You and I both know the difference between honest dealing and corporate shilling is important, otherwise they wouldn't bother trying to do it, time and again.
It's dishonest, any way you look at it. Marketing parasites try to spin doctor it but it's still fraudulent misrepresentation. i.e. fraud.
The law hasn't caught up yet but hopefully it will.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Grow up. It restricts the freedoms of re-distributers of code, not users, so that further distributers are not restricted.
Try to get your head around the idea that freedoms are tradeoffs. What is one man's freedom is another man's restriction. e.g. If I were free to take all your money you might object because you want the freedom to hold on to all your money.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
So its pretty safe to say then that FOSS is not exactly being swamped with patent infringment claims
That's because those companies want to make sure all those nice new laws are in place before they go for it.
Those atrocious new laws are going to impact for lifetimes and the stroke of a pen will restrict the freedoms of billions of people. Waiting a year or two to get control like that is a no brainer.
I haven't used Gentoo but I can understand their point of view.
It's the computer doing the compilation, not them, so that doesn't cost them much. Particularly if they have more than one computer.
And if they compile it themselves they have more control, it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. It's also a good vehicle to learn and experiment. So why not?
He didn't claim FOSS security was guaranteed as your entire post assumes. He claimed it was a better alternative than a company with an obvious vested interest.
Linux may have Mesa out of box (in some distros) but full, easy hardware accelerated GL it doesn't, and in some distros at least, getting it to work is a major pain.
It's okay in Ubuntu (based on Debian).
I installed a new NVidia graphics card last week. I did a search in the Synaptic package manager for NVidia, downloaded and installed the package over broadband with two button clicks in a few seconds, shutdown, plugged in the card, booted, answered a few questions all of which had reasonable defaults (screen resolution I wanted etc.), rebooted and now I'm running accelerated. About the only failing was that the NVidia utility programs weren't installed in the menus.
I have no connection with Ubuntu other than as a satisified user.
Linux has problems but it's getting better all the time. Most complaints I see are from people who are on cutting edge hardware or who aren't using a recent distribution.
A FOSS problem is that debugged drivers usually aren't available on the latest non-backwards compatible hardware because unlike the windows drivers linux driver development usually doesn't start until after the hardware is released. Development may also be slowed down by unnecessary closed source licensing BS.
The lessons are obvious, keep your distribution up-to-date and be prepared to forgo bleeding edge hardware when it is not backwards compatible.
---
All FOSS licenses are good and streets ahead of the average closed source license.
The learning curve for students is completely irrelevent, because that's the main goal of school.
Nope. Have you ever taught? Schools have an indefinitely large amount of things to teach in a fixed amount of time. Like businesses, they don't want to waste time.
This is probably why it was feasible and why it worked.
Nope. Experience has shown many times in many places that OO for standard office tasks is much the same as M$office and that conversions costs are minimal. No magic. Stories about the difficulty of using OO are just marketing lies.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
I certainly hope no one thinks it will be any different here. In my several years reading/., its been a constant that I can always count on; rabid fans of both spouting broken record thoughts about how poor the other is.
What I want to know is: how many of them are marketing 'droids?
Marketing/advertising is paid zealotry by another name.
I have yet to see any marketing/advertising person admit the competition is any good, ever. Unless it's a straw man they're setting up for a topple.
Market for FOSS and you're called a zealot. Market for M$ it's just a job.
Marketers try to manipulate tech writers and other opinion leaders all the time and that's probably at least part of what this tech writer is seeing. Remember, marketers with their dubious ethics are likely to write many letters to everybody else's one, causing them to have far more visibility than their numbers would indicate. And that includes on slashdot.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because TCO is good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Safe is a relative concept, and to try and confuse the issue by casting it as an absolute does no one any favours.
That's the whole point.
M$ marketing wants to confuse the issue.
They want people to forget that the vast majority of M$windows users are still running as administrator, still have activex controls on their web browser, still have executable content in email and still have useability bugs as idiotic as doubled extensions to compromise security. These all vastly outweigh current FOSS security concerns.
As usual rather than fixing the problems they're trying to baffle people with bullshit instead.
And before people bring out the tired line that it's the user's fault. Nonsense. M$ claim they are writing software for naive users. Clearly they are not as there are good solutions to all the above problems that they are not implementing.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
"Aw, fook! My Linux ISO download just got to 90% complete, and my transfer rate just got shot to shit. Oh well, I'm not going to quit now. I'll just sit here taking up space until it completes, no matter how long that takes."
In practise what happens is that once the slowdown gets to zero either the download software times out or the user hangs around for ten minutes, sees no progress and because they don't want to waste their own time says "stuff this" and goes home.
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
Considered that. Only a small percentage will do it and they can be dealt with separately. Just disconnecting once an hour is going to be hassle and if the cofeeshop cared they could do client recognition with proxies and encrypted cookies etc.
In any case it's tables they care about, not the network, and if they see somebody on a table for an extended period and the place is full they can do something about it.
Just set up bandwidth shaping so that each MAC address gradually starts slowing way down after an hour. Slow, not stopped, means they have a chance to finish their work and log off cleanly. They'll get the idea. I've seen this in other contexts; it works well and minimises arguments and overhead.
I'm not sure what you mean by "formal definition". I'm certainly not going to accept a sloppy definition of "evangelist" just because it happens to be used in WordNet by some computer science student. In any case, "evangelist", like most words, has multiple meanings. You can't refute my argument just by insisting on a usage different from the one I meant.
I checked offline before posting that definition link. In any case, Merriam-Webster and Oxford agree. I disagree with your view of.edu links, they are often more trustworthy than.com links for various reasons.
Perhaps my point will be clearer if I restate my orginal argument without using that controversial word: Too much Linux advocacy is based on somebody's heartfelt belief that Linux is superior in every way to Windows. Not just superior technically, but socially, economically, even morally.
I've never met an advocate that says Linux, or any FOSS, is superior in every way, particularly from a technical point of view. You're creating a straw man.
I don't actually disagree with most of that -- I just think that most decision makers don't give a shit.
It's partly about teaching them to give a shit - about taking the long term view, not the loaded short-term TCO arguments that M$ likes to push. I agree it's an alien way of thinking to many at the moment but you've got to start somewhere,
If you want them to use Linux -- or any other OSS solution -- you need to show them how it addresses their needs as they perceive them, and stop trying to change their whole world view.
Like I said, I think we need to do both. Addressing their immediate needs and also get them thinking long term.
M$ seems to think it's worth spending millions on biased "feel good" ad's with no actual content. Why is that? Can FOSS afford to ignore those ad's? I don't think so.
I think we're in agreement that FOSS should be promoted, just disagree on the emphasis.
Part of what's happening is that many Linux proponents are young. They're passionate about what they do. You're trying to push back the tide if you want to stop that.
When, how, and under what circumstances is it ok for copyright owners to protect their content?
No DRM, because DRM is all or nothing control and in the long term kills the free market. It might be okay if it was severely regulated by the government; e.g. no use of DRM to lock out competitors, no way for the customer to lose the "product" once they've paid for it because the vendor went bust or whatever, first sale doctrine not compromised, no way for the "product" to be lost when it passes into the public domain etc. etc.
Drastically shortened copyright terms (e.g. 10 years) to more accurately reflect the balance between the producer's and the public's rights and interests. If the copyright terms are not shortened then a drastic broadening of the definition of fair use (equivalently, narrowing of the definition of copyright) to allow modified versions to be sold. e.g. Parodies, versions in new media or new languages, "corrected" versions, reissuing by third parties because the orginal hasn't been available for 5 years, copyright lost if it becomes an industry standard (like trademarks), etc. etc.
Given both of the above two conditions I would be happy to accept normal civil, not criminal, law policing to control copyright violations, including legally controlled civilian internet wiretapping.
That's ironic. By equating evangelism with marketing, you echo (unconsciously, I assume) Microsoft's "Your potential, our passion!"
Nope, just echoing the dotcom BS where numerous businesses employed "evangelists", instead of marketing directors. M$ is just one of many.
But they're not the same thing. A marketeer is a hired gun who helps you find a market. An evangelist (in Greek, it means "bringer of good news") is a true believer who wants to make the world a better place. Billy Graham doesn't evangelize because he's worried about empty churches -- he wants to save souls.
Disagree. The formal definition of evangelist is somebody who promotes the christian gospel. Informally, it's just a promotor of something, whether a religion, a product or an idea.
I'm all for Linux advocates thinking less like evangelists and more like marketeers. Then they'd think more about solving the problems of potential Linux users, and less about telling everybody how cool Linux is.
Both are needed, one to promote feedback and continuous improvement, the other to neutralise the mountain of biased BS that M$ and similar companies put out.
It's stupid to pretend M$ and similar companies spending large sums of money trying to kill FOSS mindshare is not harmful. They want to marginalise FOSS. That's not going to happen.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2. Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2. Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2. Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2. Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
I agree people should concentrate on technical issues however there is a double standard here.
When companies do it it's called "marketing" and when anybody else does it it's called "evangelism".
OSS unfortunately needs marketing (i.e. evangelism) just to be on a level playing field with the squillion M$ spends on marketing. OSS/FS marketing is often voluntary, like everything else in OSS/FS.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
All this nonsense about cross browser compatability issues is just that: nonsense; it works in Mozilla, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Konqueror each on their respective available platforms.
Nonsense yourself. I've lost count of the number of websites I've tried to access with broken javascript. While it's certainly possible to do cross platform javascript there's a huge cross-section of tier 2 websites that don't. Quite apart from the idiots who think their links should open new windows, despite what my web browser preferences are set to.
... rather than the technology leaders they once were.
They were never technology leaders, that's just the revised history their marketing department likes to push. The current generation has been taken in unfortunately.
At every stage of their development there were technologically equivalent (not necessarily superior) competitors. Even at the start, with PCDOS and M$Windows 3 (the first usable version) there were competing products every bit as functional and technologically advanced as their products. Read this to get the flavour of how things really developed.
M$ was good polish and marketing. They should be commended for the polish, that's not easy, but it's not technology.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
A combination of hubris, condescendence and insults does not an argument make.
I'd suggest you learn a little about argument framing and how initial definition of categories can cause an argument to go in any direction. Your automatic assumption that what's good for the IP industry is necessarily good for anybody else is at best unproven and at worst simply wrong.
You haven't said anything that invalidates what I've already said so bye.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Congratulations on the Insightful mod point. On Slashdot, when talking about patents, that is certification that you don't know what you're talking about. Notice my mod points were informative because my comments were based on information. Just an observation.
It's been my observation that people who make meta-comments about moderation are either insecure, trying to deflect the argument, or are trolls themselves.
If you'd like to refute that you don't have a clue, pick one of those patents and explain to me how the USPTO issued it without complying with the laws created by Congress or the case law created by judges. The notion that the USPTO promotes bogus statutes is, with all due respect, retarded.
The fact is, as the patent statutes are currently written you could drive a bus through them for or against software patents. According to this and this 35 USC and 37 CFR doesn't even mention the word software! The USPTO is taking advantage of that ambiguity and the ambiguity in case law to build their bureaucratic empire.
The USPTO's deliberate attempt to conflate creativity and patents/copyright at every opportunity, as if they are one and the same is also disengenuous.
Do police officers "promote" the statutes against murder? No, they execute the law to the best of their ability.
They also keep their superiors well informed about the best way to improve the law, turn a blind eye to bad law, particularly when it is badly applicable, and generally try to do the right thing. Unlike the USPTO.
The USPTO is part of the executive branch of the government. If you don't believe those facts based in reality, I'll find you a 3rd grade social studies textbook that will explain the separation of powers.
That's the theory, now look at the above for the reality. You're also giving another common bureaucratic cop-out when somebody points out bureaucratic irresponsibility: "we're just following orders". That's not an excuse if you've made no realistic attempt to get the orders fixed and even then it's dubious.
Face it, despite your obvious attempt to baffle-with-bullshit people here with irrelevant information your argument is weak.
As I've said before it's telling when a government department ignores what a huge number of experts in the field is telling them. And no, lawyers and the USPTO are not expert in the field of software, software innovation, OSS or the true net economic value of software patents despite what they claim. Legal training is irrel
Slashdot Mirror
You and I both know the difference between honest dealing and corporate shilling is important, otherwise they wouldn't bother trying to do it, time and again.
It's dishonest, any way you look at it. Marketing parasites try to spin doctor it but it's still fraudulent misrepresentation. i.e. fraud.
The law hasn't caught up yet but hopefully it will.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
The GPL restricts freedoms for the users of code.
Grow up. It restricts the freedoms of re-distributers of code, not users, so that further distributers are not restricted.
Try to get your head around the idea that freedoms are tradeoffs. What is one man's freedom is another man's restriction. e.g. If I were free to take all your money you might object because you want the freedom to hold on to all your money.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
Congratulations everybody, world domination. ;-)
There is no requirement that bloggers, or anyone else for that matter, should be honest.
Nonsense. It's called fraud.
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
So its pretty safe to say then that FOSS is not exactly being swamped with patent infringment claims
That's because those companies want to make sure all those nice new laws are in place before they go for it.
Those atrocious new laws are going to impact for lifetimes and the stroke of a pen will restrict the freedoms of billions of people. Waiting a year or two to get control like that is a no brainer.
---
Anonymous marketer = paid zealot.
I haven't used Gentoo but I can understand their point of view.
It's the computer doing the compilation, not them, so that doesn't cost them much. Particularly if they have more than one computer.
And if they compile it themselves they have more control, it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling. It's also a good vehicle to learn and experiment. So why not?
---
zealotry n : excessive intolerance of opposing views.
In fact, wheel re-invention is extremely useful.
True, it is called re-search after all.
---
Keep your options open!
Zealot.
He didn't claim FOSS security was guaranteed as your entire post assumes. He claimed it was a better alternative than a company with an obvious vested interest.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Open Source is of course, NOT a solution.
Zealot. OSS is often an entirely appropriate solution to particular problems.
---
If you haven't tested your code under heavy load and limited memory on an SMP machine then you haven't tested it.
Linux may have Mesa out of box (in some distros) but full, easy hardware accelerated GL it doesn't, and in some distros at least, getting it to work is a major pain.
It's okay in Ubuntu (based on Debian).
I installed a new NVidia graphics card last week. I did a search in the Synaptic package manager for NVidia, downloaded and installed the package over broadband with two button clicks in a few seconds, shutdown, plugged in the card, booted, answered a few questions all of which had reasonable defaults (screen resolution I wanted etc.), rebooted and now I'm running accelerated. About the only failing was that the NVidia utility programs weren't installed in the menus.
I have no connection with Ubuntu other than as a satisified user.
Linux has problems but it's getting better all the time. Most complaints I see are from people who are on cutting edge hardware or who aren't using a recent distribution.
A FOSS problem is that debugged drivers usually aren't available on the latest non-backwards compatible hardware because unlike the windows drivers linux driver development usually doesn't start until after the hardware is released. Development may also be slowed down by unnecessary closed source licensing BS.
The lessons are obvious, keep your distribution up-to-date and be prepared to forgo bleeding edge hardware when it is not backwards compatible.
---
All FOSS licenses are good and streets ahead of the average closed source license.
The learning curve for students is completely irrelevent, because that's the main goal of school.
Nope. Have you ever taught? Schools have an indefinitely large amount of things to teach in a fixed amount of time. Like businesses, they don't want to waste time.
This is probably why it was feasible and why it worked.
Nope. Experience has shown many times in many places that OO for standard office tasks is much the same as M$office and that conversions costs are minimal. No magic. Stories about the difficulty of using OO are just marketing lies.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
Congratulations everybody, world domination. ;-)
I certainly hope no one thinks it will be any different here. In my several years reading /., its been a constant that I can always count on; rabid fans of both spouting broken record thoughts about how poor the other is.
What I want to know is: how many of them are marketing 'droids?
Marketing/advertising is paid zealotry by another name.
I have yet to see any marketing/advertising person admit the competition is any good, ever. Unless it's a straw man they're setting up for a topple.
Market for FOSS and you're called a zealot. Market for M$ it's just a job.
Marketers try to manipulate tech writers and other opinion leaders all the time and that's probably at least part of what this tech writer is seeing. Remember, marketers with their dubious ethics are likely to write many letters to everybody else's one, causing them to have far more visibility than their numbers would indicate. And that includes on slashdot.
---
Are you thinking long term? Just because TCO is good in the short term doesn't mean it's good in the long term.
Safe is a relative concept, and to try and confuse the issue by casting it as an absolute does no one any favours.
That's the whole point.
M$ marketing wants to confuse the issue.
They want people to forget that the vast majority of M$windows users are still running as administrator, still have activex controls on their web browser, still have executable content in email and still have useability bugs as idiotic as doubled extensions to compromise security. These all vastly outweigh current FOSS security concerns.
As usual rather than fixing the problems they're trying to baffle people with bullshit instead.
And before people bring out the tired line that it's the user's fault. Nonsense. M$ claim they are writing software for naive users. Clearly they are not as there are good solutions to all the above problems that they are not implementing.
---
Modern marketing - a great substitute for a quality product
Why is a minor detail of a closed source, unhackable software product that isn't even released yet a front page story on slashdot?
M$ advertising wastes enough of our time already without giving it away.
This is quite clearly a marketing move by M$ to create mindshare for when the new M$IE version is released and I for one am sick of such manipulation.
---
Keep your options open!
"Aw, fook! My Linux ISO download just got to 90% complete, and my transfer rate just got shot to shit. Oh well, I'm not going to quit now. I'll just sit here taking up space until it completes, no matter how long that takes."
In practise what happens is that once the slowdown gets to zero either the download software times out or the user hangs around for ten minutes, sees no progress and because they don't want to waste their own time says "stuff this" and goes home.
---
Any large public or private organisation paying recurring, per-seat licensing for software is being economically stupid.
So then you just change your MAC address!
Considered that. Only a small percentage will do it and they can be dealt with separately. Just disconnecting once an hour is going to be hassle and if the cofeeshop cared they could do client recognition with proxies and encrypted cookies etc.
In any case it's tables they care about, not the network, and if they see somebody on a table for an extended period and the place is full they can do something about it.
---
Keep your options open!
Just set up bandwidth shaping so that each MAC address gradually starts slowing way down after an hour. Slow, not stopped, means they have a chance to finish their work and log off cleanly. They'll get the idea. I've seen this in other contexts; it works well and minimises arguments and overhead.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
I'm not sure what you mean by "formal definition". I'm certainly not going to accept a sloppy definition of "evangelist" just because it happens to be used in WordNet by some computer science student. In any case, "evangelist", like most words, has multiple meanings. You can't refute my argument just by insisting on a usage different from the one I meant.
I checked offline before posting that definition link. In any case, Merriam-Webster and Oxford agree. I disagree with your view of .edu links, they are often more trustworthy than .com links for various reasons.
Perhaps my point will be clearer if I restate my orginal argument without using that controversial word: Too much Linux advocacy is based on somebody's heartfelt belief that Linux is superior in every way to Windows. Not just superior technically, but socially, economically, even morally.
I've never met an advocate that says Linux, or any FOSS, is superior in every way, particularly from a technical point of view. You're creating a straw man.
I don't actually disagree with most of that -- I just think that most decision makers don't give a shit.
It's partly about teaching them to give a shit - about taking the long term view, not the loaded short-term TCO arguments that M$ likes to push. I agree it's an alien way of thinking to many at the moment but you've got to start somewhere,
If you want them to use Linux -- or any other OSS solution -- you need to show them how it addresses their needs as they perceive them, and stop trying to change their whole world view.
Like I said, I think we need to do both. Addressing their immediate needs and also get them thinking long term.
M$ seems to think it's worth spending millions on biased "feel good" ad's with no actual content. Why is that? Can FOSS afford to ignore those ad's? I don't think so.
I think we're in agreement that FOSS should be promoted, just disagree on the emphasis.
Part of what's happening is that many Linux proponents are young. They're passionate about what they do. You're trying to push back the tide if you want to stop that.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
When, how, and under what circumstances is it ok for copyright owners to protect their content?
Given both of the above two conditions I would be happy to accept normal civil, not criminal, law policing to control copyright violations, including legally controlled civilian internet wiretapping.
---
Copyright is a privilege, not a right.
That's ironic. By equating evangelism with marketing, you echo (unconsciously, I assume) Microsoft's "Your potential, our passion!"
Nope, just echoing the dotcom BS where numerous businesses employed "evangelists", instead of marketing directors. M$ is just one of many.
But they're not the same thing. A marketeer is a hired gun who helps you find a market. An evangelist (in Greek, it means "bringer of good news") is a true believer who wants to make the world a better place. Billy Graham doesn't evangelize because he's worried about empty churches -- he wants to save souls.
Disagree. The formal definition of evangelist is somebody who promotes the christian gospel. Informally, it's just a promotor of something, whether a religion, a product or an idea.
I'm all for Linux advocates thinking less like evangelists and more like marketeers. Then they'd think more about solving the problems of potential Linux users, and less about telling everybody how cool Linux is.
Both are needed, one to promote feedback and continuous improvement, the other to neutralise the mountain of biased BS that M$ and similar companies put out.
It's stupid to pretend M$ and similar companies spending large sums of money trying to kill FOSS mindshare is not harmful. They want to marginalise FOSS. That's not going to happen.
---
GNU/Linux, the world's #1 OS by google hits. M$ windows #2.
Open Office the world's #1 office suite. M$ office #2.
Apache, the world's #1 web server. M$ IIS #2.
Evolution, the world's #1 email client, M$ outlook #2.
Unfortunately mozilla family browsers are still #2, M$ internet explorer is #1, but watch firefox (#3) grow.
Congratulations everybody, world domination. ;-)
I agree people should concentrate on technical issues however there is a double standard here.
When companies do it it's called "marketing" and when anybody else does it it's called "evangelism".
OSS unfortunately needs marketing (i.e. evangelism) just to be on a level playing field with the squillion M$ spends on marketing. OSS/FS marketing is often voluntary, like everything else in OSS/FS.
---
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.
$400 system with a multi-core processor running at ghz speeds but we really want to use it for stuff other than what it's really good at.
Some people like to investigate/open closed architectures. Some people like to collect stamps. What's the problem?
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
All this nonsense about cross browser compatability issues is just that: nonsense; it works in Mozilla, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Konqueror each on their respective available platforms.
Nonsense yourself. I've lost count of the number of websites I've tried to access with broken javascript. While it's certainly possible to do cross platform javascript there's a huge cross-section of tier 2 websites that don't. Quite apart from the idiots who think their links should open new windows, despite what my web browser preferences are set to.
---
DRM - destroying free markets one step at a time.
They were never technology leaders, that's just the revised history their marketing department likes to push. The current generation has been taken in unfortunately.
At every stage of their development there were technologically equivalent (not necessarily superior) competitors. Even at the start, with PCDOS and M$Windows 3 (the first usable version) there were competing products every bit as functional and technologically advanced as their products. Read this to get the flavour of how things really developed.
M$ was good polish and marketing. They should be commended for the polish, that's not easy, but it's not technology.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Like I said, grow up.
A combination of hubris, condescendence and insults does not an argument make.
I'd suggest you learn a little about argument framing and how initial definition of categories can cause an argument to go in any direction. Your automatic assumption that what's good for the IP industry is necessarily good for anybody else is at best unproven and at worst simply wrong.
You haven't said anything that invalidates what I've already said so bye.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Congratulations on the Insightful mod point. On Slashdot, when talking about patents, that is certification that you don't know what you're talking about. Notice my mod points were informative because my comments were based on information. Just an observation.
It's been my observation that people who make meta-comments about moderation are either insecure, trying to deflect the argument, or are trolls themselves.
If you'd like to refute that you don't have a clue, pick one of those patents and explain to me how the USPTO issued it without complying with the laws created by Congress or the case law created by judges. The notion that the USPTO promotes bogus statutes is, with all due respect, retarded.
Yeah, they don't promote current bad IP law at all. They're really trying hard to fix broken software patents. NOT.
The fact is, as the patent statutes are currently written you could drive a bus through them for or against software patents. According to this and this 35 USC and 37 CFR doesn't even mention the word software! The USPTO is taking advantage of that ambiguity and the ambiguity in case law to build their bureaucratic empire.
The USPTO's deliberate attempt to conflate creativity and patents/copyright at every opportunity, as if they are one and the same is also disengenuous.
Do police officers "promote" the statutes against murder? No, they execute the law to the best of their ability.
They also keep their superiors well informed about the best way to improve the law, turn a blind eye to bad law, particularly when it is badly applicable, and generally try to do the right thing. Unlike the USPTO.
The USPTO is part of the executive branch of the government. If you don't believe those facts based in reality, I'll find you a 3rd grade social studies textbook that will explain the separation of powers.
That's the theory, now look at the above for the reality. You're also giving another common bureaucratic cop-out when somebody points out bureaucratic irresponsibility: "we're just following orders". That's not an excuse if you've made no realistic attempt to get the orders fixed and even then it's dubious.
Face it, despite your obvious attempt to baffle-with-bullshit people here with irrelevant information your argument is weak.
As I've said before it's telling when a government department ignores what a huge number of experts in the field is telling them. And no, lawyers and the USPTO are not expert in the field of software, software innovation, OSS or the true net economic value of software patents despite what they claim. Legal training is irrel