"Under your argument, when I buy a PC with Windows preloaded in a store I would be under no license obligation to Microsoft. That's not the way software licenses work; maybe they should, but they don't."
GP is more or less right. Providing you dont click 'I agree' anywhere, you're under no license obligations to Microsoft. However, before you rush off to your warez site with your 0-day Vista isos, remember that all that really means is that you can't be sued for breach of contract for reverse engineering Windows.
If you don't have a Microsoft license, you're merely saddled with your default rights under copyright law, and that means you can't copy the code anyway - your default rights are fairly similar to your rights under the Microsoft EULA.
With the GPL it's different, in that the GPL's license rights are vastly different from your defaults and allow all sorts of copying and whatnot.
The right of 'first sale' only applies to passing on lawfully acquired physical copies of GPLed code, and you pretty much lose the rights to do anything else with GPLed code if you use it to make binary-only copies of your GPLed whatchamacallit, and some legal jurisdictions, like the UK, have complicated exceptions in their versions of 'first sale' to take into account when one party is a distributor of the code (as is the case if you're working round the GPL)
Oh and in Germany, a hardware manufacturer failed to stop an injunction taken out by the iptables people despite arguing that they had the German equivalent of 'first sale'. The judges just said that the GPL wasn't an onerous condition, and granted the injunction.
So don't worry too much. It's a complicated loophole to use, it only applies to physical media, not to digital distribution (so unless you're bundling code with your hardware, you'll lose in the marketplace anyways), some legal jurisdictions don't allow the loophole in quite this manner, and the guys running the law might not allow it anyway even if it does.
Yahoo, on the other hand definitely is, and the main reason that Microsoft and Google haven't followed suit is probably just that China hasn't asked them to, yet.
Okay okay, I'll spell it out, since you have difficulties with the screaming bloody obvious.
"Once copyright law is gone so too is the legal means of ensuring companies abide by the license."
See, you sort of get it, but this doesn't just apply to open source licenses, does it? In the absense of copyright law, the proprietary software producers wouldn't have any kind of exclusive right to distribute their software. We'd be in a world of freeware, either closed or open source. What would be the incentive for the 'proprietary' producers to even be in the software business at all?
"Your ethical right to share your own information has never been in danger. "
When talking about 'the ethical right to share information', it's generally taken to mean the ethical right to share information of general use, no matter who comes up with it.
If I happen to have a computer program or a book or whatever that my friend would find useful, RMS and others think I should be allowed to make a copy of it for him or her.
It's the copyright holder's right to call in lawyers and cops and the armed might of the state to stop me nonviolently sharing information that might be considered unethical from that perspective.
True. It's won't be as easy to use copyright law as a stick to force people to open up the sourcecode. Of the four software freedoms, the (legal) freedom to use the sourcecode to modify the code is the one that won't be automatic if copyright law suddenly evaporates - it's also the freedom which is generally least used, in practice, which is why I hedged my original post with the phrase 'almost, but not entirely,'.
I'm still not sure whether I was right to use the word 'almost', since it's certainly not immediately obvious that the right to modify/see source is the least important.
"In which case, I predict we'll start seeing things like proprietary derivatives of GPL software emerge and not get challenged. "
In the absence of copyright law, what does 'proprietary' mean?
I thought the GPL was a legalistic hack to protect the ethical right to share information. If the government goes and legalises that, then the GPL becomes almost, but not quite, entirely redundant.
"yet the haters of this technology are few and far between (mostly Mac fanbois)."
Well for Mac weenies, vendor lock-in on the software is just not enough. They need the warm comforting feeling of vendor lock-in monopoly hardware too.
I think you use the phrase 'open source' here a lot more than you mean to, so I'll adjust the argument appropriately
"I guess with multiple vendors making products for the platform, open-source junkies are satisfied that one company isn't making all the profits"
For "open source junkies" you really mean anyone who objects to Microsoft-style monopoly business practices. Including the open source community, free marketeers, competitors to the monopolists in question, and consumers generally.
"Is the success of the IBM platform an argument for open-source software?"
The IBM platform was a computer architecture that was opened up and became a de facto standard. "open source software" has little or nothing to do with it. Perhaps what you mean is that the lesson of the IBM PC could have some analagous lesson regarding the openness of software standards.
"Obviously IBM doesn't make a heap of cash from every PC product sold, so there's not a great long-term monetary argument for a company developing an open-source standard per se, or is there?"
s/open-source standard/open standard/j I assume
What you're trying to say is that developing an open standard is silly if a company wants to become a monopolist. Probably true.
But there's plenty of money to be made from the computer industry without necessarily becoming a monopolist (for example, IBM made heaps of cash from selling PCs, and then selling it's PC business, even if it couldn't charge rent on all the PC clones out there).
The only argument in favour of letting a company monopolise or close a standard is if the software that uses it wouldn't otherwise get made, not whether or not makes $100 million or $10 billion. With t'internet and it's terabytes of free or open source software swimming around, not to mention plenty of the proprietary stuff if that's your thing, that software does have a way of getting itself made these days, so I really don't see that as a viable argument.
"Snacks N' Jackson sounds pretty out there, but it sounds like the developers were trying to do something new as opposed rehash another rehash."
Hey! Come on! This WAS 1984 you know. A remarkably high percentage of the games we played in those days were new, because most of the ideas for video games that we play today hadn't even been thought up yet. The dross of those days was good, honest, this-game-sucks-but-at-least-I-tried-to-make-somet hing-fun dross, not the marketing-is-doing-a-deal-with-universal-studios-t hey-want-it-to-be-like-tomb-raider-meets-tetris-me ets-half-life-and-we-can-get-mark-hamill-for-a-voi ceover dross that we're stuck with these days.
The business tactic of spamming the market with hordes of games that were just clones of the smash-hit of two years ago stuck with a film license was really in it's infancy, and wasn't working out too well at the time (E.T. anyone?)
Anyways, I quite liked the games I played in 1984, but that was because I was a European with a Sinclair Spectrum (or Timex something-or-other). Or because I was young and knew no better, one of the two...
What are you gibbering about, fool? The GPL doesn't care what you do with your own code, except that you put it in a binary with someone else's GPLed code, you have to license the whole thing under the GPL.
It even explicitly says you can charge what you want for GPLed code (as long as it's not in the form of a license fee charged for permission to use that software). And there are plenty of corporations that put out GPLed code. Are you accusing IBM, RedHat, Cygnus, Novell, Trolltech, SGI, ID software and dozens of other corporations of thinking that 'corporations are evil' or of being communists?
Nice straw mannery. There's been oceans of press coverage of Iraq and Bin Laden, nobody here's complaining. But this isn't a war blog, this is a nerd blog. The other corporate crimes you've just mentioned warrant attention, certainly, but they're mostly outwith our area of specialisation, and should be discussed elsewhere.
Anyhoo, earlier you were complaining that there should be more coverage of the crimes of SCO and Microsoft. Surely Iraq and bin Laden takes precedence over them too.
Oh, and DRM IS a serious affair - while Sony is using it to infect everyone's PC with Trojans over some junk CDs, a British Newspaper Journalist has used Windows DRM and threatened copyright law to prevent information leaking to the public over an interview with someone who was either an IRA terrorist, or a spy in the IRA working for British Army terrorists.
See here for more details on the sort of thing DRM will be used for in future.
You mean we should stop investigating the extent of the criminal behaviour that Sony/First 4 Internet is guilty of, because they stopped it, and reluctantly apologised for the one the many crimes we uncovered? I bet you thought Woodward and Bernstein were overreacting, and that Nixon got a raw deal too.
You want us to stop showing the public exactly what nastiness is in Sony's DRM rootkit, now that we've finally managed to get mainstream press attention as to how obnoxious and evil DRM actually IS? Sound tactical judgement there. Remind me never to make you part of any Public Relations campaign I have anything to do with.
Would you like us to stop hassling poor ickle Sony just because SCO and Microsoft are just as evil, but slightly harder to punish for their crimes? What's the matter, have you just spent the last month evangelising your new PSP or something?
Ummmm. I've a better scheme. Lets flex our muscles and pummel Sony into the dirt. And when we've shown to everyone that a bunch of geeks CAN get results, then we'll be in a better position to whack SCO and Microsoft and the Software Patents Nazis. Because next time round, there will be less of an apathy factor to overcome. People won't have that excuse that we can't change anything, see?
Erm. America signed the UN charter. The UN charter considers it a crime to go to war except in imminent self-defence, or when authorised by the UN security council. Neither of those cases applies (feeble retroactive attempts to shoehorn a decade-old UN resolution into an authorisation for war doesn't count), therefore going to war was illegal. Even the UK attorney general (Tony Blair's legal advisor) said so at certain times. And that's my last word on this (off) topic...
Is that so? Some kid called Sherman Austin was prosecuted and recently spent jailtime in a federal prison apparently for publishing bombmaking instructions or something similar on an ostensibly anarchist website called raisethefist.com.
His crime was to "distribute information on explosives with the knowledge that some readers would use such info to commit a federal violent crime."
Hmmm. Given the blatant illegality of the Iraq war, does this mean the webmasters who publish those US Army Field Manuals should be in jail?
Nutzwerk - aren't they those litigous fuckpigs who censored the FFII website for telling the world that this company, despite being held up as the model company for software patents, was actually guilty of all sorts of ethically dubious internet practices?
I think the management there has control-freakery issues...
Uhuh. Would this sensitive network information be the log of all those websites you network admins visited last month, and that copy of Quake 4 you installed on the Company Mail Server?
Just because you guys are the only ones who have access to the firewall logs doesn't mean we don't know what you get up to.
"it can be used by everyone for the good of all, but still provide ample recognition and credit for the person who made it possible"
If you want credit for coming up with a neat idea, there's plenty of academic journals designed to do exactly that. And merely being the first person to implement something often gets you a lot of kudos too.
"I think they do deserve compensation, though there doesn't seem to be any alternative to financial compensation."
Why does this necessarily involve patents? People have always come up with these ideas before and they've either not needed compensation or have found compensation without the use of a new set of state monopolies.
"My intuition tells me that just destroying the patent isn't the best solution."
It's not about 'destroying the patent'. Out here in the free world we've never had software patents to destroy, and even in the US, the use of those things is both recent and exceptional- even the massive hoarders like IBM and, these days, Microsoft rarely use them against anyone, and usually claim they're for defensive purposes.
Software patents are the exception, not the norm, and the software industry has done just fine without them for decades. The burden of proof is really on the proponents of software patents to show why they're a necessary evil, not just an evil evil.
I suggest you work on your intuition. People's intuitions tend to be broken when it comes to software, particularly on the internet, mainly because the analogy between software and physical real world items like, say, loaves of bread or socket wrenches, is utterly broken. When the marginal cost of distribution and manufacture is more or less zero, all sorts of economic rules don't work the way you're used to. If the real world rules applied, Linux and open source would be economically impossible, and the highly paid music industry would do a better job of bringing me music than a bunch of unpaid 15 year old kids.
Baer's patent was in the physical processes involved in coming up with the physical object that plays a video game. For that, he needed to buy components, build prototypes, test them, stick them together, see if they worked, and all sorts of things. And he no doubt had to scrap a few prototypes in order to get something that worked properly. Now patents on physical objects are evil too, but the theory is that state-granted monopolies on physical inventions were a *necessary* evil in order that inventors could get enough capital to produce more inventions for the general public. That's the deal. Inventors could claim this limited monopoly right, providing the rest of us got inventions out of it.
For software people, implementing an idea is MUCH cheaper and easier. The cost of implementing a software idea is the cost of feeding a programmer for however long it takes to type the code in and debug it (many programmers even produce high-quality software without even using their copyrights to make money!). There are far more ideas needed to build a nontrivial work of software, and if each of those ideas needs to be scanned through the patent office, and if rent has to be paid to patent holders for each idea that gets used, then the effect is to turn a creative act that is easy and cheap into one which is complex, difficult and expensive. Software patents *inhibit* the production of software, and the public loses.
Since Baer, we've had a multi-billion dollar computer games industry springing up, with thousands of titles coming out each year, and without exclusive rights over game ideas. In fact, it's custom and practice in the games industry to pilfer ideas and methods from any other game that happens along (Paradoxically, this is the one industry where people are paid - and paid well, some of them - to come up with ideas for software).There's absolutely no lack of choice for the aspiring game-buyer these days.
Something similar is true for almost every other type of software you can think of. What exactly is broken with the software industry that we need this atrocious 'fix' that forces productive citizens to become legal experts before they can produce software?
You're saying that ideas and methods make software possible, so what's wrong with letting everyone have those ideas and methods, and make producing software possible for everyone, not just the select few with the corporate backing and the lawyers? There aren't any 'software methodologists' starving in garrets at the moment, while the world gets rich from their methods, are there? What exactly is the problem you're trying to fix, because your 'fix'? Whatever it is, you can be sure that patents will (and are, in the US) cause far worse problems.
And if you'd bother to read the article you point me at, then you'd see that Wiki's definition of an astroturfing campaign differs from this one in it's most important respect:
"The campaign typically instructs the supporters on what to say, how to say it, where to send it, and, **above all**, how to make it appear that their indignation, appreciation, joy, or hate is entirely spontaneous and independent " (my emphasis)
If NoSoftwarePatents.com or Slashdot was saying 'vote for this guy but pretend that we didn't tell you to do it' then it'd be astroturfing. As it is, it's merely campaigning.
Well the name of the game in low-turnout mickey-mouse politics is *always* to be the one gang that gets people fired up enough to vote or turn up or whatever. That's how the game actually works at this level. And it's not really fair to complain that the people who actually bothered to turn up and vote are unbalancing the results because the lazy apathetic shithead vote didn't turn up to balance thm.
As I say, that's different from real astroturfing, which is based on actual deception.
"what if its a novel idea in software design that you want to patent?"
Then you should bugger off implement it and sell a product, and stop trying to monopolise thoughts and demand that other people pay you money for work they did.
The software industry doesn't pay many people to sit around and think up ideas for other people to implement (computer games designers are exceptions, and a special case, really). There is a reason for that. Ideas are cheap and easy to come by. Implementing them is a bit more difficult (though fairly cheap and easy nowdays).
Trouble is, that at the moment, hardware, software, and skilled manpower, and the means of software distribution and production are all quite cheap and available to most people. This is making life difficult for the big players in the software industry, because in order to be an oligopolist, you and a few of your buddies need to have control over a scarce resource. In computing, at the moment, there's very little scarcity. Hence the need to bribe lawmakers for software patents, and to make software ideas scarce, so that the industry can find something to charge us for. Namely the ideas in our own heads.
Come back and whine about software patents when there really is a global ideas shortage, not before.
Astroturfing is when you *fake* a grassroots campaign, by, say, having your paid employees pretend to be consumers, or having setting up lots of pseudonyms on a web forum in order that one person pretends to be 20 disgruntled/satisfied customers or whatever.
In this case, we're a bunch of geeks who are being urged to vote for someone who most of us probably happen to agree with.
Organising a campaign isn't the same as faking a campaign.
Right. that makes ALL the difference. I bet you've still got teh M$ cooties though.
"Your problem is that you don't like the data, so you try and discredit the source for the data."
Oh, I don't much care about the data one way or another. Maybe abiword IS bloated and slow, I care little since I don't use word processors much. There does seem to be a lot of astroturfing about these days, so when I see something that looks like it, I investigate, because that sort of thing interests me. After all, I looked at your homepage, and see 'Microsoft Corporation' right there under your bleeding name n'all, and that's all hardly apparent from the link you pointed us at - what's a guy to think?
"You said that because of these Microsoft-related points - "...this may have some bearing on the result.""
Bah, picky picky picky. This is fucking Slashdot so you can excuse me if I'm not up to professional standards of lexical rigour, and maybe I phrased it without the level of precision required to pass an academic fucking peer review. And maybe this test was useful for solving Abiword performance bug 51421.44.X Plural Sector 12 alpha subsection 4, I know not. But that doesn't mean it's appropriate to use this small, narrow, and very Microsoft-centric test to make a general statement on the relative merits of Abiword versus OO.o verus MS Office, as you tried to do. What's next in this idiom? Linux sucks because it can't run Halo 2 very well?
"Other people can corroborate the data." Perhaps the test is reproducible, I know not. My attempt to reproduce it failed, but I used a different platform, so I didn't dispute the results of the test. I'm certainly not calling you a liar and it's not me that called you an astroturfer. But from some angles, you certainly look a bit like one, you have to admit.
"Raymond Chen used to contribute to Linux, way back. I sincerely doubt he does that anymore."
His email address in the Linux CREDITS file ends in microsoft.com, so I was guessing that maybe he's added to the kernel since he joined them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Under your argument, when I buy a PC with Windows preloaded in a store I would be under no license obligation to Microsoft. That's not the way software licenses work; maybe they should, but they don't."
GP is more or less right. Providing you dont click 'I agree' anywhere, you're under no license obligations to Microsoft. However, before you rush off to your warez site with your 0-day Vista isos, remember that all that really means is that you can't be sued for breach of contract for reverse engineering Windows.
If you don't have a Microsoft license, you're merely saddled with your default rights under copyright law, and that means you can't copy the code anyway - your default rights are fairly similar to your rights under the Microsoft EULA.
With the GPL it's different, in that the GPL's license rights are vastly different from your defaults and allow all sorts of copying and whatnot.
The right of 'first sale' only applies to passing on lawfully acquired physical copies of GPLed code, and you pretty much lose the rights to do anything else with GPLed code if you use it to make binary-only copies of your GPLed whatchamacallit, and some legal jurisdictions, like the UK, have complicated exceptions in their versions of 'first sale' to take into account when one party is a distributor of the code (as is the case if you're working round the GPL)
Oh and in Germany, a hardware manufacturer failed to stop an injunction taken out by the iptables people despite arguing that they had the German equivalent of 'first sale'. The judges just said that the GPL wasn't an onerous condition, and granted the injunction.
So don't worry too much. It's a complicated loophole to use, it only applies to physical media, not to digital distribution (so unless you're bundling code with your hardware, you'll lose in the marketplace anyways), some legal jurisdictions don't allow the loophole in quite this manner, and the guys running the law might not allow it anyway even if it does.
Not yet, as far as we know.
Yahoo, on the other hand definitely is, and the main reason that Microsoft and Google haven't followed suit is probably just that China hasn't asked them to, yet.
Okay okay, I'll spell it out, since you have difficulties with the screaming bloody obvious.
"Once copyright law is gone so too is the legal means of ensuring companies abide by the license."
See, you sort of get it, but this doesn't just apply to open source licenses, does it?
In the absense of copyright law, the proprietary software producers wouldn't have any kind of exclusive right to distribute their software. We'd be in a world of freeware, either closed or open source. What would be the incentive for the 'proprietary' producers to even be in the software business at all?
I got all that the first time.
There's just one tiny little crucial flaw in your argument that you guys seem to be missing though. See if you can spot it.
"Your ethical right to share your own information has never been in danger. "
When talking about 'the ethical right to share information', it's generally taken to mean the ethical right to share information of general use, no matter who comes up with it.
If I happen to have a computer program or a book or whatever that my friend would find useful, RMS and others think I should be allowed to make a copy of it for him or her.
It's the copyright holder's right to call in lawyers and cops and the armed might of the state to stop me nonviolently sharing information that might be considered unethical from that perspective.
True. It's won't be as easy to use copyright law as a stick to force people to open up the sourcecode. Of the four software freedoms, the (legal) freedom to use the sourcecode to modify the code is the one that won't be automatic if copyright law suddenly evaporates - it's also the freedom which is generally least used, in practice, which is why I hedged my original post with the phrase 'almost, but not entirely,'.
I'm still not sure whether I was right to use the word 'almost', since it's certainly not immediately obvious that the right to modify/see source is the least important.
"In which case, I predict we'll start seeing things like proprietary derivatives of GPL software emerge and not get challenged. "
In the absence of copyright law, what does 'proprietary' mean?
I thought the GPL was a legalistic hack to protect the ethical right to share information. If the government goes and legalises that, then the GPL becomes almost, but not quite, entirely redundant.
... so what's the Korean for 'I told you I was hardcore'
"yet the haters of this technology are few and far between (mostly Mac fanbois)."
Well for Mac weenies, vendor lock-in on the software is just not enough. They need the warm comforting feeling of vendor lock-in monopoly hardware too.
I think you use the phrase 'open source' here a lot more than you mean to, so I'll adjust the argument appropriately
"I guess with multiple vendors making products for the platform, open-source junkies are satisfied that one company isn't making all the profits"
For "open source junkies" you really mean anyone who objects to Microsoft-style monopoly business practices. Including the open source community, free marketeers, competitors to the monopolists in question, and consumers generally.
"Is the success of the IBM platform an argument for open-source software?"
The IBM platform was a computer architecture that was opened up and became a de facto standard. "open source software" has little or nothing to do with it. Perhaps what you mean is that the lesson of the IBM PC could have some analagous lesson regarding the openness of software standards.
"Obviously IBM doesn't make a heap of cash from every PC product sold, so there's not a great long-term monetary argument for a company developing an open-source standard per se, or is there?"
s/open-source standard/open standard/j I assume
What you're trying to say is that developing an open standard is silly if a company wants to become a monopolist. Probably true.
But there's plenty of money to be made from the computer industry without necessarily becoming a monopolist (for example, IBM made heaps of cash from selling PCs, and then selling it's PC business, even if it couldn't charge rent on all the PC clones out there).
The only argument in favour of letting a company monopolise or close a standard is if the software that uses it wouldn't otherwise get made, not whether or not makes $100 million or $10 billion. With t'internet and it's terabytes of free or open source software swimming around, not to mention plenty of the proprietary stuff if that's your thing, that software does have a way of getting itself made these days, so I really don't see that as a viable argument.
"Snacks N' Jackson sounds pretty out there, but it sounds like the developers were trying to do something new as opposed rehash another rehash."
t hing-fun dross, not the marketing-is-doing-a-deal-with-universal-studios-t hey-want-it-to-be-like-tomb-raider-meets-tetris-me ets-half-life-and-we-can-get-mark-hamill-for-a-voi ceover dross that we're stuck with these days.
Hey! Come on! This WAS 1984 you know. A remarkably high percentage of the games we played in those days were new, because most of the ideas for video games that we play today hadn't even been thought up yet. The dross of those days was good, honest, this-game-sucks-but-at-least-I-tried-to-make-some
The business tactic of spamming the market with hordes of games that were just clones of the smash-hit of two years ago stuck with a film license was really in it's infancy, and wasn't working out too well at the time (E.T. anyone?)
Anyways, I quite liked the games I played in 1984, but that was because I was a European with a Sinclair Spectrum (or Timex something-or-other). Or because I was young and knew no better, one of the two...
What are you gibbering about, fool? The GPL doesn't care what you do with your own code, except that you put it in a binary with someone else's GPLed code, you have to license the whole thing under the GPL.
It even explicitly says you can charge what you want for GPLed code (as long as it's not in the form of a license fee charged for permission to use that software). And there are plenty of corporations that put out GPLed code. Are you accusing IBM, RedHat, Cygnus, Novell, Trolltech, SGI, ID software and dozens of other corporations of thinking that 'corporations are evil' or of being communists?
Trollish retard! Begone!
Now I can track down those cheating sods who disconnect whenever I overtake them in Mario Kart!
Nice straw mannery. There's been oceans of press coverage of Iraq and Bin Laden, nobody here's complaining. But this isn't a war blog, this is a nerd blog. The other corporate crimes you've just mentioned warrant attention, certainly, but they're mostly outwith our area of specialisation, and should be discussed elsewhere.
Anyhoo, earlier you were complaining that there should be more coverage of the crimes of SCO and Microsoft. Surely Iraq and bin Laden takes precedence over them too.
Oh, and DRM IS a serious affair - while Sony is using it to infect everyone's PC with Trojans over some junk CDs, a British Newspaper Journalist has used Windows DRM and threatened copyright law to prevent information leaking to the public over an interview with someone who was either an IRA terrorist, or a spy in the IRA working for British Army terrorists.
See here for more details on the sort of thing DRM will be used for in future.
You mean we should stop investigating the extent of the criminal behaviour that Sony/First 4 Internet is guilty of, because they stopped it, and reluctantly apologised for the one the many crimes we uncovered? I bet you thought Woodward and Bernstein were overreacting, and that Nixon got a raw deal too.
You want us to stop showing the public exactly what nastiness is in Sony's DRM rootkit, now that we've finally managed to get mainstream press attention as to how obnoxious and evil DRM actually IS? Sound tactical judgement there. Remind me never to make you part of any Public Relations campaign I have anything to do with.
Would you like us to stop hassling poor ickle Sony just because SCO and Microsoft are just as evil, but slightly harder to punish for their crimes? What's the matter, have you just spent the last month evangelising your new PSP or something?
Ummmm. I've a better scheme. Lets flex our muscles and pummel Sony into the dirt. And when we've shown to everyone that a bunch of geeks CAN get results, then we'll be in a better position to whack SCO and Microsoft and the Software Patents Nazis. Because next time round, there will be less of an apathy factor to overcome. People won't have that excuse that we can't change anything, see?
Erm.
America signed the UN charter. The UN charter considers it a crime to go to war except in imminent self-defence, or when authorised by the UN security council. Neither of those cases applies (feeble retroactive attempts to shoehorn a decade-old UN resolution into an authorisation for war doesn't count), therefore going to war was illegal. Even the UK attorney general (Tony Blair's legal advisor) said so at certain times.
And that's my last word on this (off) topic...
Is that so? Some kid called Sherman Austin was prosecuted and recently spent jailtime in a federal prison apparently for publishing bombmaking instructions or something similar on an ostensibly anarchist website called raisethefist.com.
His crime was to "distribute information on explosives with the knowledge that some readers would use such info to commit a federal violent crime."
Hmmm. Given the blatant illegality of the Iraq war, does this mean the webmasters who publish those US Army Field Manuals should be in jail?
Nutzwerk - aren't they those litigous fuckpigs who censored the FFII website for telling the world that this company, despite being held up as the model company for software patents, was actually guilty of all sorts of ethically dubious internet practices?
I think the management there has control-freakery issues...
"sensitive network information."
Uhuh. Would this sensitive network information be the log of all those websites you network admins visited last month, and that copy of Quake 4 you installed on the Company Mail Server?
Just because you guys are the only ones who have access to the firewall logs doesn't mean we don't know what you get up to.
"it can be used by everyone for the good of all, but still provide ample recognition and credit for the person who made it possible"
If you want credit for coming up with a neat idea, there's plenty of academic journals designed to do exactly that. And merely being the first person to implement something often gets you a lot of kudos too.
"I think they do deserve compensation, though there doesn't seem to be any alternative to financial compensation."
Why does this necessarily involve patents? People have always come up with these ideas before and they've either not needed compensation or have found compensation without the use of a new set of state monopolies.
"My intuition tells me that just destroying the patent isn't the best solution."
It's not about 'destroying the patent'. Out here in the free world we've never had software patents to destroy, and even in the US, the use of those things is both recent and exceptional- even the massive hoarders like IBM and, these days, Microsoft rarely use them against anyone, and usually claim they're for defensive purposes.
Software patents are the exception, not the norm, and the software industry has done just fine without them for decades. The burden of proof is really on the proponents of software patents to show why they're a necessary evil, not just an evil evil.
I suggest you work on your intuition. People's intuitions tend to be broken when it comes to software, particularly on the internet, mainly because the analogy between software and physical real world items like, say, loaves of bread or socket wrenches, is utterly broken. When the marginal cost of distribution and manufacture is more or less zero, all sorts of economic rules don't work the way you're used to. If the real world rules applied, Linux and open source would be economically impossible, and the highly paid music industry would do a better job of bringing me music than a bunch of unpaid 15 year old kids.
Baer's patent was in the physical processes involved in coming up with the physical object that plays a video game. For that, he needed to buy components, build prototypes, test them, stick them together, see if they worked, and all sorts of things. And he no doubt had to scrap a few prototypes in order to get something that worked properly. Now patents on physical objects are evil too, but the theory is that state-granted monopolies on physical inventions were a *necessary* evil in order that inventors could get enough capital to produce more inventions for the general public. That's the deal. Inventors could claim this limited monopoly right, providing the rest of us got inventions out of it.
For software people, implementing an idea is MUCH cheaper and easier. The cost of implementing a software idea is the cost of feeding a programmer for however long it takes to type the code in and debug it (many programmers even produce high-quality software without even using their copyrights to make money!). There are far more ideas needed to build a nontrivial work of software, and if each of those ideas needs to be scanned through the patent office, and if rent has to be paid to patent holders for each idea that gets used, then the effect is to turn a creative act that is easy and cheap into one which is complex, difficult and expensive. Software patents *inhibit* the production of software, and the public loses.
Since Baer, we've had a multi-billion dollar computer games industry springing up, with thousands of titles coming out each year, and without exclusive rights over game ideas. In fact, it's custom and practice in the games industry to pilfer ideas and methods from any other game that happens along (Paradoxically, this is the one industry where people are paid - and paid well, some of them - to come up with ideas for software).There's absolutely no lack of choice for the aspiring game-buyer these days.
Something similar is true for almost every other type of software you can think of. What exactly is broken with the software industry that we need this atrocious 'fix' that forces productive citizens to become legal experts before they can produce software?
You're saying that ideas and methods make software possible, so what's wrong with letting everyone have those ideas and methods, and make producing software possible for everyone, not just the select few with the corporate backing and the lawyers? There aren't any 'software methodologists' starving in garrets at the moment, while the world gets rich from their methods, are there? What exactly is the problem you're trying to fix, because your 'fix'? Whatever it is, you can be sure that patents will (and are, in the US) cause far worse problems.
And if you'd bother to read the article you point me at, then you'd see that Wiki's definition of an astroturfing campaign differs from this one in it's most important respect:
"The campaign typically instructs the supporters on what to say, how to say it, where to send it, and, **above all**, how to make it appear that their indignation, appreciation, joy, or hate is entirely spontaneous and independent "
(my emphasis)
If NoSoftwarePatents.com or Slashdot was saying 'vote for this guy but pretend that we didn't tell you to do it' then it'd be astroturfing. As it is, it's merely campaigning.
Well the name of the game in low-turnout mickey-mouse politics is *always* to be the one gang that gets people fired up enough to vote or turn up or whatever. That's how the game actually works at this level. And it's not really fair to complain that the people who actually bothered to turn up and vote are unbalancing the results because the lazy apathetic shithead vote didn't turn up to balance thm.
As I say, that's different from real astroturfing, which is based on actual deception.
"what if its a novel idea in software design that you want to patent?"
Then you should bugger off implement it and sell a product, and stop trying to monopolise thoughts and demand that other people pay you money for work they did.
The software industry doesn't pay many people to sit around and think up ideas for other people to implement (computer games designers are exceptions, and a special case, really).
There is a reason for that. Ideas are cheap and easy to come by. Implementing them is a bit more difficult (though fairly cheap and easy nowdays).
Trouble is, that at the moment, hardware, software, and skilled manpower, and the means of software distribution and production are all quite cheap and available to most people. This is making life difficult for the big players in the software industry, because in order to be an oligopolist, you and a few of your buddies need to have control over a scarce resource. In computing, at the moment, there's very little scarcity. Hence the need to bribe lawmakers for software patents, and to make software ideas scarce, so that the industry can find something to charge us for. Namely the ideas in our own heads.
Come back and whine about software patents when there really is a global ideas shortage, not before.
Astroturfing is when you *fake* a grassroots campaign, by, say, having your paid employees pretend to be consumers, or having setting up lots of pseudonyms on a web forum in order that one person pretends to be 20 disgruntled/satisfied customers or whatever.
In this case, we're a bunch of geeks who are being urged to vote for someone who most of us probably happen to agree with.
Organising a campaign isn't the same as faking a campaign.
"I do not work for Microsoft Corp now"
Right. that makes ALL the difference. I bet you've still got teh M$ cooties though.
"Your problem is that you don't like the data, so you try and discredit the source for the data."
Oh, I don't much care about the data one way or another. Maybe abiword IS bloated and slow, I care little since I don't use word processors much.
There does seem to be a lot of astroturfing about these days, so when I see something that looks like it, I investigate, because that sort of thing interests me. After all, I looked at your homepage, and see 'Microsoft Corporation' right there under your bleeding name n'all, and that's all hardly apparent from the link you pointed us at - what's a guy to think?
"You said that because of these Microsoft-related points - "...this may have some bearing on the result.""
Bah, picky picky picky. This is fucking Slashdot so you can excuse me if I'm not up to professional standards of lexical rigour, and maybe I phrased it without the level of precision required to pass an academic fucking peer review. And maybe this test was useful for solving Abiword performance bug 51421.44.X Plural Sector 12 alpha subsection 4, I know not. But that doesn't mean it's appropriate to use this small, narrow, and very Microsoft-centric test to make a general statement on the relative merits of Abiword versus OO.o verus MS Office, as you tried to do. What's next in this idiom? Linux sucks because it can't run Halo 2 very well?
"Other people can corroborate the data."
Perhaps the test is reproducible, I know not. My attempt to reproduce it failed, but I used a different platform, so I didn't dispute the results of the test. I'm certainly not calling you a liar and it's not me that called you an astroturfer. But from some angles, you certainly look a bit like one, you have to admit.
"Raymond Chen used to contribute to Linux, way back. I sincerely doubt he does that anymore."
His email address in the Linux CREDITS file ends in microsoft.com, so I was guessing that maybe he's added to the kernel since he joined them.