Yep, just as I thought. Microsoft is a business. You are in business. Therefore, you are Microsoft.
All business is evil; making money from one's creative work is evil; failing to give away one's entire output for free is evil.
Thank Heaven for the GPL. One line of my code in your application, and I have the God-given right to prevent you from making any money off of your evil scheme.
I'm really beginning to see the light here. Let's monkey-wrench all of those evil businesses with the GPL. They'll never make a dime! They'll go out of business! They'll die like the bastards they are!
Sure.
Wow, you sure are doing an awesome job of addressing my arguments. Are you always this impressive? It sure takes a brilliant mind to equate "evil" and "amoral". You have to be equally brilliant to equate an individual and a business.
So who is it exactly that is forcing you to use GPLed code in your proprietary software? Nobody? Thought so. Poor you, having to write the code yourself because you don't want to play fair with the author(s) of the code (um, it did occur to you to contact them and arrange a separate license, didn't it?) and the community at large. My heart bleeds for you.
There are some people who are figuring out (or have done so already) how to make money with the GPL. Looks like you're not one of them. Pity.
Well, good luck with your business. It must be at the brink of total annihilation with all that nasty, horrible, evil GPLed code running around out there.
After reading your posting above, I have seen the light. All business is Necessarily Evil Incarnate. There is no such thing as a responsible or caring business, business owner, or entrepreneur. All software vendors everywhere, and all programmers who don't embrace the GPL and give away all of their work, are clearly only out to exploit users. Programming is an evil occupation and must be stomped out. Let's ban high salaries for programmers and destroy their jobs!
Yeah, right!
I don't dispute that there are some small business owners and entrepreneurs that are inclined to do the right thing even when unprofitable. THEY AREN'T THE PROBLEM. And they aren't terribly successful, either, are they? Not compared with behemoths like Microsoft, AT&T, Intel, etc.
If you believe so strongly in the ethics of business then YOU tell ME why we have all those problems caused by business I outlined in my previous article.
It's not my belief that all businesses are inherently evil or anything. To be evil is to take joy in the suffering of others. But I will contend that most of the larger ones, and perhaps most businesses in general, are amoral essentially by definition. It's the natural consequence of your primary (if not only) goal being to maximize your profit. In short, many (if not most) businesses don't give a shit about anything except their bottom line.
If I write some code and let the rest of the world use it, I can generally rely on the individuals out there who improve it to release their improvements back to the community. Most of the programmers out there in my experience tend to want to do that since they aren't in it strictly for the profit. I can't rely on businesses to do the same. Why? Because their improvements give them a competitive advantage! Duh! You wouldn't want to give up your competitive advantage if you're a business, would you? Just so that others can use your improvements freely and perhaps gain a competitive advantage over YOU? Didn't think so.
And yet, that seems to be exactly how you expect most businesses to behave, based on your previous articles. How naive can you get?
Because of that, I'll use the GPL (or, in the case of libraries, the LGPL) or something similar to insure that my code AND ALL CHANGES TO IT remain free. It really sucks that I have to resort to a license to insure this, but it's the only way for me to INSURE that the code remains free. Otherwise some capable business can come along, snag my code, improve it enough that people will prefer to use their version instead, and never release the improvements back to the community because they want to maintain their "competitive advantage". The state of the art DOES NOT improve in that situation, now does it?
You complain that the authoring of GPLed code forces you to reimplement that code in order to use it in your proprietary product. Well I will complain that the fact that YOUR code is proprietary to begin with forces ALL THE REST OF US to reimplement it ourselves just so we don't have to wait around for you to get around to fixing your bugs because you're too busy implementing snazzy new features. After all, it's the new features that sell, not the fixed bugs, right? Microsoft should be sufficient proof of that to you. And you're a business, so you'll do whatever generates the most profit, right?
So: on one hand we have a few businesses that are "disadvantaged" because they have to reimplement something that already exists in GPLed form. And on the other hand we have the ENTIRE REST OF THE COMMUNITY that has to reimplement proprietary code in order to extricate itself from the support nightmare that proprietary software is famous for. Gee, it's real tough for me to decide which of the two needs is more important in the long run...
I suspect it's because you ARE a business, and can only see your own needs, that you are having so much trouble with this. It would be nice if you could see and acknowledge the needs of the rest of the world. Perhaps then you would understand why a license like the GPL is a good thing to have available and why it has advantages in many situations. And why it may be the best thing for the world at large in the long run.
Oh, by the way, I don't think you need to worry about programmers going hungry. Not as long as there's a need for new software. See, not all types of software get implemented by an individual hacker in his spare time. Many are implemented as a result of a company's specific needs. If that company wants the software to be implemented, they have two choices: wait indefinitely for someone in the community to do it on their own initiative, or pay someone to do it. I doubt they'd elect to wait if it's something they need. Interestingly enough, it's pretty reasonable to suspect that the software will be cheaper to implement if the programmer can GPL it (advantages: he can use any existing GPLed software as a foundation, and if the program is useful enough he can get the community to help in the development). But the programmer still gets paid either way.
I also don't think you have to worry about programmers becoming commodities. A commodity is something that can be replaced at will. The very nature of programming is such that this won't happen: even the best programmer can't replace another and become instantly productive. It may take quite some time for him to become familiar with the existing code and the reasons for its current state. This makes an individual programmer (as long as he's reasonably good) valuable.
I do not agree with the ideals of business. It's selfish, profiteering, and soulless.
It seems to me that this is rather a sweeping condemnation. What about the many good and ethical businesspeople out there? Or, in fact, all of the individuals out there? (In the most basic sense, each one of us is really a business comprised of a single worker.)
One of the greatest deceptions of the Free Software Foundation is that it goads adherents into attacking "business" as if it were the enemy. But ironically, as Pogo Possum once put it, "I have seen the enemy, and he is us!"
The GPL creates conflicts by setting one programmer against another. And only the FSF wins.
There is a sharp distinction between the behavior of an individual and the behavior of a business, and you don't seem to grasp why that difference exists. Perhaps I can explain.
Beyond meeting the basic needs of survival (which includes providing for his family if he has one), what is usually the primary goal of an individual? Answer: to be as happy as possible. Most people are pretty happy with their situation as long as their needs are being met. There may be things that they feel would be nice to have but which would require too much sacrifice in other areas to achieve. These people will do things like take vacations, play sports, play computer games (well, some of them anyway:-), improve their house, etc., etc. They do many different things in large part because they like to do many different things. They are willing to sacrifice some of their resources to the greater good as long as it doesn't impact their survivability, because doing so makes them feel better. Many of the things they do are because they feel it's the right thing to do...someone else benefits from it and that's a good thing.
Now, beyond meeting the basic needs of survival, what is the primary goal of a business? Answer: to make as much money as possible for its owners. In fact, my understanding is that the law REQUIRES this of a publicly-traded company. So the business itself is generally willing to do anything it can to make money. If that means tempering its responsiveness to customers (for instance, by limiting the size of the customer support department), so be it. These decisions are NOT made based on whether or not it's the RIGHT thing to do, but on whether or not it's the PROFITABLE thing to do.
This distinction between an individual and a business is so fundamental that I can't believe you don't see it. Why the hell do you think the most successful companies (to wit: Microsoft) are often (if not usually) the worst from an ethical standpoint? The answer should be obvious: because NOT ONLY do you not have to be ethical to be profitable, it's often UNPROFITABLE to be ethical! As an example, it's often more profitable to kill your competition through out-of-band means (e.g., FUD) than it is to improve your product.
If you don't believe that, as an individual, the behavior of businesses isn't something to worry about, you need only ask yourself who out there wants to make your private information into a tradeable commodity and is willing to attempt to coerce Congress into passing legislation making this possible. Ask yourself whether it's businesses or individuals who are responsible for the current state of the patent system and who are taking the greatest advantage of it. Ask yourself whether it's individuals or businesses that wish to impede the use of MP3s as a means of music distribution. Ask yourself how many businesses aren't willing to lay off a part of their workforce unless the company will unequivocally die if they don't. Contrast that with how many businesses lay off a part of their workforce regularly only in order to INCREASE the profits, even though the individuals in that workforce depend on the business for their livelihood (i.e., the layoff hurts the individuals being laid off a lot more than the company would be hurt by keeping them). Ask yourself exactly WHO is pushing for the UCITA legislation -- it ain't individuals, that's for sure.
As for the GPL, you must have some strange ideas of what it means to truly advance the state of the art when, through binary-only publication (i.e., proprietary software releases), those advances aren't made available for everyone to see and improve upon. And I don't know about you believing that it should be your right to use someone else's freely-available code in your for-profit product when you're the only person who will see the profits (you're a business, remember? That means that your goal is maximum profit. Can't achieve that by paying someone for their freely-available code when you can just grab it and use it without paying him a goddamned thing. This is EXACTLY what the GPL is designed to prevent).
Actually all you need to do is find a company who was aware of a flaw in their system for 10 years and did nothing to fix it. Then you deservedly will reap a windfall lawsuit.
With today's legal climate here in the U.S.?? I doubt the amount of time the company was aware of the problem would matter. I would wager that EVEN IF THE COMPANY WAS DEVELOPING A FIX AT THE TIME THE SUIT WAS BROUGHT they would lose a lawsuit such as this.
I'm with the other guy that said this: You smell a lot like a civil litigation lawyer.
I've been using the wavepath service for almost a year now. I think I was one of their very first paying customers. I have 512Kb symmetric service (you can get up to 1Mb), and I love it. It does not seem any less reliable than the wired T1 we have at work, and wavepath seems to be very responsive. I had it stop working last week, and within 2 hours there was a guy crawling on my roof. I went with wireless because I live in the hills and could not get either cable or DSL. If you are in the bay area and can't get DSL or cable modem, then I suggest you check out wavepath.
I, too, have been a customer almost since the beginning, with 384k upstream and downstream.
The downstream screams but the upstream sucks. It hasn't always been that way but it has gradually gotten worse over time. I now get at most 10K/sec upstream, but it's typically a lot less for anything but TCP.
But worst of all, when my outbound is close to saturated (which doesn't take much anymore), the ping times go through the roof: I've seen as much as 1000ms round-trip time consistently when my outbound is saturated. Normally I see 60ms. I've verified that it's the wireless connection itself. I can easily make the ping times go to 500ms by using mtr with 0.1 sec intervals to a site 8 hops away. At 64 bytes/packet, that should put a load of only 5K/sec on my outbound connection, but it's enough to make my pings go to 400-600ms and the packet loss to go to 30-40%.
This means that I can't play Quake on the 'net because the outbound gets saturated too easily with datagram packets and the ping times skyrocket. I'd be better off with a modem for Quake.:-(
Their customer service is top-notch but it looks to me like they're way oversubscribed in my region. That's no surprise: I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley (Santa Clara) and neither DSL nor cablemodems are available here.
Supposedly cablemodems will become available here at the end of September (yeah, right...I'll believe it when I see it). When they do, I'm going to take a very hard look at them.
It may be true that a geek man will tend to get along best with a geek girl.
But that doesn't matter. Why? Because the geek men outnumber the geek girls by at least 5:1, and probably more like 10:1. Which means that at least 80% of the geek guys are going to have to "settle" for someone other than a geek girl (at least in the sense that you mean it here).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. One needn't be totally into something to appreciate and support someone else's interest in it.
There are some days that I wish my Significant Other (tm) shared my interest in computers. But given all her other wonderful qualities, I think I can live without it.
I knew it was a matter of time before someone accused me of this. Jesus, people. I'm just saying that maybe one of your arguments doesn't hold water and that while Divx has its problems, there are a lot of good ideas there.
I don't doubt that there are a few good ideas there, but they're so overwhelmed by the flaws that they're difficult to detect.:-)
But the discussion thus far has centered primarily on the technical, financial, and ease-of-use flaws in DIVX. Few have discussed the real problem with DIVX:
Suppose that technically and economically, DIVX were flawless. It would still be a really bad idea. Why?
Well, suppose DIVX really takes off, enough so that it kills normal DVD, videotapes, and laser discs. If it were technically and economically brilliant, it might have a chance of doing just that.
But suddenly, one centralized company controls everybody's ability to view movies. This, my friend, is a monopoly. And it means that Circuit City and their lawyer cohorts can now set prices as high as they like. And they will...just low enough that people still pay up, but not any lower than that. The studios love this idea because they'll be reaping the benefits as well.
You see, the best thing about DVD is that it encourages competition: between movie studios, between video stores, between DVD player manufacturers, etc. DIVX would eliminate virtually all of that.
And that's why DIVX, or any similar single-source scheme, cannot be allowed to flourish.
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Wow, you sure are doing an awesome job of addressing my arguments. Are you always this impressive? It sure takes a brilliant mind to equate "evil" and "amoral". You have to be equally brilliant to equate an individual and a business.
So who is it exactly that is forcing you to use GPLed code in your proprietary software? Nobody? Thought so. Poor you, having to write the code yourself because you don't want to play fair with the author(s) of the code (um, it did occur to you to contact them and arrange a separate license, didn't it?) and the community at large. My heart bleeds for you.
There are some people who are figuring out (or have done so already) how to make money with the GPL. Looks like you're not one of them. Pity.
Well, good luck with your business. It must be at the brink of total annihilation with all that nasty, horrible, evil GPLed code running around out there.
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I don't dispute that there are some small business owners and entrepreneurs that are inclined to do the right thing even when unprofitable. THEY AREN'T THE PROBLEM. And they aren't terribly successful, either, are they? Not compared with behemoths like Microsoft, AT&T, Intel, etc.
If you believe so strongly in the ethics of business then YOU tell ME why we have all those problems caused by business I outlined in my previous article.
It's not my belief that all businesses are inherently evil or anything. To be evil is to take joy in the suffering of others. But I will contend that most of the larger ones, and perhaps most businesses in general, are amoral essentially by definition. It's the natural consequence of your primary (if not only) goal being to maximize your profit. In short, many (if not most) businesses don't give a shit about anything except their bottom line.
If I write some code and let the rest of the world use it, I can generally rely on the individuals out there who improve it to release their improvements back to the community. Most of the programmers out there in my experience tend to want to do that since they aren't in it strictly for the profit. I can't rely on businesses to do the same. Why? Because their improvements give them a competitive advantage! Duh! You wouldn't want to give up your competitive advantage if you're a business, would you? Just so that others can use your improvements freely and perhaps gain a competitive advantage over YOU? Didn't think so.
And yet, that seems to be exactly how you expect most businesses to behave, based on your previous articles. How naive can you get?
Because of that, I'll use the GPL (or, in the case of libraries, the LGPL) or something similar to insure that my code AND ALL CHANGES TO IT remain free. It really sucks that I have to resort to a license to insure this, but it's the only way for me to INSURE that the code remains free. Otherwise some capable business can come along, snag my code, improve it enough that people will prefer to use their version instead, and never release the improvements back to the community because they want to maintain their "competitive advantage". The state of the art DOES NOT improve in that situation, now does it?
You complain that the authoring of GPLed code forces you to reimplement that code in order to use it in your proprietary product. Well I will complain that the fact that YOUR code is proprietary to begin with forces ALL THE REST OF US to reimplement it ourselves just so we don't have to wait around for you to get around to fixing your bugs because you're too busy implementing snazzy new features. After all, it's the new features that sell, not the fixed bugs, right? Microsoft should be sufficient proof of that to you. And you're a business, so you'll do whatever generates the most profit, right?
So: on one hand we have a few businesses that are "disadvantaged" because they have to reimplement something that already exists in GPLed form. And on the other hand we have the ENTIRE REST OF THE COMMUNITY that has to reimplement proprietary code in order to extricate itself from the support nightmare that proprietary software is famous for. Gee, it's real tough for me to decide which of the two needs is more important in the long run...
I suspect it's because you ARE a business, and can only see your own needs, that you are having so much trouble with this. It would be nice if you could see and acknowledge the needs of the rest of the world. Perhaps then you would understand why a license like the GPL is a good thing to have available and why it has advantages in many situations. And why it may be the best thing for the world at large in the long run.
Oh, by the way, I don't think you need to worry about programmers going hungry. Not as long as there's a need for new software. See, not all types of software get implemented by an individual hacker in his spare time. Many are implemented as a result of a company's specific needs. If that company wants the software to be implemented, they have two choices: wait indefinitely for someone in the community to do it on their own initiative, or pay someone to do it. I doubt they'd elect to wait if it's something they need. Interestingly enough, it's pretty reasonable to suspect that the software will be cheaper to implement if the programmer can GPL it (advantages: he can use any existing GPLed software as a foundation, and if the program is useful enough he can get the community to help in the development). But the programmer still gets paid either way.
I also don't think you have to worry about programmers becoming commodities. A commodity is something that can be replaced at will. The very nature of programming is such that this won't happen: even the best programmer can't replace another and become instantly productive. It may take quite some time for him to become familiar with the existing code and the reasons for its current state. This makes an individual programmer (as long as he's reasonably good) valuable.
--
There is a sharp distinction between the behavior of an individual and the behavior of a business, and you don't seem to grasp why that difference exists. Perhaps I can explain.
Beyond meeting the basic needs of survival (which includes providing for his family if he has one), what is usually the primary goal of an individual? Answer: to be as happy as possible. Most people are pretty happy with their situation as long as their needs are being met. There may be things that they feel would be nice to have but which would require too much sacrifice in other areas to achieve. These people will do things like take vacations, play sports, play computer games (well, some of them anyway
Now, beyond meeting the basic needs of survival, what is the primary goal of a business? Answer: to make as much money as possible for its owners. In fact, my understanding is that the law REQUIRES this of a publicly-traded company. So the business itself is generally willing to do anything it can to make money. If that means tempering its responsiveness to customers (for instance, by limiting the size of the customer support department), so be it. These decisions are NOT made based on whether or not it's the RIGHT thing to do, but on whether or not it's the PROFITABLE thing to do.
This distinction between an individual and a business is so fundamental that I can't believe you don't see it. Why the hell do you think the most successful companies (to wit: Microsoft) are often (if not usually) the worst from an ethical standpoint? The answer should be obvious: because NOT ONLY do you not have to be ethical to be profitable, it's often UNPROFITABLE to be ethical! As an example, it's often more profitable to kill your competition through out-of-band means (e.g., FUD) than it is to improve your product.
If you don't believe that, as an individual, the behavior of businesses isn't something to worry about, you need only ask yourself who out there wants to make your private information into a tradeable commodity and is willing to attempt to coerce Congress into passing legislation making this possible. Ask yourself whether it's businesses or individuals who are responsible for the current state of the patent system and who are taking the greatest advantage of it. Ask yourself whether it's individuals or businesses that wish to impede the use of MP3s as a means of music distribution. Ask yourself how many businesses aren't willing to lay off a part of their workforce unless the company will unequivocally die if they don't. Contrast that with how many businesses lay off a part of their workforce regularly only in order to INCREASE the profits, even though the individuals in that workforce depend on the business for their livelihood (i.e., the layoff hurts the individuals being laid off a lot more than the company would be hurt by keeping them). Ask yourself exactly WHO is pushing for the UCITA legislation -- it ain't individuals, that's for sure.
As for the GPL, you must have some strange ideas of what it means to truly advance the state of the art when, through binary-only publication (i.e., proprietary software releases), those advances aren't made available for everyone to see and improve upon. And I don't know about you believing that it should be your right to use someone else's freely-available code in your for-profit product when you're the only person who will see the profits (you're a business, remember? That means that your goal is maximum profit. Can't achieve that by paying someone for their freely-available code when you can just grab it and use it without paying him a goddamned thing. This is EXACTLY what the GPL is designed to prevent).
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With today's legal climate here in the U.S.?? I doubt the amount of time the company was aware of the problem would matter. I would wager that EVEN IF THE COMPANY WAS DEVELOPING A FIX AT THE TIME THE SUIT WAS BROUGHT they would lose a lawsuit such as this.
I'm with the other guy that said this: You smell a lot like a civil litigation lawyer.
--
I, too, have been a customer almost since the beginning, with 384k upstream and downstream.
The downstream screams but the upstream sucks. It hasn't always been that way but it has gradually gotten worse over time. I now get at most 10K/sec upstream, but it's typically a lot less for anything but TCP.
But worst of all, when my outbound is close to saturated (which doesn't take much anymore), the ping times go through the roof: I've seen as much as 1000ms round-trip time consistently when my outbound is saturated. Normally I see 60ms. I've verified that it's the wireless connection itself. I can easily make the ping times go to 500ms by using mtr with 0.1 sec intervals to a site 8 hops away. At 64 bytes/packet, that should put a load of only 5K/sec on my outbound connection, but it's enough to make my pings go to 400-600ms and the packet loss to go to 30-40%.
This means that I can't play Quake on the 'net because the outbound gets saturated too easily with datagram packets and the ping times skyrocket. I'd be better off with a modem for Quake.
Their customer service is top-notch but it looks to me like they're way oversubscribed in my region. That's no surprise: I'm in the heart of Silicon Valley (Santa Clara) and neither DSL nor cablemodems are available here.
Supposedly cablemodems will become available here at the end of September (yeah, right...I'll believe it when I see it). When they do, I'm going to take a very hard look at them.
--
It may be true that a geek man will tend to get along best with a geek girl.
But that doesn't matter. Why? Because the geek men outnumber the geek girls by at least 5:1, and probably more like 10:1. Which means that at least 80% of the geek guys are going to have to "settle" for someone other than a geek girl (at least in the sense that you mean it here).
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. One needn't be totally into something to appreciate and support someone else's interest in it.
There are some days that I wish my Significant Other (tm) shared my interest in computers. But given all her other wonderful qualities, I think I can live without it.
--
I don't doubt that there are a few good ideas there, but they're so overwhelmed by the flaws that they're difficult to detect.
But the discussion thus far has centered primarily on the technical, financial, and ease-of-use flaws in DIVX. Few have discussed the real problem with DIVX:
Suppose that technically and economically, DIVX were flawless. It would still be a really bad idea. Why?
Well, suppose DIVX really takes off, enough so that it kills normal DVD, videotapes, and laser discs. If it were technically and economically brilliant, it might have a chance of doing just that.
But suddenly, one centralized company controls everybody's ability to view movies. This, my friend, is a monopoly. And it means that Circuit City and their lawyer cohorts can now set prices as high as they like. And they will...just low enough that people still pay up, but not any lower than that. The studios love this idea because they'll be reaping the benefits as well.
You see, the best thing about DVD is that it encourages competition: between movie studios, between video stores, between DVD player manufacturers, etc. DIVX would eliminate virtually all of that.
And that's why DIVX, or any similar single-source scheme, cannot be allowed to flourish.
--