SCO's e-mail neglects to mention that since they have the e-mail itself copyrighted, and you're now using it on one of your computers by opening it, you already owe them a sum they will "conveniently supply"...
I amazed crafty Darl would miss this obvious profit opportunity!
I'll go ahead and comment on this "conspiracy" notion.
It's hardly unusual for people to argue for what they perceive to be in their best interests, where they feel their interests intersect with their client/employer/customer.
If Walmart argues that they have the best products at the lowest prices, is that a "conspiracy"? Is there anyone in business that actively argues against what they are in business for?
From an ethical standpoint, where such possible conflicts seem to exist, one might consider the idea that "I am not obligated to argue against myself."
To put it more directly, I've known tech people who see their institutions as basically wrappers around their technology. Forming a corporation is not difficult. Deciding to sell widget X (or teach subject Y) is not difficult. What is difficult, and what the competitive differentiator is for any given company, is the development and support of their products and services, and that centers around their technical competence. Techies should not feel guilty because their argument has won over some PHB's; they should see it as a competitive reality.
This brings to mind an idea relating to SCO's continuing absurdities in trying to own and/or destroy Linux.
With a major communist government becoming increasingly invested in Linux, everyone can be assured there will
be at least one completely unassailable source of Linux distribution and development, like:
SCO: We'd like you to pay us, oh... [spins wheel-o-pricing] $1499 for each processor you're running Linux on...
People's Republic of China: Did we mention our extensive nuclear arsenal, deployable to Utah within an hour?
SCO: Oh... yes... nevermind.
Given this, maybe Linux users can play the same game of arbitrary definition that SCO has been playing. If
worse comes to worse, one could just say, "Oh, Linux? We're not running Linux here. We're running a non-infringing,
custom, Linux-based operating system. Feel free to prove otherwise." And with a perpetual source of FTP servers
to obtain the "Linux-based operating system", SCO would have a truly daunting task of stopping it or charging their
hoped-for extortion fees.
There's an example from back in the 80's that still probably serves as a good engineering reference for people working on hardware/software driver issues.
In those days of yore (only in the computer industry can one refer to something 20 years ago as "yore"...) there was the Commodore 64. It retains it's place as a pioneering home computer in that it offered very good (for the time) graphics and sound capability, and an amazing 64K of RAM, in an inexpensive unit. But then came its bastard son...
The 1541 floppy disk drive. It became the storage option for a home user once they became infuriated enough with the capabilites of cassette-tape backup to pony up for storage on a real medium. Unfortunately, the 1541 was slow. Unbelievably slow. Slow enough to think, just maybe, there were little dwarven people in your serial interface cable running your bits back and forth by hand.
Now, a very unique attribute of the 1541 drive was that it had its own 6502 processor and firmware. Plausibly, having in effect a "disk-drive-coprocessor" would accelerate your data transfer. It did not. Not remotely. Running through a disassembly of the 6502 firmware revealed endless, meandering code to provide what would appear, on the surface, to be a pretty straightforward piece of functionality: send data bits over the data pin and handshake it over the handshake signal pin.
As the market forces of installed base and demand for faster speed imposed themselves, solutions to the 1541 speed problem were found by third party companies. Software was released which performed such functions as loading from disk and backing up floppies as speeds that were many, many times faster than the 1541's base hardware and firmware could offer.
The top of this particular speed-enhancement heap was a nice strategy involving utilizing both the Commodore 64's and the 1541's processors, and the serial connection, optimally. Literally optimally. Assembly routines were written to run on the both 64 and the 1541 side to exactly synchronize the sending and receiving of bits on a clock-cycle by clock-cycle basis. Taking advantage of the fact both 6502's were running at 1 Mhz, the 1541's code would start blasting the data across the serial line to the corresponding 64 code, which would pull it off the serial bus within a 3-clock-cycle window (you could not write the two routines to be any more in sync than a couple 6502 instructions). This method used no handshaking whatsoever for large blocks of data being sent from the drive to the computer, and so, in an added speed coup, the handshaking line was also used for data, doubling the effective speed.
The 1541 still seems pertinent as an example of a computer function that one would probably think would best be done primarily on a software level (running on the Commodore 64), but was engineered instead to utilize a more-hardware approach (on the 1541), only to be rescued by better software to utilize the hardware (on both).
There's probably still a few design lessons from the "ancient" 1541, for both the hardware and the software guys.
I'll leave the obvious grab for the "+5 Funny" to others...:)
Unfortunately, the claims here are rather unspecific and within the range of statistical noise where specific.
Given this, I'm betting that this will end up in the ambiguous zone along with, say, Chitosan, where some studies
indicate it's useful, and others indicate it's useless, along with the smell (N.P.I.) of bias surrounding who's
performing and quoting a given study.
If you can live with those caveats, there are other non-pharmaceutical substances that arguably have a larger
positive effect than this stuff on cognition; DHEA and St. John's Wort come to mind.
Yes, this is an interesting fact to note. I wouldn't be surprised if SCO's own lawyers have realized the consequences of redistributing without complying with the GPL, and that's the underlying reason they're still making it available via FTP.
So, I wouldn't be surprised to see SCO continuing to talk out of both sides of their mouth, one half attacking the GPL and the other stating their compliance with it.
It's important to understand where the "force of law" exists, fundamentally, in relation to the GPL. The force of law which the GPL
utilizes, at base, is the force of copyright.
In respect to SCO, given that they are redistributing the IP of others (i.e. the many, many coders who contributed to Linux), their only viable statements at this point are "We are, in fact, complying with the GPL" or "We are guilty of criminal copyright infringement"--not "The GPL sucks/is-legally-invalid/is-bad-for-business." Either they are complying with the GPL's conditions for duplicating copyrighted material, or they are guilty of criminal copyright infringement right now. Yes, right now.
Given this, the focus should arguably be on how the GPL can be enhanced to continue to provide a framework of conditions for the redistribution of Open Source which benefits everyone, rather than how the court might "test" its contents, or whether the GPL text passes some subjective opinion as to whether it's legally "neat-and-tidy".
This has been mentioned before, but I'm going to try putting it differently in hopes the point gets propagated more effectively.
There seems to be some belief that the GPL needs to be "tested in court" and that this will directly impact SCO's litigation.
Let me reiterate that the GPL describes conditions for the distribution of copyrighted material, and the baseline for doing this is: No.
Even if the GPL said something ridiculous like "You must send me a picture of yourself wearing a pink tutu before you can redistribute my code" it would still be "valid". Your choices as a company wanting to redistribute would then be, get the tights on or don't copy. The terms for copying a copyrighted work are at the copyright holder's complete discretion, and, fundamentally, only he can define them, not SCO or IBM. Fortunately, each copyright holder contributing to Linux has chosen a set of conditions which work to the benefit of all.
I like Borders bookstores, but this venture wouldn't get my investment money.
One thing that struck us is that the movie business (gets) two-thirds of their money from their archives, while magazines are getting zero. That's a huge pool of content that's not monetized at all.
By "archives" here does he mean DVDs, videotapes? I would think so, if it accounts for a 2/3 of revenue. I think there's a fundamental distinction here, in that a DVD has the advantages of rentability, playback on the medium of your choice, and reusability, driven by Hollywood's well-oiled publicity machinery. As such, it can command relatively high prices. A magazine archive strikes me as, well, old magazines. Why does Borders presume that the magazine industry would not have thought of the idea that they could keep selling their magazines? Certainly the viability of that doesn't depend on his "platform", and to a large extent the market has already spoken on this by the (nonexistent) profits old magazines can generate.
Co-branding is an interesting business activity, because some of the great success stories in business are co-branding models. One specific example is when Dryers Ice Cream and Starbucks got together and made their Java Chip ice cream. It became the best-selling ice cream in the world.
Nice buzzword, but I'm not sure how the example he cites has any relevance to the business model he's selling. Dryers and Starbucks worked together to develop a new product; what he's talking about seems to be just another portal.
We've had a lot of meetings with them--extremely positive meetings--and I'm sure they'll come into the platform in short order.
Okay, what is this "platform"? I think I can substitute "web server" everywhere you're using the term "platform" and it'll mean the same thing. I'm not seeing any mention of any competitive differentators in this interview.
The more content that moves behind the pay wall, the more willing people will be to pay.
This is just bad logic. How does B follow from A here? In fact, I'd suggest the opposite, that this basically is just a bait-and-switch model applied to the internet. Personally, I'll go to the sites which give me useful content as a baseline.
Another was an execution error: They mixed really high-quality content with Joe's dissertation on something. And strongly branded publishers don't like to see their content next to second-rate content.
Hmm... oddly, I usually find Slashdot at a filter of 5 considerably better than the "strongly branded publishers". Or moreso, everything2. I must prefer "second-rate content".
They become too focused on making money in the short term, like paid inclusion does. I'm a fanatic about that--I just think that's a horrible thing. If you're telling people that you're paid to do this, like Google does when it separates its paid links from the rest, that's fine. That's good business. If you're not telling people, however, it just seems disingenuous, and it is certainly no way to build a brand.
Okay, so your platform is going to have 140 magazines you represent, from whom you receive your revenue, and you'll offer the user a choice of... those 140 links. Sounds like paid inclusion to me.
In essence, I think Borders should be looking for revenue not in co-branding between him and other word shops, but co-branding between himself and the user. That's what, IMHO, an internet user is most likely to pay for; a system that tailors itself to him, and which he is a participant in, a la Amazon, eBay or participatory sites like this very one. The primary thing the internet distribution channel can give the user is time, in speed of accessibility and speed of finding relevant content. The second thing is variety, which the range of, for example, on-line gaming can offer that 140 channels of old magazine content cannot. I'd suggest he start there with his business model.
Thank-you for starting a whole new technical business arena which is *truly uniquely* profitable.
Please note that I have not transferred permission for you to use the copyrighted material this e-mail constitues, and as it now resides on one of your servers, please forward your check or money order for $500 to me at your earliest convenience.
The "accountability" thing is going to be quite a trick. This is the same government, after all, whose own GAO (General Accounting Office) concluded that government agency accounting is so bad, there's no way they can determine how much the government is actually spending--and that if this degree of lax accounting was taking place in a private corporation, the owners would face legal action.
Do you know how much thought goes into writing, say, the BASIC interpreter for the original IBM-PC? If you don't, I doubt you have coded much.
While we're naming things, name me one significant system that doesn't take any ideas from any other sources. Integrating others' ideas and being able to determine which ideas have merit is a skill as important as "original" thought.
And if you think Bill is the only one who made any money off of what Microsoft developed, you're just wrong. It's called "salaries", and the people doing the "work" as you define it get them too.
There's one factor regarding spam that I would think would throw these calculations way off. That being, pornographic spam.
Given that a porn spam that ends up in a minor's mailbox would be a felony, the cost of prosecuting the hundreds of thousands of cases of this would boost the "total cost" considerably, I think. And that's discounting any potential effects on the minors themselves.
As this is a crime, and the legal system should be obliged to follow through with prosecuting complaints, I think these costs should be figured into the calculations as well.
Your point is well taken, but there's a big difference in degree.
Even the most die-hard anti-Bill person would have to agree that he did something of value, or at least an attempt to do something of value, for the financial rewards he got.
Communism says Bill, you, that Indian, and the sk8r-dude who never does or tries to do anything, should all get the same paycheck.
Of course this is trivially obvious, but to call both "fraud" is ridiculous. NYT loses none of it's ad revenue from visits (probably makes more on charging the advertisers for the Slashdot hits than loses on subscriptions), doesn't disallow this by taking it up with Google if they have a problem with it, doesn't disguise their identity or hide the activity, blah blah blah.
I think it's important to look deeper into the viability of free (as in beer) software than to just look at the price tag of the software itself, in evaluating its profitability for developers.
A decent example is this respect is IE; Microsoft charges nothing for the browser, but has the work been profitable for them? Absolutely.
Another good example is Red Hat; they lose money on the boxed distro itself, and make money on support.
There's no better way to be the uber-guru for a piece of popular software than to have written it. Doing Open Source software may change the nature of where the dollars come in, but that doesn't mean it can't be found.
While I'm certainly against governments mandating development methods, there are good technical arguments for coding a web site in a cookie-minimal manner.
Firstly, you can't in any way guarantee their availability for a given client. The user may have chosen to turn them off, they may be working at a company who's corporate policy is to block cookies, they may even be using a browser which does not support cookies. This is a "bear your user in mind" kind of consideration, similar to avoiding non-standardized Javascript in your web site code.
Secondly, "session" variables under IIS (and equivalents) don't scale well. The "scope" of a session variable is at most the server it's running on. Where you could easily redirect to a mirrored server if your site is written such that it doesn't rely on session variables, you suddenly have a significant problem if it does and you try to scale it to a server farm.
Thirdly, for most all capabilities cookies give you, you can easily implement this by passing an identifier from page to page in the URLs. Use this identifier to track which user/session it is, and look up your state values in a database table.
Fourthly, HTTP is at it's core, supposedly a stateless protocol. Cookies go against the spirit of HTTP, which, though it may seem an aesthetic point, leads to various issues such as the story's, in which a stateful implementation requires major rework when forced to support a stateless one.
You're making a very significant assertion that the end-users of a technology can be sued if some other company has appropriated others' IP into it.
You have not provided any legal precedents for this assertion; until someone does, I'm taking your comments much like Microsoft's "generous" offer of indemnity; building on hot air and implying a need for a protection I probably don't need at all.
I'm glad to see the term "extortion" is now getting widespread press. The previous common description for SCO's activities has been "FUD" (apparently Linus' preferred term), and this unfortunately implies a semi-respectable strategy that many tech companies employ against competing products.
It's important not to underestimate the effect that labels can have in arguing one's case in a busy, harried world of people marginally familiar with an issue. Calling something "FUD" might not sway an IT manager or politician for whom the SCO issue is not completely clear; calling it "baseless extortion" is much more likely to raise the kind of ire needed to counteract this particular FUD in the mindset of the public and relevant decision-makers.
I'm imagining that maybe an even-worse scenario for the web than some quality web sites becoming unavailable due to there companies being litigated out of existence, is a universal presence of web sites whose functionality is twisted in bizarre ways by the demands of avoiding IP lawsuit threats.
Nothing is going to be quite as frustrating to me as having the web sites I visit being generally well-executed and useful, except for pockmarks of infuriating work-arounds to avoid the mandates of common-sense IP restrictions. Think of workarounds for bugs in an application, but the bugs can never be fixed.
I think, ultimately, all the dot.com companies will suffer from this patent infighting. All consumer desires have alternate means of satisfaction in a market economy; unfortunately, people might find going back to the phone to conduct business the necessary next step in the web's "evolution".
In a similar vein, my Compaq Presario 3000 laptop apparently won't boot Linux at all.
I've tried the bootable CDs from 3 different distros, and each starts reading the CD as the first BIOS boot device, resets the machine, and repeats, ad infinitum.
I haven't spent a great deal of time trying to hunt down what the issue might be, as I decided to just install to a more Linux-friendly Vaio laptop of mine, and leave the Presario as XP, but if other people are having similar issues it might be interesting whether there's a recent general trend toward Linux-unfriendly hardware from certain manufacturers.
Again, I'm asking for actual legal precedent or trends of this for any domain to which copyright applies.
Continuing my original analogy, despite the fact that recent copies of the New York Times have (as I recall) demonstrably contained plaigarized material, I do not believe the original copyright owner even can demand that I give it back or cease to "use" it. Nor does this make any of the millions of readers outlaws.
Slashdot Mirror
SCO's e-mail neglects to mention that since they have the e-mail itself copyrighted, and you're now using it on one of your computers by opening it, you already owe them a sum they will "conveniently supply"...
I amazed crafty Darl would miss this obvious profit opportunity!
I'll go ahead and comment on this "conspiracy" notion.
It's hardly unusual for people to argue for what they perceive to be in their best interests, where they feel their interests intersect with their client/employer/customer.
If Walmart argues that they have the best products at the lowest prices, is that a "conspiracy"? Is there anyone in business that actively argues against what they are in business for?
From an ethical standpoint, where such possible conflicts seem to exist, one might consider the idea that "I am not obligated to argue against myself."
To put it more directly, I've known tech people who see their institutions as basically wrappers around their technology. Forming a corporation is not difficult. Deciding to sell widget X (or teach subject Y) is not difficult. What is difficult, and what the competitive differentiator is for any given company, is the development and support of their products and services, and that centers around their technical competence. Techies should not feel guilty because their argument has won over some PHB's; they should see it as a competitive reality.
This brings to mind an idea relating to SCO's continuing absurdities in trying to own and/or destroy Linux.
With a major communist government becoming increasingly invested in Linux, everyone can be assured there will be at least one completely unassailable source of Linux distribution and development, like:
SCO: We'd like you to pay us, oh... [spins wheel-o-pricing] $1499 for each processor you're running Linux on...
People's Republic of China: Did we mention our extensive nuclear arsenal, deployable to Utah within an hour?
SCO: Oh... yes... nevermind.
Given this, maybe Linux users can play the same game of arbitrary definition that SCO has been playing. If worse comes to worse, one could just say, "Oh, Linux? We're not running Linux here. We're running a non-infringing, custom, Linux-based operating system. Feel free to prove otherwise." And with a perpetual source of FTP servers to obtain the "Linux-based operating system", SCO would have a truly daunting task of stopping it or charging their hoped-for extortion fees.
I'll take the hint of the number of your comments modded "troll", and not bite on this one.
There's an example from back in the 80's that still probably serves as a good engineering reference for people working on hardware/software driver issues.
In those days of yore (only in the computer industry can one refer to something 20 years ago as "yore"...) there was the Commodore 64. It retains it's place as a pioneering home computer in that it offered very good (for the time) graphics and sound capability, and an amazing 64K of RAM, in an inexpensive unit. But then came its bastard son...
The 1541 floppy disk drive. It became the storage option for a home user once they became infuriated enough with the capabilites of cassette-tape backup to pony up for storage on a real medium. Unfortunately, the 1541 was slow. Unbelievably slow. Slow enough to think, just maybe, there were little dwarven people in your serial interface cable running your bits back and forth by hand.
Now, a very unique attribute of the 1541 drive was that it had its own 6502 processor and firmware. Plausibly, having in effect a "disk-drive-coprocessor" would accelerate your data transfer. It did not. Not remotely. Running through a disassembly of the 6502 firmware revealed endless, meandering code to provide what would appear, on the surface, to be a pretty straightforward piece of functionality: send data bits over the data pin and handshake it over the handshake signal pin.
As the market forces of installed base and demand for faster speed imposed themselves, solutions to the 1541 speed problem were found by third party companies. Software was released which performed such functions as loading from disk and backing up floppies as speeds that were many, many times faster than the 1541's base hardware and firmware could offer.
The top of this particular speed-enhancement heap was a nice strategy involving utilizing both the Commodore 64's and the 1541's processors, and the serial connection, optimally. Literally optimally. Assembly routines were written to run on the both 64 and the 1541 side to exactly synchronize the sending and receiving of bits on a clock-cycle by clock-cycle basis. Taking advantage of the fact both 6502's were running at 1 Mhz, the 1541's code would start blasting the data across the serial line to the corresponding 64 code, which would pull it off the serial bus within a 3-clock-cycle window (you could not write the two routines to be any more in sync than a couple 6502 instructions). This method used no handshaking whatsoever for large blocks of data being sent from the drive to the computer, and so, in an added speed coup, the handshaking line was also used for data, doubling the effective speed.
The 1541 still seems pertinent as an example of a computer function that one would probably think would best be done primarily on a software level (running on the Commodore 64), but was engineered instead to utilize a more-hardware approach (on the 1541), only to be rescued by better software to utilize the hardware (on both).
There's probably still a few design lessons from the "ancient" 1541, for both the hardware and the software guys.
I'll leave the obvious grab for the "+5 Funny" to others... :)
Unfortunately, the claims here are rather unspecific and within the range of statistical noise where specific.
Given this, I'm betting that this will end up in the ambiguous zone along with, say, Chitosan, where some studies indicate it's useful, and others indicate it's useless, along with the smell (N.P.I.) of bias surrounding who's performing and quoting a given study.
If you can live with those caveats, there are other non-pharmaceutical substances that arguably have a larger positive effect than this stuff on cognition; DHEA and St. John's Wort come to mind.
Yes, this is an interesting fact to note. I wouldn't be surprised if SCO's own lawyers have realized the consequences of redistributing without complying with the GPL, and that's the underlying reason they're still making it available via FTP.
So, I wouldn't be surprised to see SCO continuing to talk out of both sides of their mouth, one half attacking the GPL and the other stating their compliance with it.
It's important to understand where the "force of law" exists, fundamentally, in relation to the GPL. The force of law which the GPL utilizes, at base, is the force of copyright.
In respect to SCO, given that they are redistributing the IP of others (i.e. the many, many coders who contributed to Linux), their only viable statements at this point are "We are, in fact, complying with the GPL" or "We are guilty of criminal copyright infringement"--not "The GPL sucks/is-legally-invalid/is-bad-for-business." Either they are complying with the GPL's conditions for duplicating copyrighted material, or they are guilty of criminal copyright infringement right now. Yes, right now.
Given this, the focus should arguably be on how the GPL can be enhanced to continue to provide a framework of conditions for the redistribution of Open Source which benefits everyone, rather than how the court might "test" its contents, or whether the GPL text passes some subjective opinion as to whether it's legally "neat-and-tidy".
I suggest we all, in a show of universal brotherhood and cultural tolerance, join hands and announce to the world:
Linux: It gots much flavah!
This has been mentioned before, but I'm going to try putting it differently in hopes the point gets propagated more effectively.
There seems to be some belief that the GPL needs to be "tested in court" and that this will directly impact SCO's litigation.
Let me reiterate that the GPL describes conditions for the distribution of copyrighted material, and the baseline for doing this is: No.
Even if the GPL said something ridiculous like "You must send me a picture of yourself wearing a pink tutu before you can redistribute my code" it would still be "valid". Your choices as a company wanting to redistribute would then be, get the tights on or don't copy. The terms for copying a copyrighted work are at the copyright holder's complete discretion, and, fundamentally, only he can define them, not SCO or IBM. Fortunately, each copyright holder contributing to Linux has chosen a set of conditions which work to the benefit of all.
I like Borders bookstores, but this venture wouldn't get my investment money.
One thing that struck us is that the movie business (gets) two-thirds of their money from their archives, while magazines are getting zero. That's a huge pool of content that's not monetized at all.
By "archives" here does he mean DVDs, videotapes? I would think so, if it accounts for a 2/3 of revenue. I think there's a fundamental distinction here, in that a DVD has the advantages of rentability, playback on the medium of your choice, and reusability, driven by Hollywood's well-oiled publicity machinery. As such, it can command relatively high prices. A magazine archive strikes me as, well, old magazines. Why does Borders presume that the magazine industry would not have thought of the idea that they could keep selling their magazines? Certainly the viability of that doesn't depend on his "platform", and to a large extent the market has already spoken on this by the (nonexistent) profits old magazines can generate.
Co-branding is an interesting business activity, because some of the great success stories in business are co-branding models. One specific example is when Dryers Ice Cream and Starbucks got together and made their Java Chip ice cream. It became the best-selling ice cream in the world.
Nice buzzword, but I'm not sure how the example he cites has any relevance to the business model he's selling. Dryers and Starbucks worked together to develop a new product; what he's talking about seems to be just another portal.
We've had a lot of meetings with them--extremely positive meetings--and I'm sure they'll come into the platform in short order.
Okay, what is this "platform"? I think I can substitute "web server" everywhere you're using the term "platform" and it'll mean the same thing. I'm not seeing any mention of any competitive differentators in this interview.
The more content that moves behind the pay wall, the more willing people will be to pay.
This is just bad logic. How does B follow from A here? In fact, I'd suggest the opposite, that this basically is just a bait-and-switch model applied to the internet. Personally, I'll go to the sites which give me useful content as a baseline.
Another was an execution error: They mixed really high-quality content with Joe's dissertation on something. And strongly branded publishers don't like to see their content next to second-rate content.
Hmm... oddly, I usually find Slashdot at a filter of 5 considerably better than the "strongly branded publishers". Or moreso, everything2. I must prefer "second-rate content".
They become too focused on making money in the short term, like paid inclusion does. I'm a fanatic about that--I just think that's a horrible thing. If you're telling people that you're paid to do this, like Google does when it separates its paid links from the rest, that's fine. That's good business. If you're not telling people, however, it just seems disingenuous, and it is certainly no way to build a brand.
Okay, so your platform is going to have 140 magazines you represent, from whom you receive your revenue, and you'll offer the user a choice of... those 140 links. Sounds like paid inclusion to me.
In essence, I think Borders should be looking for revenue not in co-branding between him and other word shops, but co-branding between himself and the user. That's what, IMHO, an internet user is most likely to pay for; a system that tailors itself to him, and which he is a participant in, a la Amazon, eBay or participatory sites like this very one. The primary thing the internet distribution channel can give the user is time, in speed of accessibility and speed of finding relevant content. The second thing is variety, which the range of, for example, on-line gaming can offer that 140 channels of old magazine content cannot. I'd suggest he start there with his business model.
Here's mine...
Thank-you for starting a whole new technical business arena which is *truly uniquely* profitable.
Please note that I have not transferred permission for you to use the copyrighted material this e-mail constitues, and as it now resides on one of your servers, please forward your check or money order for $500 to me at your earliest convenience.
The "accountability" thing is going to be quite a trick. This is the same government, after all, whose own GAO (General Accounting Office) concluded that government agency accounting is so bad, there's no way they can determine how much the government is actually spending--and that if this degree of lax accounting was taking place in a private corporation, the owners would face legal action.
Come on. This is just blatantly wrong.
Do you know how much thought goes into writing, say, the BASIC interpreter for the original IBM-PC? If you don't, I doubt you have coded much.
While we're naming things, name me one significant system that doesn't take any ideas from any other sources. Integrating others' ideas and being able to determine which ideas have merit is a skill as important as "original" thought.
And if you think Bill is the only one who made any money off of what Microsoft developed, you're just wrong. It's called "salaries", and the people doing the "work" as you define it get them too.
There's one factor regarding spam that I would think would throw these calculations way off. That being, pornographic spam.
Given that a porn spam that ends up in a minor's mailbox would be a felony, the cost of prosecuting the hundreds of thousands of cases of this would boost the "total cost" considerably, I think. And that's discounting any potential effects on the minors themselves.
As this is a crime, and the legal system should be obliged to follow through with prosecuting complaints, I think these costs should be figured into the calculations as well.
Your point is well taken, but there's a big difference in degree.
Even the most die-hard anti-Bill person would have to agree that he did something of value, or at least an attempt to do something of value, for the financial rewards he got.
Communism says Bill, you, that Indian, and the sk8r-dude who never does or tries to do anything, should all get the same paycheck.
Communism as suggested by Marx was not evil at all...
Whether or not one sees it as "evil" depends greatly on one's opinion as to whether equal rewards for unequal work, imposed by force, is evil.
Of course this is trivially obvious, but to call both "fraud" is ridiculous. NYT loses none of it's ad revenue from visits (probably makes more on charging the advertisers for the Slashdot hits than loses on subscriptions), doesn't disallow this by taking it up with Google if they have a problem with it, doesn't disguise their identity or hide the activity, blah blah blah.
:)
Sorry, but I'm a stickler for words.
I think it's important to look deeper into the viability of free (as in beer) software than to just look at the price tag of the software itself, in evaluating its profitability for developers.
A decent example is this respect is IE; Microsoft charges nothing for the browser, but has the work been profitable for them? Absolutely.
Another good example is Red Hat; they lose money on the boxed distro itself, and make money on support.
There's no better way to be the uber-guru for a piece of popular software than to have written it. Doing Open Source software may change the nature of where the dollars come in, but that doesn't mean it can't be found.
While I'm certainly against governments mandating development methods, there are good technical arguments for coding a web site in a cookie-minimal manner.
Firstly, you can't in any way guarantee their availability for a given client. The user may have chosen to turn them off, they may be working at a company who's corporate policy is to block cookies, they may even be using a browser which does not support cookies. This is a "bear your user in mind" kind of consideration, similar to avoiding non-standardized Javascript in your web site code.
Secondly, "session" variables under IIS (and equivalents) don't scale well. The "scope" of a session variable is at most the server it's running on. Where you could easily redirect to a mirrored server if your site is written such that it doesn't rely on session variables, you suddenly have a significant problem if it does and you try to scale it to a server farm.
Thirdly, for most all capabilities cookies give you, you can easily implement this by passing an identifier from page to page in the URLs. Use this identifier to track which user/session it is, and look up your state values in a database table.
Fourthly, HTTP is at it's core, supposedly a stateless protocol. Cookies go against the spirit of HTTP, which, though it may seem an aesthetic point, leads to various issues such as the story's, in which a stateful implementation requires major rework when forced to support a stateless one.
You're making a very significant assertion that the end-users of a technology can be sued if some other company has appropriated others' IP into it.
You have not provided any legal precedents for this assertion; until someone does, I'm taking your comments much like Microsoft's "generous" offer of indemnity; building on hot air and implying a need for a protection I probably don't need at all.
I'm glad to see the term "extortion" is now getting widespread press. The previous common description for SCO's activities has been "FUD" (apparently Linus' preferred term), and this unfortunately implies a semi-respectable strategy that many tech companies employ against competing products.
It's important not to underestimate the effect that labels can have in arguing one's case in a busy, harried world of people marginally familiar with an issue. Calling something "FUD" might not sway an IT manager or politician for whom the SCO issue is not completely clear; calling it "baseless extortion" is much more likely to raise the kind of ire needed to counteract this particular FUD in the mindset of the public and relevant decision-makers.
I'm imagining that maybe an even-worse scenario for the web than some quality web sites becoming unavailable due to there companies being litigated out of existence, is a universal presence of web sites whose functionality is twisted in bizarre ways by the demands of avoiding IP lawsuit threats.
Nothing is going to be quite as frustrating to me as having the web sites I visit being generally well-executed and useful, except for pockmarks of infuriating work-arounds to avoid the mandates of common-sense IP restrictions. Think of workarounds for bugs in an application, but the bugs can never be fixed.
I think, ultimately, all the dot.com companies will suffer from this patent infighting. All consumer desires have alternate means of satisfaction in a market economy; unfortunately, people might find going back to the phone to conduct business the necessary next step in the web's "evolution".
In a similar vein, my Compaq Presario 3000 laptop apparently won't boot Linux at all.
I've tried the bootable CDs from 3 different distros, and each starts reading the CD as the first BIOS boot device, resets the machine, and repeats, ad infinitum.
I haven't spent a great deal of time trying to hunt down what the issue might be, as I decided to just install to a more Linux-friendly Vaio laptop of mine, and leave the Presario as XP, but if other people are having similar issues it might be interesting whether there's a recent general trend toward Linux-unfriendly hardware from certain manufacturers.
Again, I'm asking for actual legal precedent or trends of this for any domain to which copyright applies.
Continuing my original analogy, despite the fact that recent copies of the New York Times have (as I recall) demonstrably contained plaigarized material, I do not believe the original copyright owner even can demand that I give it back or cease to "use" it. Nor does this make any of the millions of readers outlaws.