Now tell me, your father, did he invent his own number system? No?
Did he invent his own alphabet? No.
Were the laws of physics that his branch of engineering is based upon, discovered by him?
Did he invent the math system behind it? The algebra, the calculus?
No?
All authors borrow and use all those things from society for free.
And that is why copyright is only for a limited period of time, unlike real estate, which can be passed down to family indefinitely.
It's the other way around, OSS is unethical because it destroys software business, reducing/eliminating income of business owners and programmers. There is nothing unethical about demanding payment for software when the consumer of the software is gaining some benefit from using it.
There's no free lunch -- that freedom for OSS customers comes at the expense of programmers working like slaves, for free. Right now, the work is voluntary, so it's not quite slavery. But once protections provided by patents, copyrights and trademark laws are destroyed, OSS will be synonymous with "forced free" software, aka slavery.
You probably have something valuable to have a mega corp approach you. Don't sell more than 90% of the company -- keep at least 10% for you and your buddies. Negotiate a certain percent of revenue or profit from sales of your product for you and your friends.
Remember what happened to the guy who sold MS-DOS to Bill Gates for $10,000. Don't be a sucker -- businessmen are very smart at making deals.
When I explain why inventors have no right to the patent system,
Let's cut the crap... you think people who invent things have no right to control their inventions, their thoughts. You want them to freely distribute them to people like you so you can freely exploit them and make millions. In your great world, people have no rights to their thoughts or ideas.
Drop the moralizing, or own up to an extraordinary claim that patents are a moral right. I'm sure patents have led to useful inventions.
So when the Wright brothers invented the airplane, it would have been perfectly okay if someone copied those airplane designs and sold airplanes with $0 compensation to the inventors? That's stealing. It's not moralizing, the inventors need to be compensated for their work. Is that so bad? It's been a wet dream of many big businesses to kill the patent system for massive profit making. They have capital, manufacturing, marketing, lobbyists to make money. But they don't have killer-ideas -- the most important ingredient to make successful products.
That's meaningless when the costs are not considered. You need to address the real issue of whether patents provide a net benefit. I have outlined the pervasive damage they have inflicted when it comes to pharmaceuticals.
For the hundredth time, the pharmas exploiting patents are at fault, not the patent system. But you seem hell-bent on seeing patent system dead, so there's no point reasoning with you.
Regarding abusing public funding for private research, yes, it is exploitation of business-sense clueless people. On the other hand, that's what happens when you publish something in the public domain. If you (the researcher) don't want it exploited, don't release it for free consumption. In most cases, the researcher gets a good job due if he/she publishes a decent paper. I've seen a lot of good research papers that are patent-worthy except that the people writing these papers have little business-sense as to the value of their papers. Google is an exception to this rule.
Listen to yourself. This is hysterical.
You're the one stretching the truth; maligning patents based on the unethical behaviour of big pharma abusing patent system. Just because big pharma abuses patents doesn't mean patents are bad -- most patents are filed by ethical people. Business is a very tough, competitive environment and big business like pharma is really tough. They play all these dirty games, because if they don't, their competitor will eat their lunch.
Let's be clear, because your example is insidious. It implies that eliminating patent law would be akin to seizing personal property.
Yes, several patents earn their owners millions, if not billions. So eliminating patent law will be far worse than seizing personal real-estate property for them.
If I own a knife, then it is my personal property. So long as I don't break any laws, it is mine to do with as a I choose. Anyone proposing to ban it or take it away from me must have a significant justification.
Gee, thanks for completely twisting my words into something else. What I meant was, just because 0.0001% percent of the population uses knives for illegal, unethical activities like murder, does not mean the other 99.999% percent ethical users should be deprived of their use through a knife-ban.
Patents are nothing like this. They are a policy instrument used by government to achieve certain ends. A government choosing not to make use of them is not a matter of "banning" anything. Patents are only legitimate and useful to the extent that they achieve the objectives they are intended to achieve. You do not have a right to patent laws.
You are very much wrong about patents being some worthless bureaucratic instrument. Long ago, inventors were strongly opposed to leeches copy-catting their inventions and making a buck stealing their ideas. So they resorted to hiding, obfuscating or generally trying to apply trade secrets to their inventions so that they would have a competitive edge. The end result of this secretiveness was that many inventions died with their inventors. This was a big problem for the government because it lost a ton of money in economic output, future productivity, taxes etc. Inventions allowed governments and businesses to make way more money with less resource consumption. Inventions have obviously benefited the common consumer as well. Which is why, the govt. decided to promote inventions by protecting inventors from thieving copy-cats for a limited time. In return for this protection, the inventors were required to clearly document how their inventions worked in a document called a patent. The end result was, govt. benefited, society benefited and the inventor benefited. If you force someone to invent for free, a la open source, the output will not be of as high quality as there will be less motivation to solve the tough problems if there is nothing to gain from such hard work.
It's supply and demand, and fairness why copyright holders should make more than "normal" people. Fairness, because any successful creative work is hundreds or thousands of times more valuable to society than the work of normal people. A single good book can make tens to hundreds of millions to the publisher, so can a good song, a good computer program, a good patent etc. Normal jobs, no matter how hard you work, will never generate that kind of revenue. It's not how hard you work, but how valuable your final output is. Which is why a CEO makes more than a hard-working farmer.
Supply and demand also applies because only a few creative works make money, whereas normal jobs are relatively safer. But the price you pay for this security is such jobs are limited to typical income range from $30,000 to $150,000/year.
Creative works are hit-and-miss -- you either mostly very little or sometimes millions. If a musician creates 50 songs, an author writes 10 books, there is a very good chance only 1% to 10% will make decent money.
If you have good creative ability, and a stomach for risk, go make gobs of money, nobody's stopping you. If not, stop pulling down exceptional people to mediocrity.
Copyright was meant as an incentive - how much of that can you give to the deceased?
Copyrighted works can be valuable property whose ownership was meant to be passed on to the children and spouse of the deceased, just a house or other real-estate is passed from owner to family. It's too bad nowadays, that very few hold the copyright on the works they created, instead signing it off to some company for a one-time fee.
Just because some unethical persons and companies abuse patents doesn't mean everyone does. Do you propose banning knives for cutting vegetables just because they are sometimes used as a murder weapon? No matter much patents are abused, it's public domain after 20 years. So be thankful for all the free inventions you get, some great, some not so good. I can guarantee innovation will be greatly diminished if patents were eliminated or weakened (recent patent amendment proposal by big Corps to Obama to reduce liability for patent infringement) in any way.
Just as you expect a salary for your job, an inventor expects a high return for a highly risky (negative income), highly valuable product (to the users of the patented product). There's no free lunch, most patents are time and money sinks. Or else everyone would quit their 9-to-5 and start inventing.
Sorry but patents and copyright are completely different things. Why do you have so little respect for creative works?
Why? They want a reason (excuse) to steal from the creative people. Consumers don't care how much time and effort it takes to create the final product... they just want it very cheaply ($0 if possible). They would rather cover their ears and say "la la la" than face the truth that a large number of creative works don't make much money. In other words, a lot of creative works make less than minimum wage. A small number of good creative works rightfully deserve the huge amounts of dough they earn because nothing short of genius, luck and good marketing achieves success.
If you don't like the concept of "property", are you willing to give away your property (land, wealth etc), to other humans or animals? Or are you only generous when it comes to "sharing" somebody else's property?
Gee, "tough shit" is EXACTLY the way the rest of us get along.
Well, tough shit for you. Art and other great creative works are hundreds or thousands of times harder to produce than flipping burgers, or else everyone would be doing it. So they should get a greater return on investment than your regular 9-5. Life of author + 25 years is very reasonable.
Please explain, in a way that those of us who aren't completely wrapped in tin-foil from head to toe, can understand.
Well, an unsecured point means big brother can't track who exactly is using it -- relatively anonymous. Since 9/11, big brother (in many countries) has become obsessed with tracking everything everyone is doing under the guise of security. That kind of power can be easily abused and there are no laws preventing the abuse.
Speaking of tree-style expansion, when, if ever, will slashdot fix it's duplicate content in nested mode?
Page 1 of DRAM story is the same as page 2. This stupid bug has existed for years. Is there any testing done on slashcode?
One man's paranoia is another's common sense. All these government bodies did get power handed to them on a silver platter. They had to bully, deceive and twist a lotta arms to get it. If the collective sheeple willingly and stupidly hand over power (in the form of their information files), these bodies will happily accept. In this age, information is a valuable asset, not something you want to blindly entrust to someone else, if possible.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. I blame the specialization and dumbing down (in schools) of the human race as other reasons for absence of newer geniuses.
So all those entrepreneurs who started successful websites and made millions (eg craigslist or slashdot) from advertising or subscriptions dishonest in some way? Surely, a large group made a honest buck.
It is however a market force, giving users an option they wouldn't have otherwise had, and giving commercial developers yet another thing to compete with...
Who the heck wants to compete with slaves producing $0 software? They are destroying the market.
...which helps users in the long run.
You mean, the short run. In the long run, there will be smaller market for paid software. So there will be much fewer software vendors resulting in fewer products, less competition, reduced innovation and fewer choices. Sure, software will be free, but since there is no market for innovation, nobody will waste years of their lives creating a $0 product. Therefore, users will have to make do with ancient, slowly innovating software.
Microsoft hasn't gone anywhere, they aren't even being threatened on the desktop much, they have more to worry about from Apple than Linux right now.
Big surprise, it's hard to kill big fish! However, many small fish, like small software vendors and shareware authors have been slaughtered.
One of the things that has destroyed the lattice work of market forces in software is Microsoft itself. They bundled so much software for free with their OS that nobody else could afford to compete
Incorrect, Microsoft doesn't provide free software. The price of a stagnant Windows version is always falling due to depreciation. To compensate for this effect, Microsoft adds new features to increase the price. The cost of the bundled software is added to the price of Windows. Since Windows sells so many million copies, the price bump may be a few cents or a few dollars.
New Windows price = depreciated price of old Windows version + price of new features.
What pisses off independent developers is that Microsoft steals their ideas, and makes 100 times more money than them by charging 10 to 100 times lower, because they have such a huge customer base.
it has been a fairly consistent paradigm that Apple (or Google, or whoever) comes up with something and makes it successful and then Microsoft tries to get in on the action.
And that's why patents are important in protecting against large companies like microsoft simply leeching innovative ideas because they have more money and marketing power, while the innovator goes penniless. Pretty soon, the innovators get tired of getting robbed and stop putting effort into inventive things and society suffers by missing out.
Why the hell did they not choose "/" instead of "\"? This is what happens when language designers don't have design skills and any depth of experience in the CS field.
The key is to drive a manual transmission and to hold in the clutch whenever you can
You can do the same with an automatic by switching from "D" to "N" (neutral). But I've heard that's not good for the transmission. You also lose engine-braking, as a safety issue.
Richerd Stallman's essays. The whole point of free software is that information should be free and when you code something you'll want your code to be reused again an again - multiplying it's usefulness many times fold.
RMS belongs to the dark side. Why should information be free? Why apply moral codes to non-living entities? All manual labor and easy jobs are performed by beasts of burden, machines or humans with low-intellect or low working desire. In other words, all the boring tasks can be done with little expenditure of resources. The only thing of real value (profit for all humanity) is new information technologies of hardware, software -- things that are hard to build and require creativity and intelligence. Information should most definitely not be free until the creators of that information is fairly compensated for their labor.
In the case of this BSD software author, he should negotiate a lump-sum amount for effectively converting his open-source project to closed-source. Since the software is free, he can't charge for that, instead the charge is for change in license (compensation for not being allowed to work on the software in his own time).
Slashdot Mirror
All authors borrow and use all those things from society for free. And that is why copyright is only for a limited period of time, unlike real estate, which can be passed down to family indefinitely.
It's the other way around, OSS is unethical because it destroys software business, reducing/eliminating income of business owners and programmers. There is nothing unethical about demanding payment for software when the consumer of the software is gaining some benefit from using it.
There's no free lunch -- that freedom for OSS customers comes at the expense of programmers working like slaves, for free. Right now, the work is voluntary, so it's not quite slavery. But once protections provided by patents, copyrights and trademark laws are destroyed, OSS will be synonymous with "forced free" software, aka slavery.
You probably have something valuable to have a mega corp approach you. Don't sell more than 90% of the company -- keep at least 10% for you and your buddies. Negotiate a certain percent of revenue or profit from sales of your product for you and your friends.
Remember what happened to the guy who sold MS-DOS to Bill Gates for $10,000. Don't be a sucker -- businessmen are very smart at making deals.
Let's cut the crap... you think people who invent things have no right to control their inventions, their thoughts. You want them to freely distribute them to people like you so you can freely exploit them and make millions. In your great world, people have no rights to their thoughts or ideas.
So when the Wright brothers invented the airplane, it would have been perfectly okay if someone copied those airplane designs and sold airplanes with $0 compensation to the inventors? That's stealing. It's not moralizing, the inventors need to be compensated for their work. Is that so bad? It's been a wet dream of many big businesses to kill the patent system for massive profit making. They have capital, manufacturing, marketing, lobbyists to make money. But they don't have killer-ideas -- the most important ingredient to make successful products.
For the hundredth time, the pharmas exploiting patents are at fault, not the patent system. But you seem hell-bent on seeing patent system dead, so there's no point reasoning with you.
You're the one stretching the truth; maligning patents based on the unethical behaviour of big pharma abusing patent system. Just because big pharma abuses patents doesn't mean patents are bad -- most patents are filed by ethical people. Business is a very tough, competitive environment and big business like pharma is really tough. They play all these dirty games, because if they don't, their competitor will eat their lunch.
Yes, several patents earn their owners millions, if not billions. So eliminating patent law will be far worse than seizing personal real-estate property for them.
Gee, thanks for completely twisting my words into something else. What I meant was, just because 0.0001% percent of the population uses knives for illegal, unethical activities like murder, does not mean the other 99.999% percent ethical users should be deprived of their use through a knife-ban.
You are very much wrong about patents being some worthless bureaucratic instrument. Long ago, inventors were strongly opposed to leeches copy-catting their inventions and making a buck stealing their ideas. So they resorted to hiding, obfuscating or generally trying to apply trade secrets to their inventions so that they would have a competitive edge. The end result of this secretiveness was that many inventions died with their inventors. This was a big problem for the government because it lost a ton of money in economic output, future productivity, taxes etc. Inventions allowed governments and businesses to make way more money with less resource consumption. Inventions have obviously benefited the common consumer as well. Which is why, the govt. decided to promote inventions by protecting inventors from thieving copy-cats for a limited time. In return for this protection, the inventors were required to clearly document how their inventions worked in a document called a patent. The end result was, govt. benefited, society benefited and the inventor benefited. If you force someone to invent for free, a la open source, the output will not be of as high quality as there will be less motivation to solve the tough problems if there is nothing to gain from such hard work.
It's supply and demand, and fairness why copyright holders should make more than "normal" people. Fairness, because any successful creative work is hundreds or thousands of times more valuable to society than the work of normal people. A single good book can make tens to hundreds of millions to the publisher, so can a good song, a good computer program, a good patent etc. Normal jobs, no matter how hard you work, will never generate that kind of revenue. It's not how hard you work, but how valuable your final output is. Which is why a CEO makes more than a hard-working farmer.
Supply and demand also applies because only a few creative works make money, whereas normal jobs are relatively safer. But the price you pay for this security is such jobs are limited to typical income range from $30,000 to $150,000/year. Creative works are hit-and-miss -- you either mostly very little or sometimes millions. If a musician creates 50 songs, an author writes 10 books, there is a very good chance only 1% to 10% will make decent money.
If you have good creative ability, and a stomach for risk, go make gobs of money, nobody's stopping you. If not, stop pulling down exceptional people to mediocrity.
Copyrighted works can be valuable property whose ownership was meant to be passed on to the children and spouse of the deceased, just a house or other real-estate is passed from owner to family. It's too bad nowadays, that very few hold the copyright on the works they created, instead signing it off to some company for a one-time fee.
Just because some unethical persons and companies abuse patents doesn't mean everyone does. Do you propose banning knives for cutting vegetables just because they are sometimes used as a murder weapon? No matter much patents are abused, it's public domain after 20 years. So be thankful for all the free inventions you get, some great, some not so good. I can guarantee innovation will be greatly diminished if patents were eliminated or weakened (recent patent amendment proposal by big Corps to Obama to reduce liability for patent infringement) in any way.
Just as you expect a salary for your job, an inventor expects a high return for a highly risky (negative income), highly valuable product (to the users of the patented product). There's no free lunch, most patents are time and money sinks. Or else everyone would quit their 9-to-5 and start inventing.
Why? They want a reason (excuse) to steal from the creative people. Consumers don't care how much time and effort it takes to create the final product... they just want it very cheaply ($0 if possible). They would rather cover their ears and say "la la la" than face the truth that a large number of creative works don't make much money. In other words, a lot of creative works make less than minimum wage. A small number of good creative works rightfully deserve the huge amounts of dough they earn because nothing short of genius, luck and good marketing achieves success.
If you don't like the concept of "property", are you willing to give away your property (land, wealth etc), to other humans or animals? Or are you only generous when it comes to "sharing" somebody else's property?
Well, tough shit for you. Art and other great creative works are hundreds or thousands of times harder to produce than flipping burgers, or else everyone would be doing it. So they should get a greater return on investment than your regular 9-5. Life of author + 25 years is very reasonable.
Don't you need a password to access a secured point? Some random stranger can't just start using it without hacking the password.
Well, an unsecured point means big brother can't track who exactly is using it -- relatively anonymous. Since 9/11, big brother (in many countries) has become obsessed with tracking everything everyone is doing under the guise of security. That kind of power can be easily abused and there are no laws preventing the abuse.
Speaking of tree-style expansion, when, if ever, will slashdot fix it's duplicate content in nested mode?
Page 1 of DRAM story is the same as page 2. This stupid bug has existed for years. Is there any testing done on slashcode?
One man's paranoia is another's common sense. All these government bodies did get power handed to them on a silver platter. They had to bully, deceive and twist a lotta arms to get it. If the collective sheeple willingly and stupidly hand over power (in the form of their information files), these bodies will happily accept. In this age, information is a valuable asset, not something you want to blindly entrust to someone else, if possible.
Too many cooks spoil the broth. I blame the specialization and dumbing down (in schools) of the human race as other reasons for absence of newer geniuses.
So all those entrepreneurs who started successful websites and made millions (eg craigslist or slashdot) from advertising or subscriptions dishonest in some way? Surely, a large group made a honest buck.
Who the heck wants to compete with slaves producing $0 software? They are destroying the market.
You mean, the short run. In the long run, there will be smaller market for paid software. So there will be much fewer software vendors resulting in fewer products, less competition, reduced innovation and fewer choices. Sure, software will be free, but since there is no market for innovation, nobody will waste years of their lives creating a $0 product. Therefore, users will have to make do with ancient, slowly innovating software.
Big surprise, it's hard to kill big fish! However, many small fish, like small software vendors and shareware authors have been slaughtered.
Incorrect, Microsoft doesn't provide free software. The price of a stagnant Windows version is always falling due to depreciation. To compensate for this effect, Microsoft adds new features to increase the price. The cost of the bundled software is added to the price of Windows. Since Windows sells so many million copies, the price bump may be a few cents or a few dollars.
New Windows price = depreciated price of old Windows version + price of new features.
What pisses off independent developers is that Microsoft steals their ideas, and makes 100 times more money than them by charging 10 to 100 times lower, because they have such a huge customer base.
And that's why patents are important in protecting against large companies like microsoft simply leeching innovative ideas because they have more money and marketing power, while the innovator goes penniless. Pretty soon, the innovators get tired of getting robbed and stop putting effort into inventive things and society suffers by missing out.
Why the hell did they not choose "/" instead of "\"? This is what happens when language designers don't have design skills and any depth of experience in the CS field.
You can do the same with an automatic by switching from "D" to "N" (neutral). But I've heard that's not good for the transmission. You also lose engine-braking, as a safety issue.
RMS belongs to the dark side. Why should information be free? Why apply moral codes to non-living entities? All manual labor and easy jobs are performed by beasts of burden, machines or humans with low-intellect or low working desire. In other words, all the boring tasks can be done with little expenditure of resources. The only thing of real value (profit for all humanity) is new information technologies of hardware, software -- things that are hard to build and require creativity and intelligence. Information should most definitely not be free until the creators of that information is fairly compensated for their labor.
In the case of this BSD software author, he should negotiate a lump-sum amount for effectively converting his open-source project to closed-source. Since the software is free, he can't charge for that, instead the charge is for change in license (compensation for not being allowed to work on the software in his own time).
worst...advice...ever