics but it's rare.
The world didn't come to an end.
In fact everybody was better off. The vendors because customers weren't as dependent on them and the customers because they could repair themselves or contract third parties. That's what you get when people don't build walled gardens but rather cooperate as well as compete. We need to create markets where companies compete positively by building better products and introducing efficiences rather than competing negatively by doing things like artificial market segmentation, product expiry and arms-race-like mindshare marketing.
How exactly is anyone going to bother with R&D if the fruits of such research are so easil
But the *principle* of DRM, and especially software copy protection is essential if you are to have a viable software industry in the long term.
Nobody has any evidence for that rather extreme assertion. Plenty of software vendors do quite well without any form of DRM except the law and it may well be a net win for society at large to have more freedom at a cost of reduced (not the zero you implied) profitability to software vendors. In practice DRM has extraordinarily high costs, changing something that could be used by billions to something restricted to much smaller number with high overheads.
Many people are ignoring copyright law at the moment because it doesn't reflect their intuition of what it should be. People have been sharing and copying with friends and acquaintances since the dawn of time; copyright is a recent aberration.
Most people would agree that software vendors are entitled to some reward for their efforts. Most people would also agree that they are not entitled to an indefinitely large reward. Nobody seems to know yet how to achieve that balance but DRM does not seem to be a balanced mechanism to achieve that as DRM can hide a multitude of sins. DRM with strong legal controls might be but we're not even close to that yet.
Personally, I'd like to see it legally mandated that all software sales must include the source, not necessarily open source. It's still a level playing field, it encourages the transparency that is required for a truly functioning free market and it's no more than a host of other big ticket industries are doing e.g. the web. Or house or car design, where the "source" is obvious.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
DRM - as a concept - is just a logical progression of copyright law.
No, DRM is what some entrenched interests would like existing copyright to become. It is not a logical progression.
DRM'ed content (as currently implemented) usually breaks the copyright (as currently implemented) bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
The law is a creation of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. Current copyright law is only one of a universe of possibilities. Those people who create the false dichotomy of copyright law as currently implemented versus a free-for-all as the only alternative are confused at best and fraudulently misrepresenting the situation at worst.
Your implicit assumption that current copyright law is the only possibility is part of this narrow mindset. e.g. I'm pro some forms of copyright (e.g. very short terms with a trademark-like loss of copyright if software or media like m$word or happy birthday becomes a standard) but I'm strongly anti-DRM (which just for starters should be illegal until it implements current law) while still being anti copyright and patent law as they're currently implemented.
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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 can second that. I did a mega install of the Dapper i386 beta with a gig of extra packages via Synaptic two days ago. Yesterday the online update fixed two of the three install bugs I'd had the day before... I don't think it's quite ready yet but it's pretty close.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
I hear this kind of speach a lot and it concerns me. It seems to me that basically all data files (or network packets, etc.) are binary formats. What's really in question is what kind of higher-level data structures are imposed on those binary formats.
Partially true but for optimised code and a file format that isn't totally brain dead the only thing that really matters is the number of bytes on the disk.
Remember, modern CPU's are many orders of magnitude faster than modern disks.
What matters for speed is the CPU waiting for those bytes to slowly crawl off that disk and to a lesser extent spend time render anti-aliased fonts on the display (a character on the display is probably a hundred times the size in bits of the corresponding character in the file). Everything else is small beer, including the "binary" versus "text" distinction.
As another poster noted being able to start processing the file before it's fully loaded is helpful but even for a multi-megabyte document we're only talking milliseconds. In any case there's nothing to stop an ODF file being memory mapped and paged in as needed for display.
If ODF is slow now it's because the access code hasn't been well optimized, not because of any limitation in the format itself.
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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.
Because we find the slashbots' misinformed, knee jerk, MS bashing tedious?
Gosh, if you find it so tedious why are you still here? Somebody paying you?
Because we find that often, their tools are a good solution for our problems?
And that somehow makes everything else bad?
Because we aren't interested in fighting the Linux Jihad?
Free clue: Multi-million dollar marketing is every bit as much a jihad and some balance is needed.
Take Vista as an example. There've been practically daily stories spammed on technical news sites all over the net for literally years, and the product isn't even formally released yet! Talk about jihads, they're insane.
Stop trying to pretend that there is only one point of view on slashdot.
There are many thousands of readers and commentators on slashdot with many diverse points of view. Everything from Ayn Rand ideologues against almost any form of government to lying RIAA astroturfers spamming bullshit commercial propaganda and bogus moderations.
Your attempt to pidgeonhole them into one box is just sad, and shows just how impoverished your own view of the world is.
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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.
The problem is that graphics drivers contain proprietayr, licensed code. There's no real way around it if they want to support all the features.
What proprietary, licensed code are you talking about? Publish their names so pressure can be bought to bear on them as well.
With the "stable binary interface" you're talking about the graphics card vendors have no incentive to live their game. Binary blobs are already a problem in open source software and stable interfaces will only make it worse.
If you're okay with closed source why bother using open source at all? The same arguments at OS level apply equally at driver level.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
People go to work for money. If that isn't your goal, you have some catching up to do.
I go to work to make some money and get fun/satisfaction/challenges/socialising/etc. I work enough hours each week that I don't want to waste them not enjoying it unless I have to.
Above a minimum money does not buy happiness and anybody who thinks so needs a reality check. The time of your life is the most important thing you have - don't waste it trying to put an extra zero on your bank account.
why is open source high on your list of what makes something good?
Though commercially funded astroturfers like to lie about this, the type of license is a very important part of the featureset of a program. To pretend otherwise is naive.
Some people regard this feature as important, others less so.
open or closed, a product can still be better than something else...
You need to improve your reading comprehension skills. Just because the license is an important feature of a program doesn't make it the only feature. At no point did the post claim the open source license was the only feature, just an important one.
So thank you very much for spoiling things for everyone. I hope you "hackers" enjoyed it.
They are arseholes but it's probably nothing to do with "hackers" as such.
It's statistics. In any population of millions it's a statisical certainty you're going to get arseholes. Simple as that.
To expose anything to the net and assume that every single one of the millions (billions?) of people online is going to play nice is a statistical impossibility.
Here are just some of the possibilities I can think of:
It's somebody mentally ill.
It's a socially maladjusted teenager trying to prove to their friends how 'leet they are.
It's an amoral company somewhere in the world financially affected by the Sun demo or grid.
It's an amoral company somewhere in the world that competes with Sun and wants to make them look bad.
It's an amoral software security company that wants to advertise and encourage people to buy their security products.
It's an Asian PC vendor that wants to discourage moves away from commodity PC boxes.
It's an anti-globalisation extremist who has it in for first world capitalism.
It's a young Islamic extremist who wants to "get" a US company.
It's a European teenager who doesn't like US cultural imperialism, didn't like the american accent (?) of the demo and attacked it.
It's a botnet operator demonstrating to potential clients how effective they are.
It's a former customer of Sun who got burned and this is payback.
etc.
It's a big, complicated world. "Hackers", black hat and white hat, are just part of the picture.
You're joking. Anybody operating on GoDaddy's scale is doing their own support. Open source beats closed source hands down if you're doing your own support and it's not as if parked domains are a particularly demanding application.
See this. Your argument is only correct if you take a narrow view of what economics is. There are many things of value that can't be measured in dollars.
People cooperating through government to develop software for a once off cost that could then be copied millions of times could easily be hugely economically efficient, beating the current ">$40,000,000,000 per year for about a dozen programs developed more than two decades ago" model we currently have that is in large part a tragedy of the commons.
Not saying your wrong, it's just not the open-and-shut case you're implying. Personally I'd like to see broken patent/copyright law fixed so that software/media markets aren't the unstable, winner-take-all situation we currently have.
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The per-copy cost of mass market software is close to zero.
Yes, marketers love calling people who spot their lies "trolls" or "paranoid" or something similar.
That's because if you can't counter an argument with facts a good alternative is a negative emotional association, in this case an association with immaturity. No potential customer likes to be associated with immaturity.
Incidentally, the original post is probably only the most obvious piece of astroturf here, there's likely to be several others which are more subtle.
Marketers aren't stupid. They know they're not wanted and will use every trick they can think of to get under people's radar, including fake conversations, strawman arguments, Dorothy Dix'ers, post flooding, article submission flooding, emotional distractions and anonymous no-username posts. The no-username posts are used when they don't want to endanger their slashdot karma as it's needed for mod points to mod their propaganda up. And occasionally, for something particularly important, to mod the competition down.
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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.
Re:Did you guys even read TFA??? - ASTROTURFER
on
Microsoft Releases Atlas
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· Score: 2, Informative
This argument depends hugely on what you mean by productive behaviour.
e.g. If some workaholic is discouraged from working long hours because of high marginal taxes, spends more time with the family and as a result the kids grow up as better adjusted then that in my book is a net productivity/efficiency win. Plus, depending on how much less the workaholic works, you might get some extra taxes.
Like a lot of weak economic arguments your argument assumes there are no economic externalities, that economics is the only reality. Not true; taxes are used for social policy reasons all the time e.g. progressive taxation, smoking taxes, R&D tax breaks etc.
Not saying your argument is necessarily incorrect; just that it requires much more justification than you're giving. Until everything on earth can be monetized, including things like "love", "security", "privacy" and "freedom", then economics cannot have all the answers and to claim something is economically "inefficient" is a partial answer at the very best and to call it a "glaring flaw" is an exaggeration.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
This is a direct response to the M$ marketing "freedom to innovate" nonsense.
M$ reaps what it sows. Something that a lot of their marketing types fail to appreciate. When M$ marketing lies, spins and selectively reports then not surprisingly some people feel morally entitled to lie, spin and selectively report in response.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you etc.
Personally, I just try to balance out the biased commercial marketing in general, particularly from lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
Put subtle backdoors into GPG that become useable with NSA expertese.
Put unsubtle backdoors that look like program bugs into GPG and force the developers to submit to the official secrets act[s].
Get an NSA agent to join the GPG development team and steer development the way that the NSA likes it.
Put subtle code into pretty much any regularly installed open source program binary that deliberately compromises/backdoors the computer and/or GPG keys on any computer running it.
Physically break into the computer of a target without their knowledge.
Unbreakable encryption is not just about the math.
Having said the above the NSA's mission is not just to break the "enemy"'s encryption but also to protect the "friend"'s encryption and all of the options I've given compromise protection.
This is ignoring routine archiving of encrypted messages where they force the encrypter to decrypt at a later date if the NSA feels the need.
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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.
Nonsense. The media companies love DRM because of the market control it gives them.
willingness of ordinary people to engage in acts of willful copyright infringement
Gosh, when the vast majority of people disagree with your view of the world then maybe it's your view which is at fault?
People have been sharing with friends and acquaintances since the dawn of time.
the underlying problem is still the willingness of ordinary people to engage in acts of willful copyright infringement simply on the basis of the belief that their chances of being caught are low.
No, the underlying problem is IP companies who feel they have a right to unlimited profits for the one piece of work at the expense of the general population. And due to broken IP law are currently getting away with it.
There is also a problem with lying astroturfers who fraudulently misrepresent company propaganda as a personal opinion and also repeatedly spam discussion groups with their propaganda but that's another story.
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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.
If it was so bloody obvious, why did nobody get the idea to do it before Nintendo came along with the RumblePak (which predates Immersion's patents but covers a different implementation)?
I have the idea of opening a hardware store in some small town that's hasn't had a hardware store since it was established hundreds of years ago. By your reasoning I should be able to get a patent on that idea so nobody can create a competitor without licensing from me at my price in that town. After all, I invested significant amounts of my time and money to get it going. A hardware store in that town can't be obvious because nobody's tried to do it for hundreds of years.
You need to get off your high horse and acknowledge that lack of prior art is a necessary but not sufficient evidence for lack of obviousness. Patent boosters continually trot out the lack of prior art argument as if it means something and it's just bogus.
In addition patent boosters just handwave when it comes to determining what prior art is. Whether prior art exists depends critically on how amorphous ideas are categorised into the neat boxes the legal system likes to use.
That categorisation of patents is done largely by the patent office with very little critical thought about what the categories should be, how those categories should be abstracted from the English language and how borderline cases should be categorised. e.g. When are two colors the same? When are two ideas the same? Pick your language to get a different answer.
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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.
They say money doesn't buy you happiness? Well, it sure makes misery a whole lot easier to live with I can tell ya. I like the things money enables me to do with my life...
The science disagrees with you. Above a minimum money does not buy happiness.
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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.
Slashdot Mirror
by definition
No.
you are arguing for a rise in the price of software, games, DVDs etc. If we sell a tenth as many units, we need 10 times the price.
You are trying to argue that different market realities will not lead to different business tradeoffs and different efficiencies. That's incorrect. Apart from anything else code reuse should be much more widespread than it now is - code is not reused in large part because of the inefficiencies inherent in current law. A lawyer almost has to be monitoring every transaction. That's crazy.
"People have been sharing and copying with friends and acquaintances since the dawn of time"
yes. friends. not a random list of 3000 people across the globe in their emule queue. Thats the difference.
I can share stuff with maybe 20,000 people within months now. That NEVER happened before.
Just like the vendor can sell to 20,000 people within months now. That NEVER happened before.
In any case things like minstrel tunes, language and technology ideas were copied over wide areas, albeit on longer time scales.
Surely you must see its a whole order-of-magnitude difference.
It's proportional and makes very little difference. The net is a tool that makes file sharers more efficient. That same tool makes vendors equally more efficient also. I see no reason why vendors should be given a privileged position.
"Most people would agree that software vendors are entitled to some reward for their efforts"
SOME? how generous of you. How about people who make furniture, do they get 'some' or what they can command in a free market. what is it about people making digital products that means they must act like beggars?
What is it about digital product vendors that thinks the rest of society owes them a living? You have been given the rather extreme privilege called copyright, something that gives you massive benefits compared to the rest of society - potentially billions of people have been denied the right to copy what they possess to give one, count them, one, vendor total control.
That privilege was given in the hope that it would encourage the creation of intellectual products (actually, originally, it was just jobs for the boys by the king at the time).
I think it's time that privilege was severely moderated as it's clear it's not working too well in the digital age and doesn't reflect reasonable tradeoffs.
"Personally, I'd like to see it legally mandated that all software sales must include the source"
insane.
You have no idea. You ignored the examples I gave of present day, high value industries which are completely "source included" and yet seem to operate just fine.
I rpesume you would like all electronic products to be sold with complete schematics and manufacturing instructions too.
Funny you should say that. Most electrical devices up until the mid seventies (e.g. radio's, tv's, kitchen appliances) had schematics either in the back of them or in the manual. Then those companies got infested by lawyers trying to justify their existence and it generally stopped. You still occasionally see mass market devices with full schematics but it's rare.
The world didn't come to an end.
In fact everybody was better off. The vendors because customers weren't as dependent on them and the customers because they could repair themselves or contract third parties. That's what you get when people don't build walled gardens but rather cooperate as well as compete. We need to create markets where companies compete positively by building better products and introducing efficiences rather than competing negatively by doing things like artificial market segmentation, product expiry and arms-race-like mindshare marketing.
How exactly is anyone going to bother with R&D if the fruits of such research are so easil
But the *principle* of DRM, and especially software copy protection is essential if you are to have a viable software industry in the long term.
Nobody has any evidence for that rather extreme assertion. Plenty of software vendors do quite well without any form of DRM except the law and it may well be a net win for society at large to have more freedom at a cost of reduced (not the zero you implied) profitability to software vendors. In practice DRM has extraordinarily high costs, changing something that could be used by billions to something restricted to much smaller number with high overheads.
Many people are ignoring copyright law at the moment because it doesn't reflect their intuition of what it should be. People have been sharing and copying with friends and acquaintances since the dawn of time; copyright is a recent aberration.
Most people would agree that software vendors are entitled to some reward for their efforts. Most people would also agree that they are not entitled to an indefinitely large reward. Nobody seems to know yet how to achieve that balance but DRM does not seem to be a balanced mechanism to achieve that as DRM can hide a multitude of sins. DRM with strong legal controls might be but we're not even close to that yet.
Personally, I'd like to see it legally mandated that all software sales must include the source, not necessarily open source. It's still a level playing field, it encourages the transparency that is required for a truly functioning free market and it's no more than a host of other big ticket industries are doing e.g. the web. Or house or car design, where the "source" is obvious.
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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.
DRM - as a concept - is just a logical progression of copyright law.
No, DRM is what some entrenched interests would like existing copyright to become. It is not a logical progression.
DRM'ed content (as currently implemented) usually breaks the copyright (as currently implemented) bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
The law is a creation of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. Current copyright law is only one of a universe of possibilities. Those people who create the false dichotomy of copyright law as currently implemented versus a free-for-all as the only alternative are confused at best and fraudulently misrepresenting the situation at worst.
Your implicit assumption that current copyright law is the only possibility is part of this narrow mindset. e.g. I'm pro some forms of copyright (e.g. very short terms with a trademark-like loss of copyright if software or media like m$word or happy birthday becomes a standard) but I'm strongly anti-DRM (which just for starters should be illegal until it implements current law) while still being anti copyright and patent law as they're currently implemented.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I can second that. I did a mega install of the Dapper i386 beta with a gig of extra packages via Synaptic two days ago. Yesterday the online update fixed two of the three install bugs I'd had the day before... I don't think it's quite ready yet but it's pretty close.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
So, what you're saying is: Her survey needs a some patches?
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Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world - Mary Shafer, NASA
I hear this kind of speach a lot and it concerns me. It seems to me that basically all data files (or network packets, etc.) are binary formats. What's really in question is what kind of higher-level data structures are imposed on those binary formats.
Partially true but for optimised code and a file format that isn't totally brain dead the only thing that really matters is the number of bytes on the disk.
Remember, modern CPU's are many orders of magnitude faster than modern disks.
What matters for speed is the CPU waiting for those bytes to slowly crawl off that disk and to a lesser extent spend time render anti-aliased fonts on the display (a character on the display is probably a hundred times the size in bits of the corresponding character in the file). Everything else is small beer, including the "binary" versus "text" distinction.
As another poster noted being able to start processing the file before it's fully loaded is helpful but even for a multi-megabyte document we're only talking milliseconds. In any case there's nothing to stop an ODF file being memory mapped and paged in as needed for display.
If ODF is slow now it's because the access code hasn't been well optimized, not because of any limitation in the format itself.
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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.
Because we find the slashbots' misinformed, knee jerk, MS bashing tedious?
Gosh, if you find it so tedious why are you still here? Somebody paying you?
Because we find that often, their tools are a good solution for our problems?
And that somehow makes everything else bad?
Because we aren't interested in fighting the Linux Jihad?
Free clue: Multi-million dollar marketing is every bit as much a jihad and some balance is needed.
Take Vista as an example. There've been practically daily stories spammed on technical news sites all over the net for literally years, and the product isn't even formally released yet! Talk about jihads, they're insane.
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New game: Spot the lying astroturfer on slashdot!
Stop trying to pretend that there is only one point of view on slashdot.
There are many thousands of readers and commentators on slashdot with many diverse points of view. Everything from Ayn Rand ideologues against almost any form of government to lying RIAA astroturfers spamming bullshit commercial propaganda and bogus moderations.
Your attempt to pidgeonhole them into one box is just sad, and shows just how impoverished your own view of the world is.
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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.
The problem is that graphics drivers contain proprietayr, licensed code. There's no real way around it if they want to support all the features.
What proprietary, licensed code are you talking about? Publish their names so pressure can be bought to bear on them as well.
With the "stable binary interface" you're talking about the graphics card vendors have no incentive to live their game. Binary blobs are already a problem in open source software and stable interfaces will only make it worse.
If you're okay with closed source why bother using open source at all? The same arguments at OS level apply equally at driver level.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
If the quality is poor, blame the developer, not the tool.
The format is probably from a single supplier, undocumented, with a closed license and patent and DRM encumbered.
Any one of those would make it of poor quality as a video standard.
It's not just the technical details that matter. It's the entire featureset, though vendor marketing 'droids try to pretend otherwise.
Blame the tool, not the developer.
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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.
People go to work for money. If that isn't your goal, you have some catching up to do.
I go to work to make some money and get fun/satisfaction/challenges/socialising/etc. I work enough hours each week that I don't want to waste them not enjoying it unless I have to.
Above a minimum money does not buy happiness and anybody who thinks so needs a reality check. The time of your life is the most important thing you have - don't waste it trying to put an extra zero on your bank account.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
why is open source high on your list of what makes something good?
Though commercially funded astroturfers like to lie about this, the type of license is a very important part of the featureset of a program. To pretend otherwise is naive.
Some people regard this feature as important, others less so.
open or closed, a product can still be better than something else...
You need to improve your reading comprehension skills. Just because the license is an important feature of a program doesn't make it the only feature. At no point did the post claim the open source license was the only feature, just an important one.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
So thank you very much for spoiling things for everyone. I hope you "hackers" enjoyed it.
They are arseholes but it's probably nothing to do with "hackers" as such.
It's statistics. In any population of millions it's a statisical certainty you're going to get arseholes. Simple as that.
To expose anything to the net and assume that every single one of the millions (billions?) of people online is going to play nice is a statistical impossibility.
Here are just some of the possibilities I can think of:
It's a big, complicated world. "Hackers", black hat and white hat, are just part of the picture.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
offer better support than Linux forums can offer.
You're joking. Anybody operating on GoDaddy's scale is doing their own support. Open source beats closed source hands down if you're doing your own support and it's not as if parked domains are a particularly demanding application.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
See this. Your argument is only correct if you take a narrow view of what economics is. There are many things of value that can't be measured in dollars.
People cooperating through government to develop software for a once off cost that could then be copied millions of times could easily be hugely economically efficient, beating the current ">$40,000,000,000 per year for about a dozen programs developed more than two decades ago" model we currently have that is in large part a tragedy of the commons.
Not saying your wrong, it's just not the open-and-shut case you're implying. Personally I'd like to see broken patent/copyright law fixed so that software/media markets aren't the unstable, winner-take-all situation we currently have.
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The per-copy cost of mass market software is close to zero.
Yes, marketers love calling people who spot their lies "trolls" or "paranoid" or something similar.
That's because if you can't counter an argument with facts a good alternative is a negative emotional association, in this case an association with immaturity. No potential customer likes to be associated with immaturity.
Incidentally, the original post is probably only the most obvious piece of astroturf here, there's likely to be several others which are more subtle.
Marketers aren't stupid. They know they're not wanted and will use every trick they can think of to get under people's radar, including fake conversations, strawman arguments, Dorothy Dix'ers, post flooding, article submission flooding, emotional distractions and anonymous no-username posts. The no-username posts are used when they don't want to endanger their slashdot karma as it's needed for mod points to mod their propaganda up. And occasionally, for something particularly important, to mod the competition down.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Lying astroturfer, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
It appears to have been mod'ed up by sock puppets too.
Don't think it's an astroturfer? Learn more about undercover marketing, M$' astroturfing history, non-M$ astroturfing, net astroturfing and non-net astroturfing.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
This argument depends hugely on what you mean by productive behaviour.
e.g. If some workaholic is discouraged from working long hours because of high marginal taxes, spends more time with the family and as a result the kids grow up as better adjusted then that in my book is a net productivity/efficiency win. Plus, depending on how much less the workaholic works, you might get some extra taxes.
Like a lot of weak economic arguments your argument assumes there are no economic externalities, that economics is the only reality. Not true; taxes are used for social policy reasons all the time e.g. progressive taxation, smoking taxes, R&D tax breaks etc.
Not saying your argument is necessarily incorrect; just that it requires much more justification than you're giving. Until everything on earth can be monetized, including things like "love", "security", "privacy" and "freedom", then economics cannot have all the answers and to claim something is economically "inefficient" is a partial answer at the very best and to call it a "glaring flaw" is an exaggeration.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
because a monopoly is not a bad thing.
"Trust us, we're the phone company" doesn't work for me, nor I suspect for many people. You need checks and balances.
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Scientific, evidence based IP law. Now there's a thought.
are very quick to castigate MS as a non-innovator
This is a direct response to the M$ marketing "freedom to innovate" nonsense.
M$ reaps what it sows. Something that a lot of their marketing types fail to appreciate. When M$ marketing lies, spins and selectively reports then not surprisingly some people feel morally entitled to lie, spin and selectively report in response.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you etc.
Personally, I just try to balance out the biased commercial marketing in general, particularly from lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.
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Paid marketers are the worst zealots.
There are other possibilities:
Unbreakable encryption is not just about the math.
Having said the above the NSA's mission is not just to break the "enemy"'s encryption but also to protect the "friend"'s encryption and all of the options I've given compromise protection.
This is ignoring routine archiving of encrypted messages where they force the encrypter to decrypt at a later date if the NSA feels the need.
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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.
Someone may cunningly edit your entry, and you may not know for some time.
This is true for the internet in general, not just wikipedia.
Everybody with a net presence should do a web search on their own name regularly to check.
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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.
Nobody WANTS DRM.
Nonsense. The media companies love DRM because of the market control it gives them.
willingness of ordinary people to engage in acts of willful copyright infringement
Gosh, when the vast majority of people disagree with your view of the world then maybe it's your view which is at fault?
People have been sharing with friends and acquaintances since the dawn of time.
the underlying problem is still the willingness of ordinary people to engage in acts of willful copyright infringement simply on the basis of the belief that their chances of being caught are low.
No, the underlying problem is IP companies who feel they have a right to unlimited profits for the one piece of work at the expense of the general population. And due to broken IP law are currently getting away with it.
There is also a problem with lying astroturfers who fraudulently misrepresent company propaganda as a personal opinion and also repeatedly spam discussion groups with their propaganda but that's another story.
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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.
If it was so bloody obvious, why did nobody get the idea to do it before Nintendo came along with the RumblePak (which predates Immersion's patents but covers a different implementation)?
I have the idea of opening a hardware store in some small town that's hasn't had a hardware store since it was established hundreds of years ago. By your reasoning I should be able to get a patent on that idea so nobody can create a competitor without licensing from me at my price in that town. After all, I invested significant amounts of my time and money to get it going. A hardware store in that town can't be obvious because nobody's tried to do it for hundreds of years.
You need to get off your high horse and acknowledge that lack of prior art is a necessary but not sufficient evidence for lack of obviousness. Patent boosters continually trot out the lack of prior art argument as if it means something and it's just bogus.
In addition patent boosters just handwave when it comes to determining what prior art is. Whether prior art exists depends critically on how amorphous ideas are categorised into the neat boxes the legal system likes to use.
That categorisation of patents is done largely by the patent office with very little critical thought about what the categories should be, how those categories should be abstracted from the English language and how borderline cases should be categorised. e.g. When are two colors the same? When are two ideas the same? Pick your language to get a different answer.
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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.
They say money doesn't buy you happiness? Well, it sure makes misery a whole lot easier to live with I can tell ya. I like the things money enables me to do with my life...
The science disagrees with you. Above a minimum money does not buy happiness.
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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.