I give up. There is no arguing with you. According to this argument, term limits on intellectual properties (i.e. patent expiry) is theft in the same way that confiscation of physical objects by the government would be theft. Property is a government invention. Every culture and nation has its own set of policies about handling property in general and so-called intellectual property in particular. I know of no nation or society that treats intellectual property as morally equivalent to physical property so your position is even more radical than the American government position that Disney has purchased.
Information is not property because the government says it is. Information is property because it is something that belongs to the person who created it.
You are saying that "information is property because information is property." By definition anything that belongs to a person is property.
Information does not fill the Universe, waiting to be discovered. Information -- a book, a song, an image, a piece of software -- doesn't exist until someone creates it.
Well, that applies to some kinds of information but I'm happy to talk specifically about things like books and songs that are obviously created.
At that point, the information creator owns that information, as clearly as a furniture maker owns the chair they just finished building.
No. That does not follow. Just asserting it does not make it true. There are a variety of circumstances under which a furniture maker can make chairs without owning the resulting chair. Do the people who made your running shoes (not the company, the people) own your shoes? No. The company does. Because that's how the laws are set up. Because property in any particular nation is defined by government and they've said: "work for hire is owned by the salary payer." Fair enough. They could equally say that a song is owned as long as you do not share it and at the point of sharing the person who heard it has equal ownership rights to the person who sang it. If you don't want to share it, don't share it. Now economists could have a very interesting debate about whether this is a good idea or not, but it is a perfectly valid definition of "intellectual property". And in fact, it is a much more established, ancient view of intellectual property. Cultures where singers expected a monopoloy on their songs were rare until quite recently. How much did Beethoven make off of ownership of his 9th symphony?
And while we are on the topic, what does your simplistic view of intellectual property have to say about the fact that in large part Shakespeare ripped off plots from ancient and contemporary writers? Those plots wouldn't have existed if someone hadn't created them, but Shakespeare made them much more interesting and popular. So whos dependents should get paid? And for how long? After all, the chair is owned by the furniture company forever if they don't sell it to somebody. Do you similarly propose that a poem should pay dividends to the owner's descendents in perpetuity? Should we hunt down the descendents of Shakespeare?
Your view that works of the intellect are similar to created things does not have any basis even in law. The law says (in the US, at least) that copyright is a limited form of monopoly granted by the government to the creator at the government's discretion. It is not an inherent, God-given right like the right to free speech or the right to own physical property.
On the off-chance that the OS becomes COMPLETELY commoditized, MS DOES have a plan. It's called.net and it's VERY cool.
Do you have a theory of how Microsoft could maintain anything like its current profit margins based on a VM? There are already several out there and Microsoft's is already half-cloned in Mono. It seems to me that one problem Microsoft has is that they are under much more serious pressure to document everything rather than relying on proprietary interfaces. That's why WordML is documented. That's why all of their new protocols are SOAP-based and public. The.NET VM is a ECMA standard. Let's say that Longhorn really does have a SQL-based file system. Would you rather be an open-source person trying to reverse engineer that ("schema dump!") or NTFS, which is pretty much completely undocumented. Would you rather reverse engineer the.NET APIs or the Win32 APIs? Would you rather reverse engineer WordML or Word.doc.
I think Microsoft will have a tough time staying more than a year ahead of the open source world. Yes, in some areas they are still years ahead but if you are in a race and you see your competitor a mile back and then a half-mile back would you feel comfortable or worry that they are obviously running faster than you? If you compare a Linux office package circa 1997 to today, and make the same comparison in the MS Office package you'll see that Open source is nipping at their heels.
You are buying ownership in the company. Among other things, this means that you could sell your share if the company is bought out. Alternately there could be a buyback or dividend but it doesn't have to be "systematic" or regular. It could happen only once in a blue moon (or literally only once) and that would be okay. Investors should start getting nervous if the company is sitting on a bunch of cash poorly invested (e.g. sitting in a bank, making poor competitive purchases, etc.). It might make more sense to return the cash to the investors and let them choose their own investment starategy. That's what is happening with Microsoft: presumably because they can't figure out how to invest the money in a manner that is clearly better than what the investors would do on their own.
The people you know will complain if their computer ships without an operating system and office suite that works in the way they expect. Therefore they want to buy Microsoft products, in the same way that I want to buy the transistors in my television because I would certainly notice if they were gone. Yes, if someone makes a product that was the same as Microsoft's in every way that they cared about, people would probably "want" that too. But then that person would have made products that people want to buy.
I find it disturbing that futurists tend to presume that the benefits of communication outweigh the risks. Okay, an Independence Day scenario is not likely. But how unlikely? 1 in 10 chance? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10000? What is an acceptable risk? (we do, after all, have at least one potentially valuable commodity down here: a world with flora and fauna that will be alien and novel to them) And what would we get from them? Technology? I'm not against technology but it isn't the be-all and end-all. I think that we should consider carefully before we encourage them to investigate us.
Totally false. If you dont think information is 'PROPERTY' then go take some that is claimed by someone else and see what happens to you.
You mean like when someone leaked internal documents from Microsoft? Or Siebel? Or the Department of Energy? Anyhow, this argument is bound to go in circles. You say that information is property because the government says it is property. So if the government said that air was property and you could only expect fresh air if you bought it from a private company then air would be property too. Or they could say that light is property and it is illegal to allow light from your neighbor's porch to go into your window. I know these are silly examples but they are reductio ad absurdum. We own the government and we should tell them what is or isn't property based on our goals for society.
Information is like anything else. It can be free, it can be owned, it can be rented, it can be stolen, it can be borrowed and returned.
If you really can't see the difference between "stealing" information and "stealing" a car (hint: in one case I deprive someone else of the use of the thing) then you are really not worth further energy.
The GPL is moot, pal. Or did you read the article and understand it? Web Services kick the GPL in the ass and send it running home to momma.
Grow up.
Copyrights become even more important now, because services themseves will become redundant, and features and availability will determine who gets the dollar. It used to be that the guy who made the movie got rich. Now, it is going to be the guy who sells tickets, and the maker will be happy to share his wares with anyone and everyone who wants to build upon them.
And this demonstrates copyrights are more important than ever because...what valuable copyrights do Google and eBay have? None. They may have trade secrets but I have never seen any valuable information with a (c) Google tag on it.
Microsoft has moved toward Web Services more than any other vendor. With a couple of strategic purchases, I think they stand to win big time.
Did you read the article? Has Microsoft moved to Web Services more than eBay? Or Amazon? Or the Apache Group? Or IBM? I don't think so. Microsoft has the most to lose if network-based services become more important than desktop software.
Plenty of companies have been screwed by not getting the source, and getting straight-jacketed into dealing w/ only 1 company.. not just individuals. I see that as the point of opensource, take away the power to abuse that the software industry has, but not to be anti-industry in general.
I am lukewarm on the GPL so let me ask you this question. Let's say you give your data to a company running a web service. They put it in an open source database and manipulate it with a mix of open source and closed source software. Now isn't it possible that you are straight-jacketed in the same way? Once you've built up your feedback rating on eBay how do you move it to another auction site? To me, the solution to lock-in is much more about standardized data formats and freely available data than open source software. Of course at that point you are commoditizing (loose use of the word) the whole stack.
Thanks for the clarification. I think we can agree that this isn't really "open souce" in the sense that we mean it today.
Re:Denial is the 3rd stage of the psychosis
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Bill Gates On Linux
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Code that has been exploited and fixed is now fixed. It is more, not less, likely to be secure than new code.
Re:Denial is the 3rd stage of the psychosis
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Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 1
Well, it may not directly relate to OS/2, but you're telling me that every flavor of Linux is written completely from scratch? So, they reinvent the wheel everytime? And this is the same with Windows? They don't use components from existing OS' and make the OS from scratch for every version?
We are totally failing to communicate. New versions of OS/2 are based upon old versions of OS/2. New versions of Linux are based upon old versions of Linux. New versions of Windows are based upon old versions of Windows. New versions of PalmOS are based upon old versions of PalmOS. I don't know what this "proves" about security in OS/2 or Linux or Windows. I don't think it proves anything at all! I don't know why you brought up the issue of new versions being based upon old ones back in the top post. You said: since Windows and the Linux flavors are built off of common files (that is, common between the versions) this means that they are less secure. I still don't know what you meant.
I agree with your sentiment but I need to correct a statement of fact. Mosaic was free but I don't think it was open source. Remember how they licensed it to a bunch of commercial companies like Spyglass and Microsoft? Mosaic was free to redistribute but the code was not open. If it had been, the open source world could have competed with Netscape and Microsoft instead of waiting until the late 1990s. But there wasn't a self-aware open source world back then the way there is now.
Marc's a nice guy because he isn't mean to you when you see him at Hobee's or he's a nice guy because saying he's a nice guy allows you to name drop?;)
By the way, according to this definition, high tech was ALWAYS a commodity. I've never "bought locally". Only the retailer is local. The hardware and software comes from around the world. Here's the definition of commodity I'm familiar with: http://www.investorwords.com/cgi-bin/getword.cgi?9 75
Personally I see a lot of innovation happening on Windows, Unix, the Mac, etc. I wish Unix would steal some of Microsoft's best ideas (umm...how about a single operating-system wide component model instead of one for Mozilla, one for OpenOffice, one for KDE, one for Gnome, etc.) I also wish Microsoft would steal some good ideas from Unix (...how about bundling a decent CLI and scripting language with the OS). If a person wants to see innovation they will see it. If they want to NOT see it they won't see it. It is very subjective.
Re:Denial is the 3rd stage of the psychosis
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Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 1
Ever seen a virus for OS/2? Nope. Ever see a rootkit or other exploit for OS/2? Nope. True, market share was a lot less than Windows, but this doesn't mean that since it had a smaller userbase that it was any less secure.
No, but it means that it was a much less interesting target for hackers. There are dozens of operating systems that have never had a virus or root kit, just because nobody has ever been motivated to try hacking them. It also helps that OS/2 was on the decline as the Internet was becoming popular.
I realize it doesn't mean it was more secure, but since Windows and the Linux flavors are built off of common files (that is, common between the versions) this means that they are less secure.
I'm trying hard to find any logical statement in there and am failing badly. Software that maintains files between versions is less secure than software that is rewritten from scratch with each version? How does this apply to OS/2???
You are being FAR too pedantic. Ever hear of eBay? Its a huge exchange, just not one in the conventional sense. As for services, well when your job can be exported in the blink of an eye then yes its a commodity as well.
Right. So everything is a commodity. That makes discussion of the real economics of the situation much simpler. Thanks for the clarification Nicholas Carr and NDPTAL85.
And what is your point? You are stating a commonly known fact over and over as if it somehow refutes something I've said. I said that both private and public entities should be allowed and encouraged to go to space. I didn't say that the current legislative environment allows that.
Carribean countries (and probably a lot of development countries) tend to think about income in the short-term. They don't think about the industries they are strangling. It is also common (still!) for them to award complete monopolies on technologies in exchange for cash. Consider the sad state of the Barbadian telecoms "industry".
I would argue that millionaires DO NOT represent humanity and sending them out into space would only allow for the complete commercialization of space at the hands of a few unscrupulous privateers.
Why do you presume that millionares are unscrupulous? Some are. Some aren't. For instance Warren Buffet spoke out against the tax cuts saying that they were making his income taxes too low compared to middle class people.
At least by using publicly funded sources for space travel, we can get a better guarantee that the results of the work will be held in the public interest, whereas by commercialization of space exploration and travel, we guarantee that the results will be held for private interests only.
Of course. Government always works in the public interest. They would never consider using knowledge of space for, I don't know, weapons.
The characterization of rich people as bad and governments as good is naive. Rich people can be good or bad and so can governments.
You must have missed the part of my post where I suggested that we should let both public and private people launch rockets. That rather implies that private citizens would not ask NASA for permission to launch (though they probably should ask the FAA or a space equivalent). No, NASA is not a space equivalent to the FAA: it is not primarily a regulator, it is an R&D organization.
Why is this presented as either sending publically funded astronauts OR sending privately funded millionaires. Let them both go. Just as the individuals can compete, the two development models can compete.
Dude, you are so biased it is hilarious. On the one hand, an integrated language platform is boring because "how many languages do you need" but on the other hand, Linux is innovative because there are "window manager choices as far and wide and varied as snowflakes." Who needs Python, Java and C++ when you can have FVWM, Sawfish and Window Maker? Please re-apply when you are willing to put your intellect ahead of your biases.
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If I make something, I own it.
I give up. There is no arguing with you. According to this argument, term limits on intellectual properties (i.e. patent expiry) is theft in the same way that confiscation of physical objects by the government would be theft. Property is a government invention. Every culture and nation has its own set of policies about handling property in general and so-called intellectual property in particular. I know of no nation or society that treats intellectual property as morally equivalent to physical property so your position is even more radical than the American government position that Disney has purchased.
Information is not property because the government says it is. Information is property because it is something that belongs to the person who created it.
You are saying that "information is property because information is property." By definition anything that belongs to a person is property.
Information does not fill the Universe, waiting to be discovered. Information -- a book, a song, an image, a piece of software -- doesn't exist until someone creates it.
Well, that applies to some kinds of information but I'm happy to talk specifically about things like books and songs that are obviously created.
At that point, the information creator owns that information, as clearly as a furniture maker owns the chair they just finished building.
No. That does not follow. Just asserting it does not make it true. There are a variety of circumstances under which a furniture maker can make chairs without owning the resulting chair. Do the people who made your running shoes (not the company, the people) own your shoes? No. The company does. Because that's how the laws are set up. Because property in any particular nation is defined by government and they've said: "work for hire is owned by the salary payer." Fair enough. They could equally say that a song is owned as long as you do not share it and at the point of sharing the person who heard it has equal ownership rights to the person who sang it. If you don't want to share it, don't share it. Now economists could have a very interesting debate about whether this is a good idea or not, but it is a perfectly valid definition of "intellectual property". And in fact, it is a much more established, ancient view of intellectual property. Cultures where singers expected a monopoloy on their songs were rare until quite recently. How much did Beethoven make off of ownership of his 9th symphony?
And while we are on the topic, what does your simplistic view of intellectual property have to say about the fact that in large part Shakespeare ripped off plots from ancient and contemporary writers? Those plots wouldn't have existed if someone hadn't created them, but Shakespeare made them much more interesting and popular. So whos dependents should get paid? And for how long? After all, the chair is owned by the furniture company forever if they don't sell it to somebody. Do you similarly propose that a poem should pay dividends to the owner's descendents in perpetuity? Should we hunt down the descendents of Shakespeare?
Your view that works of the intellect are similar to created things does not have any basis even in law. The law says (in the US, at least) that copyright is a limited form of monopoly granted by the government to the creator at the government's discretion. It is not an inherent, God-given right like the right to free speech or the right to own physical property.
On the off-chance that the OS becomes COMPLETELY commoditized, MS DOES have a plan. It's called .net and it's VERY cool.
Do you have a theory of how Microsoft could maintain anything like its current profit margins based on a VM? There are already several out there and Microsoft's is already half-cloned in Mono. It seems to me that one problem Microsoft has is that they are under much more serious pressure to document everything rather than relying on proprietary interfaces. That's why WordML is documented. That's why all of their new protocols are SOAP-based and public. The .NET VM is a ECMA standard. Let's say that Longhorn really does have a SQL-based file system. Would you rather be an open-source person trying to reverse engineer that ("schema dump!") or NTFS, which is pretty much completely undocumented. Would you rather reverse engineer the .NET APIs or the Win32 APIs? Would you rather reverse engineer WordML or Word.doc.
I think Microsoft will have a tough time staying more than a year ahead of the open source world. Yes, in some areas they are still years ahead but if you are in a race and you see your competitor a mile back and then a half-mile back would you feel comfortable or worry that they are obviously running faster than you? If you compare a Linux office package circa 1997 to today, and make the same comparison in the MS Office package you'll see that Open source is nipping at their heels.
You are buying ownership in the company. Among other things, this means that you could sell your share if the company is bought out. Alternately there could be a buyback or dividend but it doesn't have to be "systematic" or regular. It could happen only once in a blue moon (or literally only once) and that would be okay. Investors should start getting nervous if the company is sitting on a bunch of cash poorly invested (e.g. sitting in a bank, making poor competitive purchases, etc.). It might make more sense to return the cash to the investors and let them choose their own investment starategy. That's what is happening with Microsoft: presumably because they can't figure out how to invest the money in a manner that is clearly better than what the investors would do on their own.
The people you know will complain if their computer ships without an operating system and office suite that works in the way they expect. Therefore they want to buy Microsoft products, in the same way that I want to buy the transistors in my television because I would certainly notice if they were gone. Yes, if someone makes a product that was the same as Microsoft's in every way that they cared about, people would probably "want" that too. But then that person would have made products that people want to buy.
I find it disturbing that futurists tend to presume that the benefits of communication outweigh the risks. Okay, an Independence Day scenario is not likely. But how unlikely? 1 in 10 chance? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10000? What is an acceptable risk? (we do, after all, have at least one potentially valuable commodity down here: a world with flora and fauna that will be alien and novel to them) And what would we get from them? Technology? I'm not against technology but it isn't the be-all and end-all. I think that we should consider carefully before we encourage them to investigate us.
Totally false. If you dont think information is 'PROPERTY' then go take some that is claimed by someone else and see what happens to you.
You mean like when someone leaked internal documents from Microsoft? Or Siebel? Or the Department of Energy? Anyhow, this argument is bound to go in circles. You say that information is property because the government says it is property. So if the government said that air was property and you could only expect fresh air if you bought it from a private company then air would be property too. Or they could say that light is property and it is illegal to allow light from your neighbor's porch to go into your window. I know these are silly examples but they are reductio ad absurdum. We own the government and we should tell them what is or isn't property based on our goals for society.
Information is like anything else. It can be free, it can be owned, it can be rented, it can be stolen, it can be borrowed and returned.
If you really can't see the difference between "stealing" information and "stealing" a car (hint: in one case I deprive someone else of the use of the thing) then you are really not worth further energy.
The GPL is moot, pal. Or did you read the article and understand it? Web Services kick the GPL in the ass and send it running home to momma.
Grow up.
Copyrights become even more important now, because services themseves will become redundant, and features and availability will determine who gets the dollar. It used to be that the guy who made the movie got rich. Now, it is going to be the guy who sells tickets, and the maker will be happy to share his wares with anyone and everyone who wants to build upon them.
And this demonstrates copyrights are more important than ever because...what valuable copyrights do Google and eBay have? None. They may have trade secrets but I have never seen any valuable information with a (c) Google tag on it.
Microsoft has moved toward Web Services more than any other vendor. With a couple of strategic purchases, I think they stand to win big time.
Did you read the article? Has Microsoft moved to Web Services more than eBay? Or Amazon? Or the Apache Group? Or IBM? I don't think so. Microsoft has the most to lose if network-based services become more important than desktop software.
Plenty of companies have been screwed by not getting the source, and getting straight-jacketed into dealing w/ only 1 company.. not just individuals. I see that as the point of opensource, take away the power to abuse that the software industry has, but not to be anti-industry in general.
I am lukewarm on the GPL so let me ask you this question. Let's say you give your data to a company running a web service. They put it in an open source database and manipulate it with a mix of open source and closed source software. Now isn't it possible that you are straight-jacketed in the same way? Once you've built up your feedback rating on eBay how do you move it to another auction site? To me, the solution to lock-in is much more about standardized data formats and freely available data than open source software. Of course at that point you are commoditizing (loose use of the word) the whole stack.
Thanks for the clarification. I think we can agree that this isn't really "open souce" in the sense that we mean it today.
Code that has been exploited and fixed is now fixed. It is more, not less, likely to be secure than new code.
Well, it may not directly relate to OS/2, but you're telling me that every flavor of Linux is written completely from scratch? So, they reinvent the wheel everytime? And this is the same with Windows? They don't use components from existing OS' and make the OS from scratch for every version?
We are totally failing to communicate. New versions of OS/2 are based upon old versions of OS/2. New versions of Linux are based upon old versions of Linux. New versions of Windows are based upon old versions of Windows. New versions of PalmOS are based upon old versions of PalmOS. I don't know what this "proves" about security in OS/2 or Linux or Windows. I don't think it proves anything at all! I don't know why you brought up the issue of new versions being based upon old ones back in the top post. You said: since Windows and the Linux flavors are built off of common files (that is, common between the versions) this means that they are less secure. I still don't know what you meant.
I agree with your sentiment but I need to correct a statement of fact. Mosaic was free but I don't think it was open source. Remember how they licensed it to a bunch of commercial companies like Spyglass and Microsoft? Mosaic was free to redistribute but the code was not open. If it had been, the open source world could have competed with Netscape and Microsoft instead of waiting until the late 1990s. But there wasn't a self-aware open source world back then the way there is now.
Marc's a nice guy because he isn't mean to you when you see him at Hobee's or he's a nice guy because saying he's a nice guy allows you to name drop? ;)
By the way, according to this definition, high tech was ALWAYS a commodity. I've never "bought locally". Only the retailer is local. The hardware and software comes from around the world. Here's the definition of commodity I'm familiar with: http://www.investorwords.com/cgi-bin/getword.cgi?9 75
Basically you are redefining commodity. But okay. Whatever.
Personally I see a lot of innovation happening on Windows, Unix, the Mac, etc. I wish Unix would steal some of Microsoft's best ideas (umm...how about a single operating-system wide component model instead of one for Mozilla, one for OpenOffice, one for KDE, one for Gnome, etc.) I also wish Microsoft would steal some good ideas from Unix (...how about bundling a decent CLI and scripting language with the OS). If a person wants to see innovation they will see it. If they want to NOT see it they won't see it. It is very subjective.
Ever seen a virus for OS/2? Nope. Ever see a rootkit or other exploit for OS/2? Nope. True, market share was a lot less than Windows, but this doesn't mean that since it had a smaller userbase that it was any less secure.
No, but it means that it was a much less interesting target for hackers. There are dozens of operating systems that have never had a virus or root kit, just because nobody has ever been motivated to try hacking them. It also helps that OS/2 was on the decline as the Internet was becoming popular.
I realize it doesn't mean it was more secure, but since Windows and the Linux flavors are built off of common files (that is, common between the versions) this means that they are less secure.
I'm trying hard to find any logical statement in there and am failing badly. Software that maintains files between versions is less secure than software that is rewritten from scratch with each version? How does this apply to OS/2???
You are being FAR too pedantic. Ever hear of eBay? Its a huge exchange, just not one in the conventional sense. As for services, well when your job can be exported in the blink of an eye then yes its a commodity as well.
Right. So everything is a commodity. That makes discussion of the real economics of the situation much simpler. Thanks for the clarification Nicholas Carr and NDPTAL85.
And what is your point? You are stating a commonly known fact over and over as if it somehow refutes something I've said. I said that both private and public entities should be allowed and encouraged to go to space. I didn't say that the current legislative environment allows that.
Carribean countries (and probably a lot of development countries) tend to think about income in the short-term. They don't think about the industries they are strangling. It is also common (still!) for them to award complete monopolies on technologies in exchange for cash. Consider the sad state of the Barbadian telecoms "industry".
I would argue that millionaires DO NOT represent humanity and sending them out into space would only allow for the complete commercialization of space at the hands of a few unscrupulous privateers.
Why do you presume that millionares are unscrupulous? Some are. Some aren't. For instance Warren Buffet spoke out against the tax cuts saying that they were making his income taxes too low compared to middle class people.
At least by using publicly funded sources for space travel, we can get a better guarantee that the results of the work will be held in the public interest, whereas by commercialization of space exploration and travel, we guarantee that the results will be held for private interests only.
Of course. Government always works in the public interest. They would never consider using knowledge of space for, I don't know, weapons.
The characterization of rich people as bad and governments as good is naive. Rich people can be good or bad and so can governments.
You must have missed the part of my post where I suggested that we should let both public and private people launch rockets. That rather implies that private citizens would not ask NASA for permission to launch (though they probably should ask the FAA or a space equivalent). No, NASA is not a space equivalent to the FAA: it is not primarily a regulator, it is an R&D organization.
The time frame is 100 years.
Why is this presented as either sending publically funded astronauts OR sending privately funded millionaires. Let them both go. Just as the individuals can compete, the two development models can compete.
Dude, you are so biased it is hilarious. On the one hand, an integrated language platform is boring because "how many languages do you need" but on the other hand, Linux is innovative because there are "window manager choices as far and wide and varied as snowflakes." Who needs Python, Java and C++ when you can have FVWM, Sawfish and Window Maker? Please re-apply when you are willing to put your intellect ahead of your biases.