what happens if you write/contribute to open source?
Then you may be a brainwashed slave who's thinking he's doing good when he's actually destroying the market for that product. Human beings are hard-wired for profit. Try doing something you don't like and without pay for several days or weeks and let me know if you like doing it. OSS makes it impossible or extremely hard for creators of software to earn fair value of product. Imagine your local Walmart or other store selling goods where price = cost of raw materials. That is, intellectual value and business profit = $0. Well, the suppliers of the raw materials will make a profit but the others who expend intellectual effort to design and create the product go hungry and starve.
Just because you idiots don't recognize the value of intellectual effort, does not make it worthless. If Linux ever got to the point where it was on par with Windows, it would bankrupt Windows and any other OSes in the market. Consumers would be stuck with 2nd rate products because "free and good enough" will handily beat "extremely good, but costs $". All improvements to the OS field would drastically decrease as OSS devs are mostly copycats, and with no OS market, there will be fewer innovations to copy as the for-profit people would have gone to other fields. The Phds won't do research in a field that has no job prospects. Effectively, the OS field would be dead if Linux were to dominate its competitors.
Huh? If you buy a house, you pay taxes. Rich people buy houses. If you buy furniture for that house, it is taxed. Rich people buy furniture. If you buy a boat, car, ceiling fan, computer, whatever... it is taxed. Rich people buy such things. Those items will be taxed. If a rich person bought a surfboard in Haiti...
And what if the rich make a huge sum of money after they have paid for that house, boat, Ferrari, furniture etc.? Is that tax-free money? The rich use a lot of resources and govt, tax-payer infrastructure to earn their money. They should therefore be required to pay more than a common employee.
I would suggest that facilitating the change of horrendous copyright laws by bringing their insanity to the fore of the public consciousness would benefit billions of people,
... at the expense of destroying thousands of people (starving authors) and destroying professional book writing. Who's going to write new books if there is no money to be made (without copyright)? A very few hobbyists. Copyright supports the writers with a decent standard of living. A few of them make tons of money, as it should be, if their work is very high quality. And the only people who complain about such people making money are a bunch of jealous nobodies or communists/socialists.
Billions of people would benefit if Bill Gates and the top 100 richest people in the world were robbed of all their wealth, after which it would be distributed amongst the poorest in the world, but that still does not make it right, legally or ethically. The rich people used their resources and talents to acquire wealth whereas the poor did nothing to deserve the free money.
Instead, they should simply hand over their hard-earned works to you goddamn leeches for free?! 120 years is still less than infinity. Many notable authors (especially Conan Doyle & family) deserve the profit as they have entertained hundreds of millions of readers for over a century. Have you ever done anything that benefits hundreds of millions of people? I didn't think so.
And why should people innovate to benefit people like you? Are they your slaves who are obligated to expend their life's efforts to improve your lives while receiving little or nothing in return? No, instead they have the freedom and the right to help others or help themselves. People who only want to help others write free software. People who want to help others and help themselves protect their work from theft using patents.
Surely this is advancing the collective cultural repository?
It definitely is. Copyright ensures authors and publishers get paid, which in turn encourages them to write and publish more books. They profit with money and you profit more useful or entertaining material to read. That was the whole premise behind copyright -- temporary financial reward and support for the author in return for permanently enriching the collective cultural repository.
If your type were to influence reduction in copyright duration, the profits would drop and authors and publishers would cut quality and quantity of books to compensate for the reduction in revenue. Why are you/.ers always looking for a free ride? If you don't want to pay for a book go to a public library. There are thousands of interesting books available for free, but nobody's reading them and they are collecting dust.
I love these types of pro-censorship arguments. All emotion and no facts. They always boil down to "it makes me feel funny".
That's right. Why don't you watch rape, torture and (real) murder scenes everyday for a year and then let me know if it did not permanently affect (scar) you in any way. Well, sex scars children similarly. So yes, pro-censorship is good sometimes as long as it's not abused.
But 99% of them are not -- they're loud and annoying. Can someone from the ad industry comment why they talk so much in commercials, even when they have nothing to say? Do you guys get paid by the number of words?
No, BSD doesn't grant openness forever, as it lets people close it. GPL on the other hand grants openness forever. Restricting the people's right to close it.
GPL does a lot more than that. If you use a 100-line GPL source file in your 200,000 line closed source app, the entire app is now GPL which is ridiculous IMHO from a cost/benefit perspective. Why can't the GPL only apply to GPL-based source code imported into the project and not virally infect non-GPL code? That way nobody can close the GPL code.
The way GPL is designed like a license virus, it reduces developer freedom by forcing every developer to accept the GPL for the entire project if he/she uses a single GPL file.
I'm really sick of all the idiots carping about copyright as a replacement for patents. They are similar but perform very differently. Copyright protects the exact expression of source code and binary whereas patents protect the higher level idea that is used to create the code.
Suppose you invented a new type of sort called slashSort() and used it in a program to make it very fast. Copyright is useless here since you don't release the source code. A competitor could employ a hacker to reverse engineer your code to find the location of slashSort(), then feed it some inputs to determine the steps performed by your algorithm. After that it's simply a matter of converting those steps into source code and releasing it in a competing product. Your profits dive by half as consumers now have more choices.
So without patents, your competitor gets to eat your lunch while you do all the hard work.
Sorry, it's definitely been earned. The inventor only gets less than 20 years of profit. The government, business people and consumers get to profit from the invention for infinity years after that. It's quite a bargain.
There is no inherent right for anyone to restrict others copying / doing with whatever they see and obtain. Patents are a trade-off, a contract in society, but no right.
I think you're are a little misinformed, it's the other way around. No one has an inherent right to force an inventor to reveal his invention to the world. That's what the world was like before patents. Trade secrets were employed to prevent competitors from stealing ideas to maintain monopoly and high profits. But the inventions died with their inventors. The government, observing the waste of losing inventions (lowered GDP), decided to coax the inventors into revealing their secrets by offering to protect the inventions for a limited time with a monopoly. In return, the inventors were required publish an exact how-to guide to recreate the invention, hence the patent system was born.
If the govt were to remove patent protection, the inventors would go back to trade secrets. And if that won't work, they probably won't release any products using that invention -- they don't want to do free R&D for some big company.
No, many slashdotters are socialists who want patents abolished so they can plunder the hard work of others without paying anything. I'm not denying there are many idiotic patents out there, but there are also many valuable, useful and innovative patents that deserve protection.
No one here is asking inventors to work for free, so you can lose that strawman.
No patents mean anyone can copy the invention without paying the inventor, so I win that argument.
you realize patents are government-enforced monopolies, right?
That monopoly has been earned and the government is simply enforcing it. It's earned based on the fact the inventor has full rights to profit from the invention and others don't, at least not without permission. It doesn't have to be a monopoly, though. If anyone pays licensing fees to the company owning the invention, it can use the invention.
Walling off sections of the free market through legal force?
Lol, the walling off is to protect the weak (inventors) from abuse (copycat jackals, greedy companies and consumers).
If you think opposing patents is "socialist", you don't know what the word means.
Sure I do, in this case, it's taking valuable things from the productive people and distributing it to the undeserving -- some kind of forced, involuntary charity.
Many software; however, can be implemented at very minimal costs and therefore SHOULD expect very limited ROI or none (no patents). The focus of comparison is on the inventor's investment, not on the innovation. Patents are for large investments that need ROI to recover losses from the invention.
Expect limited ROI from who -- the people? This is socialist/commie nonsense. People like you are as greedy as the patent trolls and demand everything for $0. Well, you can't have that price without slavery of some kind.
In the capitalist world, the cost of production has only a small relationship to the selling price. Your shortsighted comment does not address the case where a truly innovative product is easy to implement. Just because it is easy to manufacture does not make it less valuable. The price of any product has been, and should continue to be based upon supply and demand.
If you come up with an amazing new algorithm your implementation is protected, and cannot be copied by other people.
Stop posting grossly incorrect statements about a field you know nothing about. Copyright does not protect against disassembly, or simply feeding various combinations of inputs to figure out the algorithm and clone it without violating copyright. Copyright can also be easily defeated using the clean-room process on the targeted software. There's nothing wrong with the patent system other than a few greedy idiots abusing it by publishing obvious patents, and you/.ers want it abolished for some naive socialist agenda where the inventors simply hand over their hard work for free to companies and general public.
Private healthcare must DIE before more innocent people DIE!
Welcome to the real world and stop demanding people give you something for nothing -- it doesn't work in the long run.
The US system is corrupt to the core.
So why doesn't the government fix it? It's easy too, allow more doctors, outsource boring/tedious jobs, drugs etc. Do whatever is necessary to cut costs, reduce the premiums and that will automatically allow more people to afford healthcare. That way, Govt benefits, people benefit, and there would be a slight increase/decrease in profits for insurance companies. But no, the govt. is more corrupt than the insurance companies and their solution is to completely destroy private healthcare and seize all control despite the fact that most citizens don't want it. Are these the actions of a democratic or fascist govt.?
Sorry, but most people don't want healthcare service reduced to something similar they get at the DMV. Insurance companies are the lesser of the two evils. You idiots want to throw away something that's worked for decades, where the patient has some control over the situation (by choosing providers) and replace it with a more expensive (tax dollars), bureaucratic monopoly with a poor service record. Thanks, but no thanks.
Well, the world is full of scam artists too. How does the insurance company know for sure this woman is not faking the illness so she can lead a merry life partying and playing all day while the rest of premium payers and the insurance company foot the bill? If a lot of people played this scam, the company would soon go out of business.
You can bet that if the Universal healthcare administrators found out about patients lying to them to get long-term, multi-million dollar payouts, they would employ the some private investigators to spy on the patients too.
A patent is not abstract "I think therefore I am". It is a how-to guide for professionals in the field to recreate the invention.
Since RedHat does not invent anything, software patents are unjust because due to the protection they offer to inventors, OSS coders cannot copycat the invention and include it the RedHat distro, thereby driving RedHat's profits down. With software patents gone, RedHat can make money without doing much work by implementing various patented algorithms into products included in their distro.
haha Amazon, Apple and other publishers have heard about your secret and are planning to give away free copies of their books and music in hopes that sales will jump. How many students want to pay $300-$800 per semester for text books? Honda, Toyoto and Ford are also planning to give away free cars if you visit their dealerships.
Seriously, don't be a retard. OSS has been around for a few decades now and not a single developer has made significant money developing OSS. Leech companies using OSS on the other hand, have made/saved tons of money (eg: Google, RedHat). Consumers are hard-wired to pay as little as possible just as merchants are hard-wired to charge as much as possible, which is why we trade using bargaining. So free books will just turn poor authors into destitute authors, living on welfare.
First, OSS type products bring poverty to the previously rich and the middle classes of society (by destroying profitable markets). These, now poor people, will in turn stop/reduce purchasing many products they could previously afford. This affects the profit of other businesses, who in turn, cut employees (yes, your job is dependent on authors), and stop/reduce buying products from their suppliers because of reduced demand. This nasty chain reaction goes on until everybody is now in the minimum wage class (to a certain extent).
The net effect of open source products/copyright and patent abolishment on society will be,
Complete destruction of the upper and upper-middle class (I'm sure the anarchists will like this one)
Reduction of wages for the existing middle-class as they now have to compete with more people entering from higher classes, and nobody rich enough to sustain a large middle class
Low-quality products -- since nobody is willing to pay for quality products
Rise in lower class, minimum wage workers, because there are fewer rich or middle class people to sustain middle class living
If this is your definition of freedom, WOW, sign me up.
...no amount of protection of his work is going to encourage him to produce more!
So? Maybe you've heard of this concept called freedom. The author is free to stop producing more books -- he's not a slave to you or the government.
His heirs should go out and get a real job instead of trying to live off his reputation.
Why is that? People have the right to take care and provide for their heirs via real-estate, business, money etc. Why not through copyright as well? Besides, most of these so-called real jobs are mostly a waste of time in return for the meager salary they provide, and are for talentless people with no skills or inherited money who want to drag other people down to their level. How many people would show up for these real jobs if they were independently wealthy? Almost nobody.
Copyright is the government-backed enforcement of "you're not allowed to say that, because I said it first."
How does such retarded tripe get modded up? Did you RTFS? She copy/pasted a large portion of the book, and copycatting is very different from "saying it first/second".
By definition, copyright is the antithesis of free speech. There is no either/or here - copyright *is* censorship.
More blatantly false rubbish. Free speech does not give one a blanket right to abuse/use other people's property for personal benefit without permission or payment. These authors spend several years of their lives creating these novels and many decades mastering the art and craft of writing. And just like doctors or lawyers, they want a fair return on that investment. Copyright ensures that people who can write good books get paid so they don't have to find a real job working in a supermarket or other manual labor.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you may be a brainwashed slave who's thinking he's doing good when he's actually destroying the market for that product. Human beings are hard-wired for profit. Try doing something you don't like and without pay for several days or weeks and let me know if you like doing it. OSS makes it impossible or extremely hard for creators of software to earn fair value of product. Imagine your local Walmart or other store selling goods where price = cost of raw materials. That is, intellectual value and business profit = $0. Well, the suppliers of the raw materials will make a profit but the others who expend intellectual effort to design and create the product go hungry and starve.
Just because you idiots don't recognize the value of intellectual effort, does not make it worthless. If Linux ever got to the point where it was on par with Windows, it would bankrupt Windows and any other OSes in the market. Consumers would be stuck with 2nd rate products because "free and good enough" will handily beat "extremely good, but costs $". All improvements to the OS field would drastically decrease as OSS devs are mostly copycats, and with no OS market, there will be fewer innovations to copy as the for-profit people would have gone to other fields. The Phds won't do research in a field that has no job prospects. Effectively, the OS field would be dead if Linux were to dominate its competitors.
And what if the rich make a huge sum of money after they have paid for that house, boat, Ferrari, furniture etc.? Is that tax-free money? The rich use a lot of resources and govt, tax-payer infrastructure to earn their money. They should therefore be required to pay more than a common employee.
Billions of people would benefit if Bill Gates and the top 100 richest people in the world were robbed of all their wealth, after which it would be distributed amongst the poorest in the world, but that still does not make it right, legally or ethically. The rich people used their resources and talents to acquire wealth whereas the poor did nothing to deserve the free money.
Instead, they should simply hand over their hard-earned works to you goddamn leeches for free?! 120 years is still less than infinity. Many notable authors (especially Conan Doyle & family) deserve the profit as they have entertained hundreds of millions of readers for over a century. Have you ever done anything that benefits hundreds of millions of people? I didn't think so.
And why should people innovate to benefit people like you? Are they your slaves who are obligated to expend their life's efforts to improve your lives while receiving little or nothing in return? No, instead they have the freedom and the right to help others or help themselves. People who only want to help others write free software. People who want to help others and help themselves protect their work from theft using patents.
It definitely is. Copyright ensures authors and publishers get paid, which in turn encourages them to write and publish more books. They profit with money and you profit more useful or entertaining material to read. That was the whole premise behind copyright -- temporary financial reward and support for the author in return for permanently enriching the collective cultural repository.
If your type were to influence reduction in copyright duration, the profits would drop and authors and publishers would cut quality and quantity of books to compensate for the reduction in revenue. Why are you /.ers always looking for a free ride? If you don't want to pay for a book go to a public library. There are thousands of interesting books available for free, but nobody's reading them and they are collecting dust.
That's right. Why don't you watch rape, torture and (real) murder scenes everyday for a year and then let me know if it did not permanently affect (scar) you in any way. Well, sex scars children similarly. So yes, pro-censorship is good sometimes as long as it's not abused.
Because it prematurely introduces children to sex (they are very curious) and that is not good. 14th century mentalities were on the right track.
But 99% of them are not -- they're loud and annoying. Can someone from the ad industry comment why they talk so much in commercials, even when they have nothing to say? Do you guys get paid by the number of words?
GPL does a lot more than that. If you use a 100-line GPL source file in your 200,000 line closed source app, the entire app is now GPL which is ridiculous IMHO from a cost/benefit perspective. Why can't the GPL only apply to GPL-based source code imported into the project and not virally infect non-GPL code? That way nobody can close the GPL code.
The way GPL is designed like a license virus, it reduces developer freedom by forcing every developer to accept the GPL for the entire project if he/she uses a single GPL file.
I'm really sick of all the idiots carping about copyright as a replacement for patents. They are similar but perform very differently. Copyright protects the exact expression of source code and binary whereas patents protect the higher level idea that is used to create the code.
Suppose you invented a new type of sort called slashSort() and used it in a program to make it very fast. Copyright is useless here since you don't release the source code. A competitor could employ a hacker to reverse engineer your code to find the location of slashSort(), then feed it some inputs to determine the steps performed by your algorithm. After that it's simply a matter of converting those steps into source code and releasing it in a competing product. Your profits dive by half as consumers now have more choices.
So without patents, your competitor gets to eat your lunch while you do all the hard work.
Sorry, it's definitely been earned. The inventor only gets less than 20 years of profit. The government, business people and consumers get to profit from the invention for infinity years after that. It's quite a bargain.
I think you're are a little misinformed, it's the other way around. No one has an inherent right to force an inventor to reveal his invention to the world. That's what the world was like before patents. Trade secrets were employed to prevent competitors from stealing ideas to maintain monopoly and high profits. But the inventions died with their inventors. The government, observing the waste of losing inventions (lowered GDP), decided to coax the inventors into revealing their secrets by offering to protect the inventions for a limited time with a monopoly. In return, the inventors were required publish an exact how-to guide to recreate the invention, hence the patent system was born.
If the govt were to remove patent protection, the inventors would go back to trade secrets. And if that won't work, they probably won't release any products using that invention -- they don't want to do free R&D for some big company.
No, many slashdotters are socialists who want patents abolished so they can plunder the hard work of others without paying anything. I'm not denying there are many idiotic patents out there, but there are also many valuable, useful and innovative patents that deserve protection.
Oh, but eliminating patents is exactly like that and the socialists and commies are salivating at that prospect.
Bullshit, without the government enforcement, the inventors are guaranteed to be abused. Why should anyone agree to that?
Wrong, clean room with disassembly is white or gray box.
No patents mean anyone can copy the invention without paying the inventor, so I win that argument.
That monopoly has been earned and the government is simply enforcing it. It's earned based on the fact the inventor has full rights to profit from the invention and others don't, at least not without permission. It doesn't have to be a monopoly, though. If anyone pays licensing fees to the company owning the invention, it can use the invention.
Lol, the walling off is to protect the weak (inventors) from abuse (copycat jackals, greedy companies and consumers).
Sure I do, in this case, it's taking valuable things from the productive people and distributing it to the undeserving -- some kind of forced, involuntary charity.
Expect limited ROI from who -- the people? This is socialist/commie nonsense. People like you are as greedy as the patent trolls and demand everything for $0. Well, you can't have that price without slavery of some kind.
In the capitalist world, the cost of production has only a small relationship to the selling price. Your shortsighted comment does not address the case where a truly innovative product is easy to implement. Just because it is easy to manufacture does not make it less valuable. The price of any product has been, and should continue to be based upon supply and demand.
Stop posting grossly incorrect statements about a field you know nothing about. Copyright does not protect against disassembly, or simply feeding various combinations of inputs to figure out the algorithm and clone it without violating copyright. Copyright can also be easily defeated using the clean-room process on the targeted software. There's nothing wrong with the patent system other than a few greedy idiots abusing it by publishing obvious patents, and you /.ers want it abolished for some naive socialist agenda where the inventors simply hand over their hard work for free to companies and general public.
Welcome to the real world and stop demanding people give you something for nothing -- it doesn't work in the long run.
So why doesn't the government fix it? It's easy too, allow more doctors, outsource boring/tedious jobs, drugs etc. Do whatever is necessary to cut costs, reduce the premiums and that will automatically allow more people to afford healthcare. That way, Govt benefits, people benefit, and there would be a slight increase/decrease in profits for insurance companies. But no, the govt. is more corrupt than the insurance companies and their solution is to completely destroy private healthcare and seize all control despite the fact that most citizens don't want it. Are these the actions of a democratic or fascist govt.?
Sorry, but most people don't want healthcare service reduced to something similar they get at the DMV. Insurance companies are the lesser of the two evils. You idiots want to throw away something that's worked for decades, where the patient has some control over the situation (by choosing providers) and replace it with a more expensive (tax dollars), bureaucratic monopoly with a poor service record. Thanks, but no thanks.
Well, the world is full of scam artists too. How does the insurance company know for sure this woman is not faking the illness so she can lead a merry life partying and playing all day while the rest of premium payers and the insurance company foot the bill? If a lot of people played this scam, the company would soon go out of business.
You can bet that if the Universal healthcare administrators found out about patients lying to them to get long-term, multi-million dollar payouts, they would employ the some private investigators to spy on the patients too.
Since RedHat does not invent anything, software patents are unjust because due to the protection they offer to inventors, OSS coders cannot copycat the invention and include it the RedHat distro, thereby driving RedHat's profits down. With software patents gone, RedHat can make money without doing much work by implementing various patented algorithms into products included in their distro.
haha Amazon, Apple and other publishers have heard about your secret and are planning to give away free copies of their books and music in hopes that sales will jump. How many students want to pay $300-$800 per semester for text books? Honda, Toyoto and Ford are also planning to give away free cars if you visit their dealerships.
Seriously, don't be a retard. OSS has been around for a few decades now and not a single developer has made significant money developing OSS. Leech companies using OSS on the other hand, have made/saved tons of money (eg: Google, RedHat). Consumers are hard-wired to pay as little as possible just as merchants are hard-wired to charge as much as possible, which is why we trade using bargaining. So free books will just turn poor authors into destitute authors, living on welfare.
First, OSS type products bring poverty to the previously rich and the middle classes of society (by destroying profitable markets). These, now poor people, will in turn stop/reduce purchasing many products they could previously afford. This affects the profit of other businesses, who in turn, cut employees (yes, your job is dependent on authors), and stop/reduce buying products from their suppliers because of reduced demand. This nasty chain reaction goes on until everybody is now in the minimum wage class (to a certain extent).
The net effect of open source products/copyright and patent abolishment on society will be,
If this is your definition of freedom, WOW, sign me up.
So? Maybe you've heard of this concept called freedom. The author is free to stop producing more books -- he's not a slave to you or the government.
Why is that? People have the right to take care and provide for their heirs via real-estate, business, money etc. Why not through copyright as well? Besides, most of these so-called real jobs are mostly a waste of time in return for the meager salary they provide, and are for talentless people with no skills or inherited money who want to drag other people down to their level. How many people would show up for these real jobs if they were independently wealthy? Almost nobody.
How does such retarded tripe get modded up? Did you RTFS? She copy/pasted a large portion of the book, and copycatting is very different from "saying it first/second".
More blatantly false rubbish. Free speech does not give one a blanket right to abuse/use other people's property for personal benefit without permission or payment. These authors spend several years of their lives creating these novels and many decades mastering the art and craft of writing. And just like doctors or lawyers, they want a fair return on that investment. Copyright ensures that people who can write good books get paid so they don't have to find a real job working in a supermarket or other manual labor.