Profit maximisation. Employees are automonous agents and they minimise the value they provide (their effort) relative to the money they get. Software is complex enough so that employees can (and do!) hide a multitude of sins.
I agree with a lot of what you say however there is a fundamental difference between government and business; A democratic government theoretically represents the interests of all citizens while big business theoretically represents the interests only of the current shareholders in proportion to their percentage of shares.
In both cases the interests of the voters/shareholders can be compromised by those at the top but at least the government attempts to represent all the population equally. I think that is a good thing.Yes, tyranny of the majority is a bad thing however it's better than the only alternative, tyranny of the minority. Large businesses could not exist without a complex legal framework, that is government enforced law, to back them up.
Unfortunately large bureaucracies, whether public or private, tend to corruption and self-serving interests. This leads to sometimes complex and messy compromises between private and public, cooperation and competition, corruption and incompetence. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and all that.
Easy. Whatever the peoples' respresentative, the elected government, decides.
No business has a god given right to exist if a democratically elected government says no.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
I'm getting sick of this repetitive FUD by anonymous posters modded up. Probably marketing 'droids.
Forget philosophies. FOSS is simple statistics. With 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and widely used software it is a statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and motivation to write good software. And when one person writes it millions of people can use it. Open source software and commoditisation is simply supply-and-demand and the market in action.
Can someone please explain to me who feeds the family when everyone is doing work for free?
Who said anybody is working for free? It simply becomes an industry where programmers work to add value, not abuse the system with incompatible products, monopoly pricing and minimizing the value to the customer.
Open source != working for free or communism. Anybody who says differently is either clueless or a marketing 'droid.
The software industry is becoming a commodity industry. When one person can write a piece of software that a billion people can use then supply-and-demand, except when short circuited by broken intellectual property law, is going to do its magic. Deal with it. The rest of society sees no reason to be subsidising an inefficient software industry.
What happens when programmer A, who does OSS development on the side when he comes home from working at MS gets fired because OSS cuts into revenues so much that MS can no longer afford to pay programmer A?
LOL! M$ is being paid $38,000,000,000 per year for a dozen programs it mostly wrote more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties. I hardly think that is a fair deal to anybody except M$ and no programmer at M$ is in any danger of being fired unless they are really incompetent.
To answer your question: Many open source and free software programmers are paid for by companies. Many are doing it in their spare time. Many are doing it to educate themselves. Many are doing it for fun. When you have 6,000,000,000+ people in the world it is a statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to create good software and when one person writes it millions of people can use it. As in any functioning market anybody who wants to get paid will have to innovate and come up with products that people are willing to pay for. Open source doesn't change that, just rearranges the rules of the market so that abuse, market manipulation and monopoly rents are less feasible.
"Communism is the goal." -Roger Baldwin, Founder of the ACLU
Why are so many Americans so blinkered? There is a lot more to economics and markets than the capitalism versus communism dichotomy. The laws we currently have governing economics and markets are only one of a multitude of possibilities.
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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.
A country of 25,000,000+ people? That's major enough progress to make the daily news for me!
If even a fraction of the Venezualan programming population get involved in open source that will mean significant improvements for open source software producers, packagers and consumers world wide. Remember, one of the most valuable attributes of software is that it can be copied at minimal cost. All it takes is a single person to program it and a hundred million people can use it, something the commercial pay-an-arm-and-a-leg-per-copy advocates like to ignore.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Microsoft did make it possible to change your password.
If you have a network route to www.passport.com, if www.passport.com is up and running, if it's compatible with your browser, if the passport.com doesn't have a bug, if the client software doesn't have a bug, if the business logic doesn't have a bug, if you're running on the right computer, if the firewall is configured correctly, if something hasn't timed out, if you speak the language of implementation and can understand the instructions, if, if, if...
Signon, beloved of anal website administrators everywhere, is a major point of failure on the web. I've lost count of the number of manufacturer support and other websites that required logins for no good reason, didn't work and as a result were useless. Idiots.
A small harm is not zero harm. You are ignoring the fact that many small harms may add up to a big harm.
If you can't accept that simple fact then you've got problems reasoning logically and nothing I might say is going to change your mind. I'd suggest you read up on logic
Of course they are harmed. It's just that they are harmed a little. And a "little" multiplied by a big number can be a lot.
By your reasoning a ten thousand people each stealing one second of my time each day is somehow less harmful than one person stealing an hour of my time each day. Nonsense.
"The time of my life" is valuable to me and the assholes who steal it from me, whether it be marketing 'droids or thieves stealing valuables, deserve to lose some of their own "time of life".
Having said this I agree with you in part that in a just society we try to improve both the averages (reduce the overall rate of crime) and limit the extremes for each individual (expend extra effort to deal with bad crimes).
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Copyright is not a right. It is a privilege granted by the many to the few.
Of course. Usually if it's commercial it can't be hacked (experimented with). Slashdot is for software hackers/nerds (experimenters). What else do you expect?
I won't reply in detail to your argument. While you make some good points you are operating from assumptions different from me.
I don't agree with the third world comparison because they are in a different legal environment. I do agree that from a moral standpoint the third world is being badly treated. Particularly with third world debt.
I don't agree with your argument about production being cheap thus people have choices. True but pointless - if people won't see it (due to it being crowded out by repetitive mass market advertising i.e. noise) production is pointless. Only by statistical accident does anything not produced by the oligopoly hit the mass market.
Your argument about a proportional reduction in income in the film industry is overly simplistic - just as likely it's the fat (of which there is a lot!) that would be trimmed.
I am condoning a certain amount of copying because I believe that the media and IP oligopolies have already used their unique position to compromise basic democratic principles. In those circumstances I have no problem fighting fire with fire. e.g. the changes in IP law are some of the important issues for the future in government today but if you look at the mass media they might as well not exist. The DMCA, closed file formats, CD monopoly pricing and click-through licensing are other ones.
If the media, RIAA etc. were acting as honest brokers or copying was causing a lot more harm than it is then I would be less sympathetic to the copiers. In the current circumstances though that is not the case.
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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.
Your argument fails because even the 'witte fietsen' plan is firmly embedded in the free market economy.
My argument succeeds quite nicely thank you. The so-called free market economy succeeds partly because it is firmly embedded in a command economy (i.e. government).
There is no such thing as a pure "free" market. If it existed it would be warlordism, might makes right, those with the biggest stick get all the rewards. Instead we have a complex legal and economic framework that discourages negative competitive behaviour (protection rackets, anti-trust, fraud, false advertising, stock manipulation, manipulation of minors, forging money, spamming etc.) and allowing positive competitive behaviour (improvement in product, lowering of price, informative advertising etc.).
Sometimes a more free, competitive market is appropriate, sometimes more coordination and cooperation is appropiate. It all depends on the particular circumstances. Though a powerful tool there is nothing magic about markets and like all tools they don't necessarily give the best result in all circumstances.
The 'witte fietsen' plan was dumb, like most of the stuff hippies thought up.
About as dumb as the average dotcom business plan, like much of the stuff thought up by the typical business fanatic.
Some people will not have respect for something they receive for free. If they can break it without consequences, they will.
A statistically small fraction of poorly socialised people, generally children, will vandalise the system. Depending on the resulting costs (as compared a so-called free market approach with costs in advertising and competitive duplication, or monopoly rent) this approach may or may not be a good idea. Judging by other posts here it is a good idea in smaller towns.
It's been my experience that if an organisation has such poor web support that they can't write a compatible, standards based web page (easy, despite the FUD put out by some) then the organisation in general is probably crap and I'm better off avoiding them anyway.
Works for me.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Linux will not get to the desktop until such time as one can walk into a store (or online) and buy SUPERDEEDUPER Tools for Linux for 49.95 and have it work, out of the box on all the major distros (SuSE, Redhat, Fedora, Debian..... ).
You are applying the M$Windows model of software development/distribution to the open source world. This is a common error by closed source developers.
In the open source world everything that the average user may need and is of adequate quality is already included in the distribution.
Remember, open source is free (libré). Good quality distributions will include everything they think their target user will need, including support for standard hardware and major application areas.
For more specialised application software the creators/distributors, if they have any sense, package the software in the way that is appropriate for their target user. In the open source world this is usually, not surprisingly, in source form, though many packages distribute binaries.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Doesn't releasing something under GPL pretty much guarantee a loss of standardization? GPL = "Go, procreate and live".
Of course not. Commercial licenses are far worse. They usually try to block duplication, reverse engineering and compatibility. Forcing competitors to be different.
GPL open source competitors at least have the option of being the same if they want. BSD style open source allow value add's that cannot be incorporated into the original and again can cause balkanisation and incompatibility.
I don't want to get into a GPL v. BSD debate here. I don't use BSD style licenses myself but I have no problem with people who do. It's still far better than the average closed source license, where the real problem is.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Too right. M$ has a $38,000,000,000 per year incentive to lie whenever they think they can get away with it. What they say and what they do are sometimes completely different things.
Software is a complex, abstract business. It's just too easy to lie i.e. Communicate with intent to deceive. The legal system is just starting to come to grips with this.
In addition you might be able to trust most people but you can't necessarily trust most large corporations where it's easy to create "chinese walls" (ha!) and have different parts of the corporation with different "facts" e.g. sub-contract marketing and have plausible deniability when a marketing 'droid is caught lying or FUD'ing in general.
One of the things I like about open source is that accountability is better. Since contributions are tracked (e.g. CVS) you can usually work out which individual is responsible for what [mis-]feature and you can always verify "marketing" claims against code before "purchase".
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You can't turn something like ICANN into a global shared responsibility.
Not completely true. You couldn't distribute all of the authority but you could distribute most of it (geographically by making more use of country and US state based domains and subdomains and logically by making more use of subject domains) and by making ICANN internationally democratically accountable and responsible only for the absolute minimum at the top level. However, that assumes that ICANN (and the US government) would be willing or could be forced to give up the power it has now. Hmmmm.
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Commercial software bigots - dinosaurs of the internet age.
Apache is one of the tools you have for use. It's not just the tool you're currently using (IIS) that you implied.
Just because Apache is well-regarded and extrememly popular doesn't mean that our business is going to go to the expense of switching. That makes no sense: a switch-over exceeds the costs of continuing as we are.
If you've truly done that evaluation then I agree with you 100%.
If you've simply assumed that an evaluation and switch-over will be short term and long term more costly than the status quo then I feel you're not doing your job.
I've lost count of the number of places I've worked in that just assumed both evaluation of software and switch-over of software were too expensive and wasted a lot of time with "tried-and-true" software. They were usually pleasantly surprised by what could be accomplished with better tools and how quickly switching costs were recovered.
Switching software is often overrated as a cost, particularly when you consider that an ongoing cost, tangible or intangible, must eventually total more than any one-off cost.
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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.
Wow. It's kind of like reading the Communist Manifesto, if Karl Marx had been dropped on his head a lot as a baby.
I love the way that right-wingers love to tar anybody who doesn't agree with their particular narrow brand of capitalism as (ominous background music) A COMMUNIST. A hint: McCarthyism went out in the 60's and it just makes you look silly. Economics and markets are complex subjects and what we have in law right now is just one of a multitude of possibilities.
To summarize, you feel that it's economically unfair for some people to get paid more than others,
No, some people work harder or smarter than others and contribute more to the community and so should be be rewarded more. Unless their contribution is extreme they should not be paid so much that it endangers the democratic process.
so the solution is for unrelated people to screw over everyone in the industry,
No, the solution is that government should take back part of the privilege (copyright) they've bestowed on the industry because it's no longer in the best interests of the public. Note that I did not say all of the privilege so stop implying I did.
never mind that the people on the lower rung are the ones who suffer, not the people at the top.
That will happen in any system but it is usually possible to create a more fair and just society.
It is simply not reasonable that that a small number of people (in particular, the actors) should get millions of dollars for a few hours of at best semi-skilled work.
Why not? That's dictated by the public, not by the studios.
Partly. It's mainly dictated by mindshare advertising where the studio oligopoly simply crowd out alternatives by the sheer quantity of advertising they put out. Remember that free speech can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. Duplicate advertising is noise.
They certainly don't want to pay $BIGNAME $20 Mil. per movie, but the public shows time and time again that they'll go to any piece of drek with said $BIGNAME in it. That's a failure of public taste, not of the industry. I'd say there are actually more quality movies being created now compared to anytime in the past. It's easy to look at the past and think that their movies were better, but that's because the bad ones have faded from history and use and only the decent to good ones remain. Cable, the internet, and high quality, low cost video equipment actually mean that film makers can do more with less and get better exposure than anytime before.
In theory. In practice the market is completely saturated and when one player wins another player must lose. The major studios simply crowd out alternatives. People have only a limited number of hours in the day (hollywood is producing more than two movies a day now, let alone TV and foreign movies) and go with what they know.
Most actors don't get paid anywhere near that though, and given that an actor might get one good part every two or three years, getting $150,000 for a part isn't that unreasonable if they're a good actor. And trust me, a good (or great) actor spends far more than "a few hours" on the part.
That's my whole point. A small number of players, actors or otherwise, control a huge percentage of the market. Market failure. It happens, you know.
There is no such thing as a pure "free" market. If it existed it would be warlordism, might makes right, those with the biggest stick get all the rewards. Instead we have a complex legal and economic framework that discourages negative competitive behaviour (protection rackets, anti-trust, fraud, false advertising, stock manipulation, manipulation of minors etc.) and allowing positive competitive behaviour (improvement in product, lowering of price etc.). Even copyright law itself is a response to the negative competitive behaviour of simply copying a competitor's work rather than creating so
but any software engineer worth their salt leaves the childish politics at home and makes the tools they have do the job.
Yep, However, all software engineers, unless their workplace has bigoted, anti-freeware/open source software policies, have Apache available to do the job and know that it is generally regarded as one of the best webservers in the market.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
I'm not really serious about this stuff, I'm just screwing around. I hope someone has a use for a logic cell that doesn't clock too well at yesteryear's bus speeds. Oh darn it, this poly menu is grayed out again, what do I do now? And why is that square on my screen red again? Welp, gotta run off to my shift at 7-11!
Reinterpretation:
For engineers who are not commercial software bigots. They use good software where they can find it and recognise that the software industry is becoming increasingly commoditised. Open source and freeware is simply statistics; with 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and with widely used software it is statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to create good free/open software for use by others. And once it's been done once, it can be copied millions of times; the multiplier effect is enormous.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
No, there are far more consumers of ECAD software than producers. That means, overall, industry and the consumer wins.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Don't pretend you're on some kind of moral high ground.
Nonsense. I don't pirate movies because I'm just not interested in what they put out but I have no problem with the people who do.
You can bullshit all you like about morals and the high ground. It is simply not reasonable that that a small number of people (in particular, the actors) should get millions of dollars for a few hours of at best semi-skilled work. It has nothing to do with a free market and everything to do with market failure and gaming of the legal system. Little more than primitive industrial feudalism where might makes right. It's even hereditary now with the brat pack and their children replacing their parents at the trough.
In these circumstances I don't have much problem with people evening the score.
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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.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. how'zat work when you love money?
Profit maximisation. Employees are automonous agents and they minimise the value they provide (their effort) relative to the money they get. Software is complex enough so that employees can (and do!) hide a multitude of sins.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
I agree with a lot of what you say however there is a fundamental difference between government and business; A democratic government theoretically represents the interests of all citizens while big business theoretically represents the interests only of the current shareholders in proportion to their percentage of shares.
In both cases the interests of the voters/shareholders can be compromised by those at the top but at least the government attempts to represent all the population equally. I think that is a good thing.Yes, tyranny of the majority is a bad thing however it's better than the only alternative, tyranny of the minority. Large businesses could not exist without a complex legal framework, that is government enforced law, to back them up.
Unfortunately large bureaucracies, whether public or private, tend to corruption and self-serving interests. This leads to sometimes complex and messy compromises between private and public, cooperation and competition, corruption and incompetence. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance and all that.
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
Who decides what is private business?
Easy. Whatever the peoples' respresentative, the elected government, decides.
No business has a god given right to exist if a democratically elected government says no.
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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'm getting sick of this repetitive FUD by anonymous posters modded up. Probably marketing 'droids.
Forget philosophies. FOSS is simple statistics. With 6,000,000,000+ people in the world and widely used software it is a statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and motivation to write good software. And when one person writes it millions of people can use it. Open source software and commoditisation is simply supply-and-demand and the market in action.
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
Can someone please explain to me who feeds the family when everyone is doing work for free?
Who said anybody is working for free? It simply becomes an industry where programmers work to add value, not abuse the system with incompatible products, monopoly pricing and minimizing the value to the customer.
Open source != working for free or communism. Anybody who says differently is either clueless or a marketing 'droid.
The software industry is becoming a commodity industry. When one person can write a piece of software that a billion people can use then supply-and-demand, except when short circuited by broken intellectual property law, is going to do its magic. Deal with it. The rest of society sees no reason to be subsidising an inefficient software industry.
What happens when programmer A, who does OSS development on the side when he comes home from working at MS gets fired because OSS cuts into revenues so much that MS can no longer afford to pay programmer A?
LOL! M$ is being paid $38,000,000,000 per year for a dozen programs it mostly wrote more than a decade ago with the most complicated bits, the device drivers, being written by third parties. I hardly think that is a fair deal to anybody except M$ and no programmer at M$ is in any danger of being fired unless they are really incompetent.
To answer your question: Many open source and free software programmers are paid for by companies. Many are doing it in their spare time. Many are doing it to educate themselves. Many are doing it for fun. When you have 6,000,000,000+ people in the world it is a statistical certainty that somebody somewhere will have both the means and the motivation to create good software and when one person writes it millions of people can use it. As in any functioning market anybody who wants to get paid will have to innovate and come up with products that people are willing to pay for. Open source doesn't change that, just rearranges the rules of the market so that abuse, market manipulation and monopoly rents are less feasible.
"Communism is the goal." -Roger Baldwin, Founder of the ACLU
Why are so many Americans so blinkered? There is a lot more to economics and markets than the capitalism versus communism dichotomy. The laws we currently have governing economics and markets are only one of a multitude of possibilities.
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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.
A country of 25,000,000+ people? That's major enough progress to make the daily news for me!
If even a fraction of the Venezualan programming population get involved in open source that will mean significant improvements for open source software producers, packagers and consumers world wide. Remember, one of the most valuable attributes of software is that it can be copied at minimal cost. All it takes is a single person to program it and a hundred million people can use it, something the commercial pay-an-arm-and-a-leg-per-copy advocates like to ignore.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Microsoft did make it possible to change your password.
If you have a network route to www.passport.com, if www.passport.com is up and running, if it's compatible with your browser, if the passport.com doesn't have a bug, if the client software doesn't have a bug, if the business logic doesn't have a bug, if you're running on the right computer, if the firewall is configured correctly, if something hasn't timed out, if you speak the language of implementation and can understand the instructions, if, if, if ...
Signon, beloved of anal website administrators everywhere, is a major point of failure on the web. I've lost count of the number of manufacturer support and other websites that required logins for no good reason, didn't work and as a result were useless. Idiots.
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
and sold the rights, /. would curse him
Some /.'ers would be unhappy. /. isn't a monoculture like some companies I could name.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Not even close.
I did not say they were close.
A small harm is not zero harm. You are ignoring the fact that many small harms may add up to a big harm.
If you can't accept that simple fact then you've got problems reasoning logically and nothing I might say is going to change your mind. I'd suggest you read up on logic
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
Those people aren't actually harmed.
Of course they are harmed. It's just that they are harmed a little. And a "little" multiplied by a big number can be a lot.
By your reasoning a ten thousand people each stealing one second of my time each day is somehow less harmful than one person stealing an hour of my time each day. Nonsense.
"The time of my life" is valuable to me and the assholes who steal it from me, whether it be marketing 'droids or thieves stealing valuables, deserve to lose some of their own "time of life".
Having said this I agree with you in part that in a just society we try to improve both the averages (reduce the overall rate of crime) and limit the extremes for each individual (expend extra effort to deal with bad crimes).
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Copyright is not a right. It is a privilege granted by the many to the few.
It's-commerical-so-it-must-be-bad-/. attitude.
Of course. Usually if it's commercial it can't be hacked (experimented with). Slashdot is for software hackers/nerds (experimenters). What else do you expect?
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DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
I won't reply in detail to your argument. While you make some good points you are operating from assumptions different from me.
I don't agree with the third world comparison because they are in a different legal environment. I do agree that from a moral standpoint the third world is being badly treated. Particularly with third world debt.
I don't agree with your argument about production being cheap thus people have choices. True but pointless - if people won't see it (due to it being crowded out by repetitive mass market advertising i.e. noise) production is pointless. Only by statistical accident does anything not produced by the oligopoly hit the mass market.
Your argument about a proportional reduction in income in the film industry is overly simplistic - just as likely it's the fat (of which there is a lot!) that would be trimmed.
I am condoning a certain amount of copying because I believe that the media and IP oligopolies have already used their unique position to compromise basic democratic principles. In those circumstances I have no problem fighting fire with fire. e.g. the changes in IP law are some of the important issues for the future in government today but if you look at the mass media they might as well not exist. The DMCA, closed file formats, CD monopoly pricing and click-through licensing are other ones.
If the media, RIAA etc. were acting as honest brokers or copying was causing a lot more harm than it is then I would be less sympathetic to the copiers. In the current circumstances though that is not the case.
---
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.
Your argument fails because even the 'witte fietsen' plan is firmly embedded in the free market economy.
My argument succeeds quite nicely thank you. The so-called free market economy succeeds partly because it is firmly embedded in a command economy (i.e. government).
There is no such thing as a pure "free" market. If it existed it would be warlordism, might makes right, those with the biggest stick get all the rewards. Instead we have a complex legal and economic framework that discourages negative competitive behaviour (protection rackets, anti-trust, fraud, false advertising, stock manipulation, manipulation of minors, forging money, spamming etc.) and allowing positive competitive behaviour (improvement in product, lowering of price, informative advertising etc.).
Sometimes a more free, competitive market is appropriate, sometimes more coordination and cooperation is appropiate. It all depends on the particular circumstances. Though a powerful tool there is nothing magic about markets and like all tools they don't necessarily give the best result in all circumstances.
---
DRM - Democracy Restriction & Manipulation
The 'witte fietsen' plan was dumb, like most of the stuff hippies thought up.
About as dumb as the average dotcom business plan, like much of the stuff thought up by the typical business fanatic.
Some people will not have respect for something they receive for free. If they can break it without consequences, they will.
A statistically small fraction of poorly socialised people, generally children, will vandalise the system. Depending on the resulting costs (as compared a so-called free market approach with costs in advertising and competitive duplication, or monopoly rent) this approach may or may not be a good idea. Judging by other posts here it is a good idea in smaller towns.
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Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
It's been my experience that if an organisation has such poor web support that they can't write a compatible, standards based web page (easy, despite the FUD put out by some) then the organisation in general is probably crap and I'm better off avoiding them anyway.
Works for me.
---
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$/RIAA abuse.
Linux will not get to the desktop until such time as one can walk into a store (or online) and buy SUPERDEEDUPER Tools for Linux for 49.95 and have it work, out of the box on all the major distros (SuSE, Redhat, Fedora, Debian ..... ).
You are applying the M$Windows model of software development/distribution to the open source world. This is a common error by closed source developers.
In the open source world everything that the average user may need and is of adequate quality is already included in the distribution.
Remember, open source is free (libré). Good quality distributions will include everything they think their target user will need, including support for standard hardware and major application areas.
For more specialised application software the creators/distributors, if they have any sense, package the software in the way that is appropriate for their target user. In the open source world this is usually, not surprisingly, in source form, though many packages distribute binaries.
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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$/RIAA abuse.
Doesn't releasing something under GPL pretty much guarantee a loss of standardization? GPL = "Go, procreate and live".
Of course not. Commercial licenses are far worse. They usually try to block duplication, reverse engineering and compatibility. Forcing competitors to be different.
GPL open source competitors at least have the option of being the same if they want. BSD style open source allow value add's that cannot be incorporated into the original and again can cause balkanisation and incompatibility.
I don't want to get into a GPL v. BSD debate here. I don't use BSD style licenses myself but I have no problem with people who do. It's still far better than the average closed source license, where the real problem is.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Oh Microsoft gets it.
Too right. M$ has a $38,000,000,000 per year incentive to lie whenever they think they can get away with it. What they say and what they do are sometimes completely different things.
Software is a complex, abstract business. It's just too easy to lie i.e. Communicate with intent to deceive. The legal system is just starting to come to grips with this.
In addition you might be able to trust most people but you can't necessarily trust most large corporations where it's easy to create "chinese walls" (ha!) and have different parts of the corporation with different "facts" e.g. sub-contract marketing and have plausible deniability when a marketing 'droid is caught lying or FUD'ing in general.
One of the things I like about open source is that accountability is better. Since contributions are tracked (e.g. CVS) you can usually work out which individual is responsible for what [mis-]feature and you can always verify "marketing" claims against code before "purchase".
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
You can't turn something like ICANN into a global shared responsibility.
Not completely true. You couldn't distribute all of the authority but you could distribute most of it (geographically by making more use of country and US state based domains and subdomains and logically by making more use of subject domains) and by making ICANN internationally democratically accountable and responsible only for the absolute minimum at the top level. However, that assumes that ICANN (and the US government) would be willing or could be forced to give up the power it has now. Hmmmm.
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Commercial software bigots - dinosaurs of the internet age.
What's your point?
I was responding to your point:
Apache is one of the tools you have for use. It's not just the tool you're currently using (IIS) that you implied.
Just because Apache is well-regarded and extrememly popular doesn't mean that our business is going to go to the expense of switching. That makes no sense: a switch-over exceeds the costs of continuing as we are.
If you've truly done that evaluation then I agree with you 100%.
If you've simply assumed that an evaluation and switch-over will be short term and long term more costly than the status quo then I feel you're not doing your job.
I've lost count of the number of places I've worked in that just assumed both evaluation of software and switch-over of software were too expensive and wasted a lot of time with "tried-and-true" software. They were usually pleasantly surprised by what could be accomplished with better tools and how quickly switching costs were recovered.
Switching software is often overrated as a cost, particularly when you consider that an ongoing cost, tangible or intangible, must eventually total more than any one-off cost.
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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.
Wow. It's kind of like reading the Communist Manifesto, if Karl Marx had been dropped on his head a lot as a baby.
I love the way that right-wingers love to tar anybody who doesn't agree with their particular narrow brand of capitalism as (ominous background music) A COMMUNIST. A hint: McCarthyism went out in the 60's and it just makes you look silly. Economics and markets are complex subjects and what we have in law right now is just one of a multitude of possibilities.
To summarize, you feel that it's economically unfair for some people to get paid more than others,
No, some people work harder or smarter than others and contribute more to the community and so should be be rewarded more. Unless their contribution is extreme they should not be paid so much that it endangers the democratic process.
so the solution is for unrelated people to screw over everyone in the industry,
No, the solution is that government should take back part of the privilege (copyright) they've bestowed on the industry because it's no longer in the best interests of the public. Note that I did not say all of the privilege so stop implying I did.
never mind that the people on the lower rung are the ones who suffer, not the people at the top.
That will happen in any system but it is usually possible to create a more fair and just society.
It is simply not reasonable that that a small number of people (in particular, the actors) should get millions of dollars for a few hours of at best semi-skilled work.
Why not? That's dictated by the public, not by the studios.
Partly. It's mainly dictated by mindshare advertising where the studio oligopoly simply crowd out alternatives by the sheer quantity of advertising they put out. Remember that free speech can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. Duplicate advertising is noise.
They certainly don't want to pay $BIGNAME $20 Mil. per movie, but the public shows time and time again that they'll go to any piece of drek with said $BIGNAME in it. That's a failure of public taste, not of the industry. I'd say there are actually more quality movies being created now compared to anytime in the past. It's easy to look at the past and think that their movies were better, but that's because the bad ones have faded from history and use and only the decent to good ones remain. Cable, the internet, and high quality, low cost video equipment actually mean that film makers can do more with less and get better exposure than anytime before.
In theory. In practice the market is completely saturated and when one player wins another player must lose. The major studios simply crowd out alternatives. People have only a limited number of hours in the day (hollywood is producing more than two movies a day now, let alone TV and foreign movies) and go with what they know.
Most actors don't get paid anywhere near that though, and given that an actor might get one good part every two or three years, getting $150,000 for a part isn't that unreasonable if they're a good actor. And trust me, a good (or great) actor spends far more than "a few hours" on the part.
That's my whole point. A small number of players, actors or otherwise, control a huge percentage of the market. Market failure. It happens, you know.
There is no such thing as a pure "free" market. If it existed it would be warlordism, might makes right, those with the biggest stick get all the rewards. Instead we have a complex legal and economic framework that discourages negative competitive behaviour (protection rackets, anti-trust, fraud, false advertising, stock manipulation, manipulation of minors etc.) and allowing positive competitive behaviour (improvement in product, lowering of price etc.). Even copyright law itself is a response to the negative competitive behaviour of simply copying a competitor's work rather than creating so
but any software engineer worth their salt leaves the childish politics at home and makes the tools they have do the job.
Yep, However, all software engineers, unless their workplace has bigoted, anti-freeware/open source software policies, have Apache available to do the job and know that it is generally regarded as one of the best webservers in the market.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Reinterpretation:
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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$/RIAA abuse.
One more skill commoditized overseas.
No, there are far more consumers of ECAD software than producers. That means, overall, industry and the consumer wins.
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It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Don't pretend you're on some kind of moral high ground.
Nonsense. I don't pirate movies because I'm just not interested in what they put out but I have no problem with the people who do.
You can bullshit all you like about morals and the high ground. It is simply not reasonable that that a small number of people (in particular, the actors) should get millions of dollars for a few hours of at best semi-skilled work. It has nothing to do with a free market and everything to do with market failure and gaming of the legal system. Little more than primitive industrial feudalism where might makes right. It's even hereditary now with the brat pack and their children replacing their parents at the trough.
In these circumstances I don't have much problem with people evening the score.
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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.