While it's cool to see our subjects in a national daily, and Diane Francis is a well-known commentator, the newspaper is... not quite real.
In fact, it's a personal project of Conrad Black, and its circulation is unimpressive. It's what we used to call "a rich man's folly", like a medieval watchtower on an unfortified manorhouse.
It will be in business for about another year, assuming that he can sell his other papers to keep himself solvent... in the meantime, it's a libertarian/reform newspaper without advertisements... or advertisers.
Tim suggests a slashdot-like site to post and coment on proposed patents.
There are already sites discussing the desirability/undesirability of software patents (eg, here), and at least one database of prior art. Rumor has it that ther is also a new-patent site somewhere, but I've not found it.
So, who's interested in getting the appropriate folks together with slashcode to build just such a site?
--dave
Re:we're not going to like the way this turns out
on
At The Crossroads
·
· Score: 1
G27 Radio wrotethere just doesn't seem to be a way to protect.. IP on the Net without taking away our freedom to share... If there is another way, please say so.
There is, and it was discoverd partially by accident by Tim O'Reilly and friends.
I'm the financially sucessful second author of a book. It is downloadable for free, yet people insist on buying it and sending Tim money. Tim then sends me money.
Why? Because the printed book is independantly valuable: the on-line copy is better for quick reference to techniques, the paper one is better of understanding. It's more portable, can be dropped in the bath with only minor damage, and actually has a better index. The on-line copy is valuable because teh sections make useful tutorials on particular subjects, and one section has a clickable fault tree, which is cool.
That means, you see, that the products that will suffer from the net are the ones which are identical, whatever their media, the ones where there is no value added by adapting them to a different media.
Right now, this looks like folks who will suffer are the publishers of mass-market songs. Top 10 stuff, to be precise. Which isn't the whole of recorded music or the recording industry, much less the whole of music or the whole of literature.
DonGenaro said "and also according to jefferson's vision people can be property".
Actually he said it was unfortunate that they should be property, and proposed the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia put together a fund to return the kidnapped slaves and their descendants to their homelands. [Source: The Atlantic, some time last year]
With respect, you're confusing the source of the problem with the tool used.
In the days of the great Trusts, the owners of the trusts bought congressmen and senators to get legal protection for their monopolies. Does this then mean that we should do without congressmen and senators? Should we have kings instead?
What brought down the monopolies was the actions of those self-same concressmen and senators, with the help of the courts and the then department of justice.
Government is a two edged-sword: it can cut the people, or it can cut of the heads of those who actually threaten our liberties. Do not try to eliminate it, lest you find yourself in a world where the corporations really do have their own armies, and the citizins have none.
Microsoft is actually very nice to the Samba folks, and appears to be aware that if the CIFS potocol is ever to be accepted as an internet standard that there will need to be multiple interoperating implementations.
In addition, discussions on the CIFS and Samba list indicates that substantial parts of the required information are already publically known...
The danger of having a single database, or multiples which you can easily extract matching information from, is that others can find out things from public records that you don't want known.
An actual Canadian example from some years ago: one company provided both library and pharmacy databases to customers. A person with access to each as a ordinary user looked in the pharmacy database for unmarried females below thirty who had prescriptions for birth contol pills.
The pharmacy database didn't allow him to look up their adresses, as it had controls to keep exactly that search from being made. So he took the full names and searched for them in the library database, which did not have controls on adresses.
The principle being broken here is that the pharmacy customers only granted permission to use their addresses for delivery purpose, not for publication to local lotharios. This was circumvented by the user's matching them in the library database, which didn't have (and probably didn't normally need) any protections on the use of adresses.
Stats Canada, who manage the census, is very aware of this problem, and makes sure that only selected statistical queries can be made, and that they can't be narrowed down enough to identify single households or persons.
HRDC, on the other hand, is not exactly a hotbed of privacy advocates: it's job is providing a disorganized bag of services to multiple different groups of citizins.
Net result? if you can ask the question, an ordinary user of the HRDC database can probably answer it... How about "member of parliament and smoked pot in their youth"? (;-))
In a previous life with a large and famously conservative company (Siemens large-scale imaging), we needed to use gcc for several platforms, and we needed to convince the customers who used our system that gcc was A Good Thing.
After a check with out own IS operation, we found out that opens source was no different from commercial: the company and its customers wanted
The distribution on a CD
A good printed manual. and
A service contract
all together in the same envelope.
This was trivial to provide, and most customers didn't take the service contract because they already understood open source.
The dictionary kind of corporatism is a representation scheme: shareholders elect their board of directors, companies elect a sector representative, and the representatives meet in a council to allocate resources. It was one of the the theoretical basis of Fascism (not Nazism, please note!), and was intended to place the control of the economy in the hands of people who would be motivated to "make the trains run on time".
This is echoed in modern times by the heads of companies meeting in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and making decisions about the economy in some particular context, and those NGOs being part of larger government/business organizations. The World Trade Organization is an example of the latter.
The behavior of a corporatist community of businesses is rather close to Jon's definition, but only in the absence of a "policeman". Of course, a wise corporatist community will wish to avoid the state having police powers, and will campaign for the disentanglement of the state from business, specifically from issues like pollution, which they consider would be better dealt with by economic forces.
This campaigning is often mistaken for normal right-wing politics, with slogans like "smaller government", but it is different in nature.
This kind of mimimal government, government without police powers, is not necessarily wanted by people who are not part of that community, which is restricted to the owners or shareholders of the corporations. In a corporatist state, one can vote only in proportion to the number of shares of stock you own...
This is in contrast to the traditional kind of government, which we established to protect us from robbers, murderers, and other governments. In traditional governments, we choose people to protect us. The people who wish us to lack that protection naturally disapprove of this, and argue for different kinds of governments. The corporatist form is just one of these. (Be glad they're not pushing Industrial Feudalism!)
What to do about it? That's an open question, but there are some classical answers. Classical as in "ancient greek" classical
A readable book on the ethical relationship between business and government was written a few years back by Jane Jacobs of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" fame. It's Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce & Politics, a recorded discussion/debate between a group of characters. (Like most of Jane's books it's fun and readable, not an academic treatise). It raises all the basic questions about commerce and government that we've had since Plato, and I daresay it is one direct answer to "what's to be done?"
Just because it's free, don't assume you'd actually want it.
Firstly, it's heavyweight, secondly it's an interface to a cloud of other interfaces, any one of which may be sufficient, and thirdly it drags along the assumptions of the authors about "what's good for the 'net".
As Laurence Lessig points out in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, a perfect authentication and identification system may be something you don't want.
Anonymous considers "30-40% of gross salary including the non income taxes" to be suspiciously low. Quite reasonably, he suggests we take the total tax burden for a year for all taxes and divide it by the total income to get a real rate.
I live in Ontario, Canada, a famously high-tax jurisdiction for North America, and am in the highest tax bracket. (To be fair, I should comment that I do get more paid services for my taxes than Americans do).
My tax rate, calculated as Anonymous suggests by my tax progran, is 29%. To this add PST and GST, which includes all the hidden business taxes that I contribute to, and my rate is <= 44%.
I have every expectation that U.S. jurisdictions will indeed fall into the 30-40% range...
Jon ends his essay with a challenge to traditional publishers, to "scrutinize itself and its culture,... and yes, its models of distribution. That would truly be novel."
I don't think that traditional publishers are into introspection, but I can point out one "conventionally published" book that gained value from being on the web and enhanced the printed version.
Once upon a time I worked on the O'Reilly Samba book, which contained a chapter on troubleshooting. The largest part of this traditional chunk of paper was a trouble tree, derived from Andrew Tridgell's short paper on debugging Samba. A trouble tree, for those who haven't used one, is a bunch of numbered tests, with lists of outcomes. If the test succeeds, you're sent on to a particular page where the next test is described. If it fails, you're sent to a different page where there's instructions on what to do next.
I hear you saying "Aha!", don't I?
That's right, this was automagically converted into web pages and links, so you can just click to go to the right place. An example lives here.
The interactivity here is only moderate: the reader can traverse a pre-existing tree. By rights they should also be able to add annotations, hints to themselves and suggestions to the authors. And the web supports this, so it's at least possible...
However, even though the trouble tree isn't very interactive, it adds enough value that this section of the book is more convenient on the web than on paper. This is the first economic gain the user (and publisher) sees.
The next comes from making individual, bite-size sections available on the web. You can't read the book continuously, but my eyes hurt when I try to do that from a screen anyway. You can, though, go from Samba Book to Configuring Windows Clients to Setting Up Windows NT 4.0 Computers and review the steps you need, quickly and conveniently, before or during setting up a PC.
This is pure packaging: it's not interactivity at all. It's just a classical publishing truism: making it easy for the reader to find the information they need. A gain for the reader, and indirectly a gain for the publisher.
So now we can get to economics, and why my pocketbook likes having the book on-line.
O'Reilly tells me that Samba's selling well. People tell them they've referred to the book online and then bought copies. People tell me the same thing. Other people want to contribute corrections and updates, and have. This, to me, is wonderful: I'm both in a traditional market culture, hawking my book in town square for money, and in a "gift culture", contributing my time to making other people's work easier, and having them give me back their efforts to help the next person.
So I've added a little bit of human interactivity to the mix: like other folks with web pages, I follow the newsgroups and mailing lists, and when someone asks a newbie question that my work answers, I mail them a URL. And I get back replies like "Cool, I used your tip and I've bought the book".
So it fits my culture, and my publisher's actual and corporate culture. It nicely dodges questions of hierarchy, as I now don't have to ask the publisher's permission to mail sections to folks with problems. It's an adaptation of classical publishing techniques (trouble trees and packaging), and the editing and distribution models of the publisher adapt easily to the new medium.
(I actualy disagree with Pheros_7f4 about Microsoft changing things intentionally, but that's a side issue...)
The usual sense of "replacing my NT PDC" is to provide all PDC functionality in Samba in the much the same way that MS pioneered it, (a bit of a long-term task).
What's your opinion of providing the unix equivalent of an SMB server, with things like DFS supported on top of automounter tables, much like "homedir map" already does?
Honeywell used to have just such an agreement, and it even required an equally strict non-competition clause. A colleague said "that would mean I'd have to divest my interest in a company, and my partners would both want to wring my neck". The manager promptly inked out both clauses.
And this wasn't for a senior person, either: it was for an entry-level job.
spiralx writes: Yes, but it's still incredibly difficult for an unknown artist to gain serious exposure or make more than a pittence on the net.
To be practical, I'd suggest that the artist should not depend only on the 'net for income, but use both old and new media at the same time.
I'm an unknown artist, a minor author of a well-known nerd book. I'm gaining serious exposure via the publisher making the book available on the net, and this is increasing the revenue from the "dead-tree" edition. Conventional books, you see, still have great value, so people happily buy them even though they can refer to them online as well.
And why did I and my publisher take this track? Because we know that the historical origin of copyright is really quite different from what some people would have you believe. A good article, and a sustained debate, lives here, at my favorite tree-based mag.
It starts with Charles C. Mann on Emmanuel Kant: "Every artistic work, he said, consists of a physical object and a piece of its creator's spirit. People can buy the object but not the spirit, for soul cannot be purchased. Thus readers can freely copy books, but only in ways that respect the writer's integrity".
Also check out the comments by Lawrence Lessig, of "Code" fame...
To be blunt, there is no theft taking place so long as the use is that which the author wanted. The contrary opinions of interested third parties does not change this.
I'm most familiar with the Samba book, where he and all three authors accepted Andrew Tridgell's suggestion of making it available as open source, but he's published several Linux open source books.
He does require the permission of the authors, you understand: they're the folks who own the books.
Actually it's more the opposite: they're relatively simple, and intended for a system whose main purpose in life was to provide good interactive performance. The multi-queues trick was a way to keep the cost of scanning the process queue down.
In modern systems, very large numbers of processes (or threads) can cause you to spend way too much time in the dispatcher: this was the subject of an IBM/Linux paper recently...
Actually we used to update software asynchronously, too: when I worked in Mineapolis, a different database layout was being exposure-tested during several weekends. I couldn't even tell they were experimenting, much less that they were rolling forward and back with something so low-level. (I was a dumb user in those days, you understand).
A smarter colleague taught us the algorithm, but that's a rant for another day...
I think you've missed Mr. Katz's point: actually publishing online and allowing citations and links really does mean relinquishing income from reprint, royalty and subsidiary rights. You're not limiting the viewer to just viewing your work: you're encouraging them to use it as part of a wider discussion, not all of which you own.
Allowing citations and links are important in order to get widespread public discussion, but destructive of one's hopes to republish your "collected works" later for additional income.
If you want to make money and have your work available on the net, grant only limited rights to the networked entity. O'Reilly did this with the Samba book, and therefor preserved my income from the dead-tree edition.
I can testify that people will buy the "original" copy, even if an on-line copy exists and is legal.
I'm the second author of an Open Source book, which is in the top reccomendations in its class at Amazon. And is selling quite well, thanks!
The MPA is overly worried: I expect due diligence on their part, but I don't expect them to lose money on movie sales. I, and everyone else but Dr. Evil, will buy the commercial product.
I do expect that they won't get to make money of spinoff hardware salse, though...
I'd be more inclined to think Solaris was on x86 and Power PC because of Sun's desire to keep it portable, not because Linux 0.9 was running on my 386 print-server (;-))
Slashdot Mirror
In the U.S. he hasn't any choice: since the days of the "Red Scare", saying anything at all removed your right to refuse to answer other questions.
This specifically included appeals to the fifth amendment, or any other from of negotiated immunity.
--dave
While it's cool to see our subjects in a national daily, and Diane Francis is a well-known commentator, the newspaper is ... not quite real.
In fact, it's a personal project of Conrad Black, and its circulation is unimpressive. It's what we used to call "a rich man's folly", like a medieval watchtower on an unfortified manorhouse.
It will be in business for about another year, assuming that he can sell his other papers to keep himself solvent... in the meantime, it's a libertarian/reform newspaper without advertisements... or advertisers.
and may be teasing... --dave
Tim suggests a slashdot-like site to post and coment on proposed patents.
There are already sites discussing the desirability/undesirability of software patents (eg, here), and at least one database of prior art. Rumor has it that ther is also a new-patent site somewhere, but I've not found it.
So, who's interested in getting the appropriate folks together with slashcode to build just such a site?
--daveG27 Radio wrotethere just doesn't seem to be a way to protect .. IP on the Net without taking away our freedom to share... If there is another way, please say so.
There is, and it was discoverd partially by accident by Tim O'Reilly and friends.
I'm the financially sucessful second author of a book. It is downloadable for free, yet people insist on buying it and sending Tim money. Tim then sends me money.
Why? Because the printed book is independantly valuable: the on-line copy is better for quick reference to techniques, the paper one is better of understanding. It's more portable, can be dropped in the bath with only minor damage, and actually has a better index. The on-line copy is valuable because teh sections make useful tutorials on particular subjects, and one section has a clickable fault tree, which is cool.
That means, you see, that the products that will suffer from the net are the ones which are identical, whatever their media, the ones where there is no value added by adapting them to a different media.
Right now, this looks like folks who will suffer are the publishers of mass-market songs. Top 10 stuff, to be precise. Which isn't the whole of recorded music or the recording industry, much less the whole of music or the whole of literature.
--dave
DonGenaro said "and also according to jefferson's vision people can be property".
Actually he said it was unfortunate that they should be property, and proposed the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia put together a fund to return the kidnapped slaves and their descendants to their homelands. [Source: The Atlantic, some time last year]
--dave
With respect, you're confusing the source of the problem with the tool used.
In the days of the great Trusts, the owners of the trusts bought congressmen and senators to get legal protection for their monopolies. Does this then mean that we should do without congressmen and senators? Should we have kings instead?
What brought down the monopolies was the actions of those self-same concressmen and senators, with the help of the courts and the then department of justice.
Government is a two edged-sword: it can cut the people, or it can cut of the heads of those who actually threaten our liberties. Do not try to eliminate it, lest you find yourself in a world where the corporations really do have their own armies, and the citizins have none.
--dave
The Pentagon Papers.
Pyrotoc said:
MS are very pissed off about Samba.
Microsoft is actually very nice to the Samba folks, and appears to be aware that if the CIFS potocol is ever to be accepted as an internet standard that there will need to be multiple interoperating implementations.
In addition, discussions on the CIFS and Samba list indicates that substantial parts of the required information are already publically known...
--dave (an interested spectator) c-b
The danger of having a single database, or multiples which you can easily extract matching information from, is that others can find out things from public records that you don't want known.
An actual Canadian example from some years ago: one company provided both library and pharmacy databases to customers. A person with access to each as a ordinary user looked in the pharmacy database for unmarried females below thirty who had prescriptions for birth contol pills.
The pharmacy database didn't allow him to look up their adresses, as it had controls to keep exactly that search from being made. So he took the full names and searched for them in the library database, which did not have controls on adresses.
The principle being broken here is that the pharmacy customers only granted permission to use their addresses for delivery purpose, not for publication to local lotharios. This was circumvented by the user's matching them in the library database, which didn't have (and probably didn't normally need) any protections on the use of adresses.
Stats Canada, who manage the census, is very aware of this problem, and makes sure that only selected statistical queries can be made, and that they can't be narrowed down enough to identify single households or persons.
HRDC, on the other hand, is not exactly a hotbed of privacy advocates: it's job is providing a disorganized bag of services to multiple different groups of citizins.
Net result? if you can ask the question, an ordinary user of the HRDC database can probably answer it... How about "member of parliament and smoked pot in their youth"? (;-))
--dave
In a previous life with a large and famously conservative company (Siemens large-scale imaging), we needed to use gcc for several platforms, and we needed to convince the customers who used our system that gcc was A Good Thing.
After a check with out own IS operation, we found out that opens source was no different from commercial: the company and its customers wanted
- The distribution on a CD
- A good printed manual. and
- A service contract
all together in the same envelope.This was trivial to provide, and most customers didn't take the service contract because they already understood open source.
?--dave
The dictionary kind of corporatism is a representation scheme: shareholders elect their board of directors, companies elect a sector representative, and the representatives meet in a council to allocate resources. It was one of the the theoretical basis of Fascism (not Nazism, please note!), and was intended to place the control of the economy in the hands of people who would be motivated to "make the trains run on time".
This is echoed in modern times by the heads of companies meeting in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and making decisions about the economy in some particular context, and those NGOs being part of larger government/business organizations. The World Trade Organization is an example of the latter.
The behavior of a corporatist community of businesses is rather close to Jon's definition, but only in the absence of a "policeman". Of course, a wise corporatist community will wish to avoid the state having police powers, and will campaign for the disentanglement of the state from business, specifically from issues like pollution, which they consider would be better dealt with by economic forces.
This campaigning is often mistaken for normal right-wing politics, with slogans like "smaller government", but it is different in nature.
This kind of mimimal government, government without police powers, is not necessarily wanted by people who are not part of that community, which is restricted to the owners or shareholders of the corporations. In a corporatist state, one can vote only in proportion to the number of shares of stock you own...
This is in contrast to the traditional kind of government, which we established to protect us from robbers, murderers, and other governments. In traditional governments, we choose people to protect us. The people who wish us to lack that protection naturally disapprove of this, and argue for different kinds of governments. The corporatist form is just one of these. (Be glad they're not pushing Industrial Feudalism!)
What to do about it? That's an open question, but there are some classical answers. Classical as in "ancient greek" classical
A readable book on the ethical relationship between business and government was written a few years back by Jane Jacobs of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" fame. It's Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce & Politics, a recorded discussion/debate between a group of characters. (Like most of Jane's books it's fun and readable, not an academic treatise). It raises all the basic questions about commerce and government that we've had since Plato, and I daresay it is one direct answer to "what's to be done?"
--davecb
Just because it's free, don't assume you'd actually want it.
Firstly, it's heavyweight, secondly it's an interface to a cloud of other interfaces, any one of which may be sufficient, and thirdly it drags along the assumptions of the authors about "what's good for the 'net".
As Laurence Lessig points out in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, a perfect authentication and identification system may be something you don't want.
--dave
Anonymous considers "30-40% of gross salary including the non income taxes" to be suspiciously low. Quite reasonably, he suggests we take the total tax burden for a year for all taxes and divide it by the total income to get a real rate.
I live in Ontario, Canada, a famously high-tax jurisdiction for North America, and am in the highest tax bracket. (To be fair, I should comment that I do get more paid services for my taxes than Americans do).
My tax rate, calculated as Anonymous suggests by my tax progran, is 29%. To this add PST and GST, which includes all the hidden business taxes that I contribute to, and my rate is <= 44%.
I have every expectation that U.S. jurisdictions will indeed fall into the 30-40% range...
--dave
Jon ends his essay with a challenge to traditional publishers, to "scrutinize itself and its culture, ... and yes, its models of distribution. That would truly be novel."
I don't think that traditional publishers are into introspection, but I can point out one "conventionally published" book that gained value from being on the web and enhanced the printed version.
Once upon a time I worked on the O'Reilly Samba book, which contained a chapter on troubleshooting. The largest part of this traditional chunk of paper was a trouble tree, derived from Andrew Tridgell's short paper on debugging Samba. A trouble tree, for those who haven't used one, is a bunch of numbered tests, with lists of outcomes. If the test succeeds, you're sent on to a particular page where the next test is described. If it fails, you're sent to a different page where there's instructions on what to do next.
I hear you saying "Aha!", don't I?
That's right, this was automagically converted into web pages and links, so you can just click to go to the right place. An example lives here.
The interactivity here is only moderate: the reader can traverse a pre-existing tree. By rights they should also be able to add annotations, hints to themselves and suggestions to the authors. And the web supports this, so it's at least possible...
However, even though the trouble tree isn't very interactive, it adds enough value that this section of the book is more convenient on the web than on paper. This is the first economic gain the user (and publisher) sees.
The next comes from making individual, bite-size sections available on the web. You can't read the book continuously, but my eyes hurt when I try to do that from a screen anyway. You can, though, go from Samba Book to Configuring Windows Clients to Setting Up Windows NT 4.0 Computers and review the steps you need, quickly and conveniently, before or during setting up a PC.
This is pure packaging: it's not interactivity at all. It's just a classical publishing truism: making it easy for the reader to find the information they need. A gain for the reader, and indirectly a gain for the publisher.
So now we can get to economics, and why my pocketbook likes having the book on-line.
O'Reilly tells me that Samba's selling well. People tell them they've referred to the book online and then bought copies. People tell me the same thing. Other people want to contribute corrections and updates, and have. This, to me, is wonderful: I'm both in a traditional market culture, hawking my book in town square for money, and in a "gift culture", contributing my time to making other people's work easier, and having them give me back their efforts to help the next person.
So I've added a little bit of human interactivity to the mix: like other folks with web pages, I follow the newsgroups and mailing lists, and when someone asks a newbie question that my work answers, I mail them a URL. And I get back replies like "Cool, I used your tip and I've bought the book".
So it fits my culture, and my publisher's actual and corporate culture. It nicely dodges questions of hierarchy, as I now don't have to ask the publisher's permission to mail sections to folks with problems. It's an adaptation of classical publishing techniques (trouble trees and packaging), and the editing and distribution models of the publisher adapt easily to the new medium.
For right now, I really couldn't ask for more.
--dave(I actualy disagree with Pheros_7f4 about Microsoft changing things intentionally, but that's a side issue...)
The usual sense of "replacing my NT PDC" is to provide all PDC functionality in Samba in the much the same way that MS pioneered it, (a bit of a long-term task).
What's your opinion of providing the unix equivalent of an SMB server, with things like DFS supported on top of automounter tables, much like "homedir map" already does?
--daveYou do know you can dodge such things....
Honeywell used to have just such an agreement, and it even required an equally strict non-competition clause. A colleague said "that would mean I'd have to divest my interest in a company, and my partners would both want to wring my neck". The manager promptly inked out both clauses.
And this wasn't for a senior person, either: it was for an entry-level job.
--davespiralx writes: Yes, but it's still incredibly difficult for an unknown artist to gain serious exposure or make more than a pittence on the net.
To be practical, I'd suggest that the artist should not depend only on the 'net for income, but use both old and new media at the same time.
I'm an unknown artist, a minor author of a well-known nerd book. I'm gaining serious exposure via the publisher making the book available on the net, and this is increasing the revenue from the "dead-tree" edition. Conventional books, you see, still have great value, so people happily buy them even though they can refer to them online as well.
And why did I and my publisher take this track? Because we know that the historical origin of copyright is really quite different from what some people would have you believe. A good article, and a sustained debate, lives here, at my favorite tree-based mag.
It starts with Charles C. Mann on Emmanuel Kant: "Every artistic work, he said, consists of a physical object and a piece of its creator's spirit. People can buy the object but not the spirit, for soul cannot be purchased. Thus readers can freely copy books, but only in ways that respect the writer's integrity".
Also check out the comments by Lawrence Lessig, of "Code" fame...
To be blunt, there is no theft taking place so long as the use is that which the author wanted. The contrary opinions of interested third parties does not change this.
--daveEr, he does.
I'm most familiar with the Samba book, where he and all three authors accepted Andrew Tridgell's suggestion of making it available as open source, but he's published several Linux open source books.
He does require the permission of the authors, you understand: they're the folks who own the books.
--daveActually it's more the opposite: they're relatively simple, and intended for a system whose main purpose in life was to provide good interactive performance. The multi-queues trick was a way to keep the cost of scanning the process queue down.
In modern systems, very large numbers of processes (or threads) can cause you to spend way too much time in the dispatcher: this was the subject of an IBM/Linux paper recently...
--daveActually we used to update software asynchronously, too: when I worked in Mineapolis, a different database layout was being exposure-tested during several weekends. I couldn't even tell they were experimenting, much less that they were rolling forward and back with something so low-level. (I was a dumb user in those days, you understand).
A smarter colleague taught us the algorithm, but that's a rant for another day...
--daveI think you've missed Mr. Katz's point: actually publishing online and allowing citations and links really does mean relinquishing income from reprint, royalty and subsidiary rights. You're not limiting the viewer to just viewing your work: you're encouraging them to use it as part of a wider discussion, not all of which you own.
Allowing citations and links are important in order to get widespread public discussion, but destructive of one's hopes to republish your "collected works" later for additional income.
If you want to make money and have your work available on the net, grant only limited rights to the networked entity. O'Reilly did this with the Samba book, and therefor preserved my income from the dead-tree edition.
--dave
I can testify that people will buy the "original" copy, even if an on-line copy exists and is legal.
I'm the second author of an Open Source book, which is in the top reccomendations in its class at Amazon. And is selling quite well, thanks!
The MPA is overly worried: I expect due diligence on their part, but I don't expect them to lose money on movie sales. I, and everyone else but Dr. Evil, will buy the commercial product.
I do expect that they won't get to make money of spinoff hardware salse, though...
--dave
I'd be more inclined to think Solaris was on x86 and Power PC because of Sun's desire to keep it portable, not because Linux 0.9 was running on my 386 print-server (;-))
--dave
I just saw from Amazon that Using Samba is selling quite well, thus justifying O'Reilly's risk in publishing it in Open Source.
--davecb