Taxes are theft, because they are not something that you agree to; they are something that's forced upon you. Now, who's going to decide how much taxes there will be, and who will receive how much of it? Whichever way you put it, you'll see that the taxes you propose to encourage invention will end up feeding yet another class of thieves, while lessening the liberty and responsibility of citizens. If some people want invention and innovation, let them pay for it, themselves, with their own money, voluntarily. If they don't, let them not pay for it, and spend their money how they see better fit. In any case, let them free to decide for themselves. Freedom teaches through responsibility. Oppression corrupts as much as it hurts.
Sure enough, patents is a funding model. Racket is a way to fund the racketeers' expenses (hasn't everyone got a right to live?). But patents are based on threat and on violence; like all forms of racket, they are theft. Your tax proposal is also another kind of theft. The principle of racket is that someone is paid not for a service he renders, but under the threat of violence. The effect of the racket is to prevent other people from rendering services, while diverting the right holder from rendering services himself. Remove theft. What is left? Freedom. Research paid by its expected beneficial effects. Research paid voluntarily. An end is put to a funding model based on theft, and once again will people focus on funding models based on work, based on cooperation, based on voluntarily exchanging valuable services. So you invented something great alone in your basement? Great! You win a prize, if enough other people think you've done great. And now, don't stop and live on your past glory, but either invent new things, or implement your past inventions, but DO SOMETHING USEFUL. Mutual freedom is the ONLY possible incentive to mutually useful work.
So that patents should "still" work, it would require that they worked once. But there is NO EVIDENCE that they ever worked.
Oh, of course, lots of people (the racketeers that make money with patents, and their lackeys), will tell you that all research would stop without patents. As if research had ever waited for patents so as to begin! Yeah, some people even pretended that without a monopoly, there would be no trade between Europe, Asia, and America; but their tea ended in the sea near Boston.
Patents have ALWAYS been a way to STIFFLE, not ENCOURAGE, coopetitive creation. Witness these Quotes from the LPF.
Perhaps the policy of GPL-ing top-secret documents and spy communiqués should be reviewed and revised
Ttttt. Don't confuse Rights and Opportunity. Everyone has the Right to copy, modify and distribute our top secret information. But if we're good, no one will have the opportunity. And if we're not so good and the information does fall into enemy hands, then no amount of weeping about bogus rights will save us.
Of course, if someone does something wrong so as to access the information (such as breaking into our house), then we may legitimately prosecute them for this deed. But we may not prosecute them for having the information itself, or prosecute anyone else who uses it without having taken part in the possible illegitimate activities involved. If we want to secure some information, it is our duty to take appropriate measures; governments shouldn't interfere by granting "intellectual property" priviledges and otherwise asserting various "secrets".
Justice is not concerned with the results of the various transactions but only with whether the transactions themselves are fair. -- F.A. Hayek, "Law, Legislation and Liberty", I.6.j
It is well known that Lenin's Tcheka did systematize the use of sleep deprivation as a torture technique (among other ones) in its prisons, so as to have prisoners admit their crimes against the state. The technique has been used in all totalitarian regimes ever since. One advantage is that it doesn't leave obvious marks on the body of prisoners, when they have to be shown to the public during their "trial".
"People copying software is bad for us; We'll use every means to prevent it; this includes governmental force, since there were laws passed to protect us."
The first point is true. Of course, it's bad for them if they don't have a monopoly. But in as much as it's bad for them, it's good for the public. The second point is their right, although it would be a stupid and futile attitude, should the law be fair. The third point is where everything breaks: government using the public force against the public, to "protect" a few crooks.
Hey, Government, if you're looking for people to protect against the public, why not protect me, specifically? I'm ready to give you back 90% of every billion dollar that you'll help me extort from the public...
Richard Dawkins has a nice way to put it in "The Selfish Gene": starting with meiotic reproduction, the evolutionary stable strategy for genes will be to split in two sexes, one with safe fair-play strategy (female), and the other one with high-risk, high-stake strategy (male). Benign differences at the beginning are amplified and specialized by natural selection, and come to invade the whole behavior of individual gene carriers. So yes, it can be genetically explained that women will statistically more interested in peaceful traditional activities, while men will be more attracted to adventurous and violent activities.
Now (1) statistics doesn't exclude exceptions to the norm; (2) considering the weight of acquired traits in human behavior, genetics only account for an initial trend, that can be amplified or dampened by social pressure; (3) as computer science/gaming is considered more and more "traditional" and "safe", you can expect women to be more and more into this activity, (4) even if you manage to get a fair ratio of women in CS, then, you'll most likely still be able to feel a neat difference between behavior of male and female computer scientists/gamers (for better and for worse).
The whole point is that if the license is understood as collective, then anything done with the software is internal copy and internal use, not external distribution. Hence, restrictions on distribution do not apply. In particular, you don't need distribute source, since you don't distribute binaries. Interestingly, you don't need put your modifications under the GPL either, since you don't distribute them.
Thus, a positive side-effect of such hole is that you may freely mix free and proprietary software code from a range of otherwise incompatible licenses, as long as you don't "distribute" your code outside of your world-wide association. In other words, if you're member of the WWBA (World-Wide Bugroff Association), then you can freely mix and match most free software, as if it were under the bugroff license.
Be careful about what you say about contractors. The license is personal; it doesn't apply to "companies". If any employee or contractor is given a binary, then the same employee or contractor is also given the sources (or rights thereof), with license to modify, copy, distribute. And the company has no right whatsoever to prevent the employee or contractor to republish the modified sources, or else, it is itself in breach of the license. So that yes, if everyone in that company is happy and friendly and agrees, then the sources won't go out of the company; but if anyone in the company who was handed the software decides to republish it, then there it goes.
Conclusion: the "company" (i.e. its managers) doesn't decide. The people in the company individually decide, possibly but not necessarily in mutual consent. That is freedom.
Most existing programming languages, development tools, and programming processes, were designed with closed development of proprietary software in mind, and are quite adapted to such ends, but are not meant to take advantage or encourage the extreme code evolutivity that free software allows. Don't you think there is a gaping opportunity for the development of tools that enable seamless metaprogramming, such as reflective systems like (actual) pliant or (still vapor) tunes?
Are you going to invest massively in such tracks, do you think they are merely wishful thinking, are you in a wait-and-see mode, or do you just feel unconcerned? If you think such concerns, if possibly valid, are too long-term to you, what kind of financial infrastructure do you consider appropriate for research on such topics? How do you envision the relationship between free software companies and computer science research centers?
Some time ago, I began an article on what is an OS, and what it should be: Why a New OS?.
The bottom line is that: the OS is the set of behaviors, whatever it be, that anyone can expect from any computer in a given set. Technical considerations of separation into kernel and applications and drivers and daemons and whatever are mostly irrelevant here. They are relevant to internal design of an OS, not to the definition of an OS as a class of externally observable phenomena (unless of course you believe that OSes are only observable by people keen in their internal design).
As progress comes (and goes), the operating system has included an increasing (and sometimes decreasing) amount of features, and been designed in more and more complex ways. From the times of hand-switching programs into memory, to interactive monitors, to batch processors, to time-sharing systems, to virtual machine systems (even recursive virtual machines on some mainframes), there has been a lot of change in OS structure. As for features, structured persistent storage (filesystems) were sure not part of early system monitors; "disk"-managing operating systems were such an exception for micro-computers that they had to be explicitly named so in the early eighties (anyone remember Apple DOS 3.3? MS-DOS 2.x?). Today, it's taken for granted. Same goes for multiprogramming, for virtual memory, for (yuck) integrated bitmapped GUI, for TCP/IP networking, for package management, computer clustering, high-availability, device pluggability, autoconfigured wireless connectivity, palm computing, home-appliance connectivity, speech control, orthogonal persistence, process migration, automatic binary/source/specification consistency management, integrated metaprogramming, etc.
Feature- and design- based characterizations of the concept of an OS are doomed, because they are inherently short-sighted. Which is precisely what allows features to characterize specific instances of "OS" by their feature: any number can play, hence a fruitful competition (well, in absence of protection barriers such as so-called intellectual property, and of technological barriers they induce such as standardization on low-level languages like C).
I propose that after all, we do not burn all GIFs. Indeed, I see use for at least two of them:
the first one, that infringes the patent, is available on my page below, and should be as widely spread as possible: It's just aone transparent pixel compressed with LZW. This protest is like Mahatma Gandhi's March to the sea: Gandhi crossed half of India afoot to cristallize a single pinch of salt from the sea with a spoon, as a protest against the british monopoly on salt. He was thrown in jail, but no one would respect the monopoly anymore afterwards.
the second one should be spread in a similar way, but it ought to be created first. Explanations given in this message
Actually, the case for a compiler is just a very particular case of metaprogramming. Now, consider what happens if someone would use more elaborate programs, that do code transformation based on semantic analysis and uses huge incrementally developed knowledge bases. And consider what happens if the knowledge base uses dynamic feedback from the programs on which it is run (as with experience-based learning). These are issues I discussed (among other things) in my paper Metaprogramming and Free Availability of Sources. The notion of metaprogramming makes software licences and intellectual property completely inadequate; conversely, intellectual property makes metaprogramming very difficult, and is one great reason why AI is so little advanced today.
I had begun an article on pretty much the same subject, and even submitted a feature proposal to Rob (that got ignored as usual). I talked about it to as much people as I could at the Free Software conference Autour du Libre 1999 in Brest this january (where I presented a paper on another topic - shameless plug), but was greeted more with polite interest than with enthusiasm.
Note: as of why we mustn't fear corruption or other inefficiencies: since there is free competition among such services, that draw their money from voluntary funding, if one service is inefficient, funds will move to another one!
Slashdot Mirror
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Oh, of course, lots of people (the racketeers that make money with patents, and their lackeys), will tell you that all research would stop without patents. As if research had ever waited for patents so as to begin! Yeah, some people even pretended that without a monopoly, there would be no trade between Europe, Asia, and America; but their tea ended in the sea near Boston.
Patents have ALWAYS been a way to STIFFLE, not ENCOURAGE, coopetitive creation. Witness these Quotes from the LPF.
Free Software! Free Information!
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Ttttt. Don't confuse Rights and Opportunity. Everyone has the Right to copy, modify and distribute our top secret information. But if we're good, no one will have the opportunity. And if we're not so good and the information does fall into enemy hands, then no amount of weeping about bogus rights will save us.
Of course, if someone does something wrong so as to access the information (such as breaking into our house), then we may legitimately prosecute them for this deed. But we may not prosecute them for having the information itself, or prosecute anyone else who uses it without having taken part in the possible illegitimate activities involved. If we want to secure some information, it is our duty to take appropriate measures; governments shouldn't interfere by granting "intellectual property" priviledges and otherwise asserting various "secrets".
Justice is not concerned with the results of the various transactions but only with whether the transactions themselves are fair. -- F.A. Hayek, "Law, Legislation and Liberty", I.6.j
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
The first point is true. Of course, it's bad for them if they don't have a monopoly. But in as much as it's bad for them, it's good for the public. The second point is their right, although it would be a stupid and futile attitude, should the law be fair. The third point is where everything breaks: government using the public force against the public, to "protect" a few crooks.
Hey, Government, if you're looking for people to protect against the public, why not protect me, specifically? I'm ready to give you back 90% of every billion dollar that you'll help me extort from the public...
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Now (1) statistics doesn't exclude exceptions to the norm; (2) considering the weight of acquired traits in human behavior, genetics only account for an initial trend, that can be amplified or dampened by social pressure; (3) as computer science/gaming is considered more and more "traditional" and "safe", you can expect women to be more and more into this activity, (4) even if you manage to get a fair ratio of women in CS, then, you'll most likely still be able to feel a neat difference between behavior of male and female computer scientists/gamers (for better and for worse).
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Thus, a positive side-effect of such hole is that you may freely mix free and proprietary software code from a range of otherwise incompatible licenses, as long as you don't "distribute" your code outside of your world-wide association. In other words, if you're member of the WWBA (World-Wide Bugroff Association), then you can freely mix and match most free software, as if it were under the bugroff license.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Conclusion: the "company" (i.e. its managers) doesn't decide. The people in the company individually decide, possibly but not necessarily in mutual consent. That is freedom.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Are you going to invest massively in such tracks, do you think they are merely wishful thinking, are you in a wait-and-see mode, or do you just feel unconcerned? If you think such concerns, if possibly valid, are too long-term to you, what kind of financial infrastructure do you consider appropriate for research on such topics? How do you envision the relationship between free software companies and computer science research centers?
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
The bottom line is that: the OS is the set of behaviors, whatever it be, that anyone can expect from any computer in a given set. Technical considerations of separation into kernel and applications and drivers and daemons and whatever are mostly irrelevant here. They are relevant to internal design of an OS, not to the definition of an OS as a class of externally observable phenomena (unless of course you believe that OSes are only observable by people keen in their internal design).
As progress comes (and goes), the operating system has included an increasing (and sometimes decreasing) amount of features, and been designed in more and more complex ways. From the times of hand-switching programs into memory, to interactive monitors, to batch processors, to time-sharing systems, to virtual machine systems (even recursive virtual machines on some mainframes), there has been a lot of change in OS structure. As for features, structured persistent storage (filesystems) were sure not part of early system monitors; "disk"-managing operating systems were such an exception for micro-computers that they had to be explicitly named so in the early eighties (anyone remember Apple DOS 3.3? MS-DOS 2.x?). Today, it's taken for granted. Same goes for multiprogramming, for virtual memory, for (yuck) integrated bitmapped GUI, for TCP/IP networking, for package management, computer clustering, high-availability, device pluggability, autoconfigured wireless connectivity, palm computing, home-appliance connectivity, speech control, orthogonal persistence, process migration, automatic binary/source/specification consistency management, integrated metaprogramming, etc.
Feature- and design- based characterizations of the concept of an OS are doomed, because they are inherently short-sighted. Which is precisely what allows features to characterize specific instances of "OS" by their feature: any number can play, hence a fruitful competition (well, in absence of protection barriers such as so-called intellectual property, and of technological barriers they induce such as standardization on low-level languages like C).
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
I had begun an article on pretty much the same subject, and even submitted a feature proposal to Rob (that got ignored as usual). I talked about it to as much people as I could at the Free Software conference Autour du Libre 1999 in Brest this january (where I presented a paper on another topic - shameless plug), but was greeted more with polite interest than with enthusiasm.
You can read my ramblings in the draft article:
A Free Software Auction Service...
Note: as of why we mustn't fear corruption or other inefficiencies: since there is free competition among such services, that draw their money from voluntary funding, if one service is inefficient, funds will move to another one!
-- Faré@TUNES.org