My point was that the version we were reading didn't pass through the Chinese state government censors in any way. In no way was it Chinese state propaganda, despite originally being written in Chinese, contrary to the silly assertions of the great grandparent.
"Well said. I'm pretty sure that this is just the English translation of a Chinese state-run newspaper. (The "read original Chinese" link at the bottom gives this away.)"
Errr, you are aware that the Epoch Times is a virulently anti-Communist newspaper don't you? They're famous for doing some sort of 10-part history of Chinese Communism (which read like a lurid and hysterical diatribe. I picked up a copy once; I don't know much about the history of China but they had a summary of the Paris Commune of 1871 which was an utterly atrocious travesty of history). If anything, the Epoch times is far more likely to distort the facts in a manner that defames the Chinese government, hard as that may be to believe.
Not everything written in the Chinese language is censored by the Chinese government
"Do the editors read ANYTHING before posting!?"
I find the irony of THIS statement quite remarkable, given the above.
You're both right; it's only your first sentence 'Quite wrong.' that's incorrect.
The GPL is the document that grants the right to have your own personal copy of the code, but it's unconditional; you don't have to accept the GPL, or do anything else that would constitute 'agreeing' to it. Everyone has the right to have GPLed software on their machines, granted by the GPL, whether they accept the GPL or not.
However if they don't accept the GPL, they don't have the rights to modify or distribute or distribute modified versions of the software. Those rights are only offered on a conditional acceptance of the terms in the GPL (which they 'accept' by attempting to exert rights that only copyright law grants). So he's right and you're mostly right.
(Oh, and for the record, if you, say, have a copy of the code on a CD-ROM, then it's not just the GPL that necessarily gives you the right to have 'a copy of the code on your machine'; around the world, there are laws similar to 17 USC 117 that deny the copyright holder the right to prevent you running code you're in possession of)
And of course the Steam EULA will force you to bend over and be raped by Valve Software. You don't even have the right to run the game you pay for.
I wonder how long before their source engine games are subjected to the same bait and switch tactics that they used with HL:Counterstrike, where they now inflict advertisements on the players, supposedly to pay for the Steam servers that they forced everyone to "upgrade" to.
When you buy a Valve game, what you're paying for, with real money, is the right to *request* that you be allowed to use some nonspecific software, which they can revoke at any time they want to, and where you'll be subjected to forcible upgrades. It's not up to you to decide whether you're happy with version 1.1 and want to stick with it; if version 1.2 comes out, full of billboards and with a subliminal voice whispering 'Please buy Brand X fizzy pop', that's the version you play, or not at all.
With my Digital Rights being Managed like this, I'll stick to nethack, thanks...
Strictly speaking yes, but a settlement without a court judgement is still often used as a likely indicator of what the law is.
For instance, on a related note, the conventional wisdom relating to the AT&T vs BSD court case is that large chunks of ancient Unix code are now public domain, but this is only because Judge Debevoise made a preliminary report on the case before the litigants settled, and ever since then, geeks of the world have acted accordingly; it's still not been tested either.
The argument might be weak and contrary to what most people think about the BSD license, but it's not necessarily untested; there was one instance where the holders of a BSD-licensed copyright argued something similar.
The email client pine used to be nominally BSD-licensed, until the FSF tried to make a GPLed version. Then Washington University got all sniffy about relicensing, claimed that the BSD license didn't say what everybody thought it said (something about distribution being allowed, and modification being allowed, but distributing modified versions being not allowed)and threatened legal action against the FSF. The FSF backed down before any lawsuit took place (it's probably good politics not to piss off a University), and Washington changed the license so that everybody understood what they meant.
So the one test case where someone got lawyers involved over the wording of the BSD license went in favour of a nonstandard reading of the license.
"What's to stop the MPAA/RIAA from buying an old Russian Bomber / Diesel Sub / whatever and just destroying the whole platform? Or hiring someone to plant C-4 on the base of hte structure and blowing it up?"
Errr, the same thing stopping them doing that sort of thing with the current pirate bay servers. Terrorism and murder is pretty much illegal everywhere.
Read your own quote "... his political point of view is that... the developer can simply decide whether you have freedom or not...".
Linus chose to give us freedom, but he still believes that authors have the rights to deprive users of 'the four freedoms', should they want to. Stallman believes that the user should have the right to those freedoms, regardless of the wishes of the authors. Therein lies the ideological difference.
Erm, the point isn't that he heaped abuse on independent developers. The point is that it helps to show the mindset of Microsoft when it was alleged to have actively attacked and drove said developers out of business, which is the unlawful activity Microsoft is accused of, in an actual court case.
Similarly, if someone's accused of a racist attack, then the prosecution can bring a character witness to show that he made a number of racist statements.
It's a different situation with someone verbally attacking Microsoft. We're not in the dock for committing crimes against Microsoft.
"How is the decision by non-governmental entities that something is undeserving of their support or attention a threat to freedom speech?"
When the non-governmental entities have the power to prevent your voice being heard, and do so because of the content of what you say, isn't that another form of censorship? When the tiny few who control, say, the Television stations decide that your TV documentary should not be aired because the views expressed in it are too dangerous for the public, aren't you being censored? Sure, you can start up your own TV station, if you happen to be a multi-millionaire. Otherwise you can show your documentary to 3 people and a dog at selected film festivals. Does 'freedom of speech' mean freedom of speech for multi-millionaires? Or does it mean you can say what you want using ineffective means of communication?
And this particular case is more subtle still. What if the broadcasters were happy with your documentary being shown, but the advertisers forced them, reluctantly, to cancel your show. There is an example of something like this happening to documentary filmmakers in the movie 'The Corporation', where Monsanto successfully bowdlerised a Fox documentary on Bovine Growth Hormone.
Is it right and proper that a handful of people or corporations can use their money and lawyers to influence the public discourse in a 'democratic' country, out of all proportion to their numbers? Even if they have the numbers, should a large number of people be allowed to pressure a dissident few into silence, using non-governmental pressure? Do only the rich and (maybe) the many have the right to be heard?
Maybe governments passing laws to silence you isn't the only way you can be silenced - in fact, it's probably quite ineffective, given the costs of policing and the uproar that it generates. Far more effective, perhaps, for a system where the people in charge have vast PR and advertising budgets using the most effective communications machinery going, while the dissidents hand out badly photocopied leaflets in fenced-off 'freedom of speech zones' on street corners.
Maybe that's the 'freedom of speech' issue that this guy was talking about...
Yeah, but if SCOTUS rules that patents aren't valid relative to section 271(f) because they're not valid at all, then there's no reason for that reasoning not to be applicable.
In fact, my uninformed guess is that it would be perverse for software to not be a component under 271(f) while being fully patentable under 101. The law so far has ruled diametrically opposite. The Eolas case, the one Supreme Court ruling (sortof) in favour of software patents, allowed for a computer running software to be part of a larger industrial process (and that is the foothold that was exploited by subsequent district courts to effectively legalise software patents without any congressional input). Software can be a component of a patentable invention, if not the invention itself. However, in this particular case, I have a sneaking recollection that the full invention that AT&T wants to patent is nothing but software, which works in favour of the SFLC again.
I don't know how it'll go, but it would be a brilliant legal move for the SFLC to abolish software patents with this drive-by hit on a passing lawsuit, though. It costs us nothing and might win us everything, so it's definitely worth a try.
The law is 35 USC 271, section f, which is designed to stop people making components of a patented invention and shipping them overseas in order to be assembled into something that would breach the patent, had the act occured in the US.
In this case, the software is apparently developed in the US and shipped overseas.
Yes, it's a disgusting overreach of US patent law into foreign jurisdictions. And yes, software patents are evil, and hopefully unlawful. Go Eben and Dan!
"The biggest error you made in your post was assuming a technocratic price theory. You seem to assume (given your moral harangue) that if only one could accurately discover Microsoft's costs and decide a fair profit, then a just price for Windows can be calculated. "
I wasn't talking about a "just" price. I was taking issue with some wrongheaded analogy between software and cars (actually his analogy kindof worked, but the poster didn't understand that.) But yes, you're right that the profits are determined by a price, which is usually (not in THIS case) determined by some bargain between buyer and seller.
"While it certainly gets more complicated, in essence, price is determined only by two things: what the seller is willing to accept and the buyer willing to offer. Marginal utility and cost certainly do influence the buyer and seller, but the subjective valuation of the product trumps them both. Take the collective aggregate of buyers and sellers, and you end up with a price curve. This is something you can examine mathematically, but one must remember that it is a curve of convenience, because the actuality is that it is still a set of discrete economic transactions that the curve attempts to track."
Indeed. But isn't the 'supply' of an infinitely reproducible good with zero marginal cost going to be infinite? Even looking at it with supply-demand-curve tinted glasses, the only thing keeping that supply finite IS those proprietary locks I was talking about.
"Costs. There are costs related to the good, and also costs unrelated to the good. The seller certainly wants to recoup the latter costs by selling the goods, but they do not enter into his price calculations. And what of wages? Piece-wages are related to the cost of the good, but hourly wages and salaries are not. For a software company, such costs can be significant."
Indeed and I mentioned them, using presumably incorrect terminology, when I spoke about the one-off fixed cost involved in writing a piece of software. I suppose there's some things, like an hourly-paid worker on an assembly line, whose wages aren't counted as part of the marginal cost of the car, under your scheme of things, but I probably counted them in my nebulous 'cost'.
"Profits. Gross profits or net? The only way your trite formula makes any sense is if you meant gross profits. But the only way your moral harangue has weight is if you meant net profits. You then say "profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'". Your definition of profit is very confused."
Well yeah, I had no clear definition in mind when I abused the word. I suppose my "profit" per copy of software was, implictly, something like 'total revenue - total outgoings) / number of items sold. I shouldn't have used the word, really, since the PRICE only exists because of the proprietary locks. You should be able to agree on that. Good luck making a profit on goods with a price of $0. As for the 'moral harangue', I wasn't even thinking in moral terms, I was just taking issue with someone's analogy. 'Property is Theft' is something I can harangue people on some other day.
"Now to your formula. What happens when Microsoft raises the price of Windows? Does its "profit" go up? According to your formula it must. But according to the price curve there is a point at which profits will fall as price increases. It's not the government that's keeping Microsoft from selling Windows at a minimum price of $1000 per copy. It's their selfish love of profits that keeps up from getting gouged! (Of course, some people will claim that they would be gouged even with a price of $10)."
And for the purposes of the original argument, that's irrelevant. There's a price per copy of windows, and that there's some *cough*nebulus and poorly defined 'costs' involved. It doesn't matter if the price is due to a supply/demand curve with rational economists doing their profit maximisation, or if Bill Gates wore a blindfold and put a pin in a phone directory or the price was l
Instead of the insults, exactly what did I say that was wrong?
Was it some terminological inexactitude to do with the words 'profit' and 'cost' that means something slightly different to technical accountants? Everything I said seemed more or less tautological, given the naive definitions of the words I was using.
Development costs is a single one-off fixed cost, and I amply dealt with it.
Support yes, is a non-zero cost, but with software, the people supporting the software aren't necessarily the people who wrote it- Cygnus supports software it doesn't write, and Oracle is about to support RedHat, which it didn't write either. If software support is included as part of the price of software, then the car analogy has to factor in the cost of servicing and maintenance and road tax as part of the price of the car.
The COST of cars is the price of the materials that go into it, plus the cost of the labour required to make and of the resources required to move it to where it is to be sold. There's also a single one-off fixed cost to begin with that relates to the factory the car is built in, plus the cost of designing the car, plus some other small sundries. Those one-off costs become less and less important, the more cars you sell.
The price is the cost plus the profit.
Now with a copy of some piece of software, the price of the materials, the labour required to make it, and the resources required to move it is either the cost of the box and the media it comes on (i.e. very cheap) or the price of letting the internet distribute it (i.e. more or less free). There's still a one-off fixed cost, which is the cost of writing it in the first place, but that becomes less and less important as time goes on, just like the cars. Besides, it's eminently possible to get those fixed costs taken care of for more or less nothing too. Linux does it. GNU does it. (Free|Open|Net)BSD does it. You get the picture. The reason that they're generally free (as in beer) and Windows isn't is precisely because they've relaxed the need to cover the fixed costs (and, of course, curbed Linus' immense lust for profit and power) by using copyright law to proprietarise software.
Price again, is cost + profit. In this case, with the proprietary locks on, the profit margin is immense, because the marginal cost of what Microsoft sells is next to nothing, and that is why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world.
Your particular analogy is broken because a) you confuse cost with price and b) ten cars costs roughly ten times as much to make (given the initial investment in making a car factory) as one car, whereas ten copies of windows costs roughly the same to make as one copy of windows (barring the fixed costs, again). The price of both cars and software is cost + profit; however with software, the cost is next to 0, and the profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'.
I don't have a bcm4318, but you do know that the bcm43xx driver has been merged into the stock linux kernel? Maybe you can upgrade the kernel rather than just the card.
I don't know if the in-kernel driver is any newer/better than the version on the berlios site these days, but it's certainly working for me...
That's just for their script for building your own customised distro from gNewSense, for the purposes of becoming the next Ubuntu or debian or gNewsense. The final step in those instructions is 'Push your files to a mirror and publicise'.
If you want to run gNewsense, it'll probably be similar to any other debian/Ubuntu based distro.
By the time the Giant Meteor Headed to Earth becomes the business of the US Geological Survey, then there's the small matter of the Giant Meteor Headed to Earth having destroyed all life.
Wait for the US government to clamp down on the loonies in NASA...
You miss the point. It's about marginal costs and the commons.
The 'economy of ownership' is the one where people say 'This stuff is mine! Give me money or you can't use it, even if it costs me nothing for you to have it.
The 'economy of sharing' is where people say 'This stuff can't, or shouldn't be owned at all. If anyone wants to use it, they can and if anyone wants to help improve it, bonus!'
The commons notoriously has problems with things like overgrazing and overfishing, and the notion of sharing what you produce has problems if it costs you something to share. With digital goods shared on the internet, neither of those are a problem. Software doesn't wear out, and it doesn't cost me anything if two people share my work over a website or p2p network. The fixed costs associated with creating free software in the first place do have to be covered, but that hasn't been a problem so far.
The internet works with a different set of economic rules from the traditional economy. Stuff like Linux and Apache are economic equivalent of bumblebees. They shouldn't work under the old rules, yet they do.
And because of that, the ethical rules should change too, but they haven't, yet. In a world where Ubuntu and OpenBSD can be made without having policemen to stop them being copied, why should we employ policemen and jails to prevent Windows or OSX being copied? Jailing people is violent and evil, m'kay, and should only ever be used as a last resort. The primary justification for employing copyright protections in the first place was just to produce copyrighted works - if the works are now getting made without those protections, then there's no excuse for attacking and threatening people just to make an equivalent work that might compete with it...
Umm, I think that's Moglen's point, more or less. I'm still waiting for the *cough*quicktime*cough* movie to download...
For starters, even SCO believes there is hardly any SCO copyrighted code in the Linux kernel (at MOST, we're talking about 326 lines in Linux, here). SCO is suing over IBM copyrighted code in the Linux kernel. Really.
Secondly, I never said anything at all about the relationship between the Microsoft/Novell deal and the SCO/Linux lawsuit. Your initial post seemed to deny ANY link between Microsoft and SCO, and I felt the need to correct you on that howler.
In my opinion, the main relationship between them is that Microsoft has realised that using SCO as a sockpuppet to attack Linux with has run it's course, so it's switched to a completely different tactic, namely some sort of as-yet-unclear patent FUD/threat, and it spotted the opportunity when Novell came knocking at the door and asking for cash.
1) At the outset of the lawsuit, Microsoft paid SCO $10 million in "license fees", that were, apparently, illegally kept by SCO rather than passed on to Novell. A few years back Santa Cruz actually had to pay Microsoft for the rights to distribute Unix, now Microsoft has somehow decided it needs to pay SCO for something Unixy.
2)Microsoft then convinced Baystar, an investment management firm, to invest another $50 million or so, by saying 'if you start to lose money, we'll cover your loss' (but when Baystar started to lose money, Microsoft stopped returning Baystar's calls, literally, so Baystar started dumping every piece of SCO stock they could, as fast as their contracts would let them).
3) Meanwhile, IBM has uncovered a huge pile of emails between Darl McBride, the SCO CEO, and Microsoft, which SCO was trying to hide from IBM.
All of this is on the record in court filings. Nothing controversial about any of it. read all about it on Groklaw.
So why did Microsoft feel the need to pump huge amounts of money into a dying pissant software company at exactly the same time as it's attacking Linux with bogus copyright claims? What did Darl Mcbride and Microsoft feel the need to send each other dozens of emails that IBM wasn't supposed to know about? What's the simplest, Occams-razorish answer?
To avoid the scary threat of being called a conspiracy theorist must i do a stretch and say shit like 'uuuuuh, Microsoft maybe wants to put out it's own version of Unix and surprise us all for Christmas 2008 and uhhhhh Microsoft was just doing a good deed by putting some random Investment Firm in touch with some random Tech company and uhhhh, Darl Mcbride and Bill Gates were maybe planning on going on a fishing trip in Oregon sometime, yeh that's it, a fishing trip'.
Come on, what's YOUR simpler and more compelling theory that explains the observed facts?
Erm, that's why you check the md5 (or hopefully some better) hash of the iso you just downloaded with the checksum provided by your distro manufacturer's homepage, yeah?
Good luck getting the md5 checksum of your pirate Vista iso from a trustworthy soul at Microsoft...
(Okay, md5 isn't the epitome of security these days, but it's still probably ridiculously difficult for someone to generate the appropriate gribble that can be put inside an iso with a preinstalled rootkit so as to match the original hash)
Not quite. Section 7 of the GPL doesn't work retroactively. It doesn't say 'You're breaking the GPL if one of your customers happens to get sued', it says 'You're breaking the GPL if you distribute while knowing about a GPL-incompatible legal restriction that will be imposed on your licensees'
If Novell stops distributing code as soon as it hears about an actual Microsoft patent claim (or some other legal machinery that prevents it's customers from exercising their full GPL rights), then it won't be liable for previous instances where it supplied someone with GPL code.
Of course, it does lose the right to distribute the code from that moment on, which is hopefully a Big Deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh don't be an ass.
My point was that the version we were reading didn't pass through the Chinese state government censors in any way. In no way was it Chinese state propaganda, despite originally being written in Chinese, contrary to the silly assertions of the great grandparent.
"Well said. I'm pretty sure that this is just the English translation of a Chinese state-run newspaper. (The "read original Chinese" link at the bottom gives this away.)"
Errr, you are aware that the Epoch Times is a virulently anti-Communist newspaper don't you? They're famous for doing some sort of 10-part history of Chinese Communism (which read like a lurid and hysterical diatribe. I picked up a copy once; I don't know much about the history of China but they had a summary of the Paris Commune of 1871 which was an utterly atrocious travesty of history). If anything, the Epoch times is far more likely to distort the facts in a manner that defames the Chinese government, hard as that may be to believe.
Not everything written in the Chinese language is censored by the Chinese government
"Do the editors read ANYTHING before posting!?"
I find the irony of THIS statement quite remarkable, given the above.
You're both right; it's only your first sentence 'Quite wrong.' that's incorrect.
The GPL is the document that grants the right to have your own personal copy of the code, but it's unconditional; you don't have to accept the GPL, or do anything else that would constitute 'agreeing' to it. Everyone has the right to have GPLed software on their machines, granted by the GPL, whether they accept the GPL or not.
However if they don't accept the GPL, they don't have the rights to modify or distribute or distribute modified versions of the software. Those rights are only offered on a conditional acceptance of the terms in the GPL (which they 'accept' by attempting to exert rights that only copyright law grants). So he's right and you're mostly right.
(Oh, and for the record, if you, say, have a copy of the code on a CD-ROM, then it's not just the GPL that necessarily gives you the right to have 'a copy of the code on your machine'; around the world, there are laws similar to 17 USC 117 that deny the copyright holder the right to prevent you running code you're in possession of)
And of course the Steam EULA will force you to bend over and be raped by Valve Software. You don't even have the right to run the game you pay for.
I wonder how long before their source engine games are subjected to the same bait and switch tactics that they used with HL:Counterstrike, where they now inflict advertisements on the players, supposedly to pay for the Steam servers that they forced everyone to "upgrade" to.
When you buy a Valve game, what you're paying for, with real money, is the right to *request* that you be allowed to use some nonspecific software, which they can revoke at any time they want to, and where you'll be subjected to forcible upgrades. It's not up to you to decide whether you're happy with version 1.1 and want to stick with it; if version 1.2 comes out, full of billboards and with a subliminal voice whispering 'Please buy Brand X fizzy pop', that's the version you play, or not at all.
With my Digital Rights being Managed like this, I'll stick to nethack, thanks...
Strictly speaking yes, but a settlement without a court judgement is still often used as a likely indicator of what the law is.
For instance, on a related note, the conventional wisdom relating to the AT&T vs BSD court case is that large chunks of ancient Unix code are now public domain, but this is only because Judge Debevoise made a preliminary report on the case before the litigants settled, and ever since then, geeks of the world have acted accordingly; it's still not been tested either.
The argument might be weak and contrary to what most people think about the BSD license, but it's not necessarily untested; there was one instance where the holders of a BSD-licensed copyright argued something similar.
The email client pine used to be nominally BSD-licensed, until the FSF tried to make a GPLed version. Then Washington University got all sniffy about relicensing, claimed that the BSD license didn't say what everybody thought it said (something about distribution being allowed, and modification being allowed, but distributing modified versions being not allowed)and threatened legal action against the FSF. The FSF backed down before any lawsuit took place (it's probably good politics not to piss off a University), and Washington changed the license so that everybody understood what they meant.
So the one test case where someone got lawyers involved over the wording of the BSD license went in favour of a nonstandard reading of the license.
"What's to stop the MPAA/RIAA from buying an old Russian Bomber / Diesel Sub / whatever and just destroying the whole platform? Or hiring someone to plant C-4 on the base of hte structure and blowing it up?"
Errr, the same thing stopping them doing that sort of thing with the current pirate bay servers. Terrorism and murder is pretty much illegal everywhere.
Read your own quote "... his political point of view is that ... the developer can simply decide whether you have freedom or not...".
Linus chose to give us freedom, but he still believes that authors have the rights to deprive users of 'the four freedoms', should they want to.
Stallman believes that the user should have the right to those freedoms, regardless of the wishes of the authors. Therein lies the ideological difference.
Erm, the point isn't that he heaped abuse on independent developers. The point is that it helps to show the mindset of Microsoft when it was alleged to have actively attacked and drove said developers out of business, which is the unlawful activity Microsoft is accused of, in an actual court case.
Similarly, if someone's accused of a racist attack, then the prosecution can bring a character witness to show that he made a number of racist statements.
It's a different situation with someone verbally attacking Microsoft. We're not in the dock for committing crimes against Microsoft.
See?
"How is the decision by non-governmental entities that something is undeserving of their support or attention a threat to freedom speech?"
When the non-governmental entities have the power to prevent your voice being heard, and do so because of the content of what you say, isn't that another form of censorship? When the tiny few who control, say, the Television stations decide that your TV documentary should not be aired because the views expressed in it are too dangerous for the public, aren't you being censored? Sure, you can start up your own TV station, if you happen to be a multi-millionaire. Otherwise you can show your documentary to 3 people and a dog at selected film festivals. Does 'freedom of speech' mean freedom of speech for multi-millionaires? Or does it mean you can say what you want using ineffective means of communication?
And this particular case is more subtle still. What if the broadcasters were happy with your documentary being shown, but the advertisers forced them, reluctantly, to cancel your show. There is an example of something like this happening to documentary filmmakers in the movie 'The Corporation', where Monsanto successfully bowdlerised a Fox documentary on Bovine Growth Hormone.
Is it right and proper that a handful of people or corporations can use their money and lawyers to influence the public discourse in a 'democratic' country, out of all proportion to their numbers? Even if they have the numbers, should a large number of people be allowed to pressure a dissident few into silence, using non-governmental pressure? Do only the rich and (maybe) the many have the right to be heard?
Maybe governments passing laws to silence you isn't the only way you can be silenced - in fact, it's probably quite ineffective, given the costs of policing and the uproar that it generates. Far more effective, perhaps, for a system where the people in charge have vast PR and advertising budgets using the most effective communications machinery going, while the dissidents hand out badly photocopied leaflets in fenced-off 'freedom of speech zones' on street corners.
Maybe that's the 'freedom of speech' issue that this guy was talking about...
Yeah, but if SCOTUS rules that patents aren't valid relative to section 271(f) because they're not valid at all, then there's no reason for that reasoning not to be applicable.
In fact, my uninformed guess is that it would be perverse for software to not be a component under 271(f) while being fully patentable under 101. The law so far has ruled diametrically opposite. The Eolas case, the one Supreme Court ruling (sortof) in favour of software patents, allowed for a computer running software to be part of a larger industrial process (and that is the foothold that was exploited by subsequent district courts to effectively legalise software patents without any congressional input). Software can be a component of a patentable invention, if not the invention itself. However, in this particular case, I have a sneaking recollection that the full invention that AT&T wants to patent is nothing but software, which works in favour of the SFLC again.
I don't know how it'll go, but it would be a brilliant legal move for the SFLC to abolish software patents with this drive-by hit on a passing lawsuit, though. It costs us nothing and might win us everything, so it's definitely worth a try.
The law is 35 USC 271, section f, which is designed to stop people making components of a patented invention and shipping them overseas in order to be assembled into something that would breach the patent, had the act occured in the US.
In this case, the software is apparently developed in the US and shipped overseas.
Yes, it's a disgusting overreach of US patent law into foreign jurisdictions. And yes, software patents are evil, and hopefully unlawful. Go Eben and Dan!
"The biggest error you made in your post was assuming a technocratic price theory. You seem to assume (given your moral harangue) that if only one could accurately discover Microsoft's costs and decide a fair profit, then a just price for Windows can be calculated. "
I wasn't talking about a "just" price. I was taking issue with some wrongheaded analogy between software and cars (actually his analogy kindof worked, but the poster didn't understand that.) But yes, you're right that the profits are determined by a price, which is usually (not in THIS case) determined by some bargain between buyer and seller.
"While it certainly gets more complicated, in essence, price is determined only by two things: what the seller is willing to accept and the buyer willing to offer. Marginal utility and cost certainly do influence the buyer and seller, but the subjective valuation of the product trumps them both. Take the collective aggregate of buyers and sellers, and you end up with a price curve. This is something you can examine mathematically, but one must remember that it is a curve of convenience, because the actuality is that it is still a set of discrete economic transactions that the curve attempts to track."
Indeed. But isn't the 'supply' of an infinitely reproducible good with zero marginal cost going to be infinite? Even looking at it with supply-demand-curve tinted glasses, the only thing keeping that supply finite IS those proprietary locks I was talking about.
"Costs. There are costs related to the good, and also costs unrelated to the good. The seller certainly wants to recoup the latter costs by selling the goods, but they do not enter into his price calculations. And what of wages? Piece-wages are related to the cost of the good, but hourly wages and salaries are not. For a software company, such costs can be significant."
Indeed and I mentioned them, using presumably incorrect terminology, when I spoke about the one-off fixed cost involved in writing a piece of software. I suppose there's some things, like an hourly-paid worker on an assembly line, whose wages aren't counted as part of the marginal cost of the car, under your scheme of things, but I probably counted them in my nebulous 'cost'.
"Profits. Gross profits or net? The only way your trite formula makes any sense is if you meant gross profits. But the only way your moral harangue has weight is if you meant net profits. You then say "profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'". Your definition of profit is very confused."
Well yeah, I had no clear definition in mind when I abused the word. I suppose my "profit" per copy of software was, implictly, something like 'total revenue - total outgoings) / number of items sold. I shouldn't have used the word, really, since the PRICE only exists because of the proprietary locks. You should be able to agree on that. Good luck making a profit on goods with a price of $0.
As for the 'moral harangue', I wasn't even thinking in moral terms, I was just taking issue with someone's analogy. 'Property is Theft' is something I can harangue people on some other day.
"Now to your formula. What happens when Microsoft raises the price of Windows? Does its "profit" go up? According to your formula it must. But according to the price curve there is a point at which profits will fall as price increases. It's not the government that's keeping Microsoft from selling Windows at a minimum price of $1000 per copy. It's their selfish love of profits that keeps up from getting gouged! (Of course, some people will claim that they would be gouged even with a price of $10)."
And for the purposes of the original argument, that's irrelevant. There's a price per copy of windows, and that there's some *cough*nebulus and poorly defined 'costs' involved. It doesn't matter if the price is due to a supply/demand curve with rational economists doing their profit maximisation, or if Bill Gates wore a blindfold and put a pin in a phone directory or the price was l
Instead of the insults, exactly what did I say that was wrong?
Was it some terminological inexactitude to do with the words 'profit' and 'cost' that means something slightly different to technical accountants? Everything I said seemed more or less tautological, given the naive definitions of the words I was using.
Development costs is a single one-off fixed cost, and I amply dealt with it.
Support yes, is a non-zero cost, but with software, the people supporting the software aren't necessarily the people who wrote it- Cygnus supports software it doesn't write, and Oracle is about to support RedHat, which it didn't write either. If software support is included as part of the price of software, then the car analogy has to factor in the cost of servicing and maintenance and road tax as part of the price of the car.
Economics lesson.
The COST of cars is the price of the materials that go into it, plus the cost of the labour required to make and of the resources required to move it to where it is to be sold. There's also a single one-off fixed cost to begin with that relates to the factory the car is built in, plus the cost of designing the car, plus some other small sundries. Those one-off costs become less and less important, the more cars you sell.
The price is the cost plus the profit.
Now with a copy of some piece of software, the price of the materials, the labour required to make it, and the resources required to move it is either the cost of the box and the media it comes on (i.e. very cheap) or the price of letting the internet distribute it (i.e. more or less free). There's still a one-off fixed cost, which is the cost of writing it in the first place, but that becomes less and less important as time goes on, just like the cars. Besides, it's eminently possible to get those fixed costs taken care of for more or less nothing too. Linux does it. GNU does it. (Free|Open|Net)BSD does it. You get the picture. The reason that they're generally free (as in beer) and Windows isn't is precisely because they've relaxed the need to cover the fixed costs (and, of course, curbed Linus' immense lust for profit and power) by using copyright law to proprietarise software.
Price again, is cost + profit. In this case, with the proprietary locks on, the profit margin is immense, because the marginal cost of what Microsoft sells is next to nothing, and that is why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world.
Your particular analogy is broken because a) you confuse cost with price and b) ten cars costs roughly ten times as much to make (given the initial investment in making a car factory) as one car, whereas ten copies of windows costs roughly the same to make as one copy of windows (barring the fixed costs, again). The price of both cars and software is cost + profit; however with software, the cost is next to 0, and the profit only exists because of the existence of the proprietary 'locks'.
Hope this helps.
I don't have a bcm4318, but you do know that the bcm43xx driver has been merged into the stock linux kernel? Maybe you can upgrade the kernel rather than just the card.
I don't know if the in-kernel driver is any newer/better than the version on the berlios site these days, but it's certainly working for me...
Not really. That's just FUD.
That's just for their script for building your own customised distro from gNewSense, for the purposes of becoming the next Ubuntu or debian or gNewsense. The final step in those instructions is 'Push your files to a mirror and publicise'.
If you want to run gNewsense, it'll probably be similar to any other debian/Ubuntu based distro.
Wrong Survey.
By the time the Giant Meteor Headed to Earth becomes the business of the US Geological Survey, then there's the small matter of the Giant Meteor Headed to Earth having destroyed all life.
Wait for the US government to clamp down on the loonies in NASA...
You miss the point. It's about marginal costs and the commons.
The 'economy of ownership' is the one where people say 'This stuff is mine! Give me money or you can't use it, even if it costs me nothing for you to have it.
The 'economy of sharing' is where people say 'This stuff can't, or shouldn't be owned at all. If anyone wants to use it, they can and if anyone wants to help improve it, bonus!'
The commons notoriously has problems with things like overgrazing and overfishing, and the notion of sharing what you produce has problems if it costs you something to share. With digital goods shared on the internet, neither of those are a problem. Software doesn't wear out, and it doesn't cost me anything if two people share my work over a website or p2p network. The fixed costs associated with creating free software in the first place do have to be covered, but that hasn't been a problem so far.
The internet works with a different set of economic rules from the traditional economy. Stuff like Linux and Apache are economic equivalent of bumblebees. They shouldn't work under the old rules, yet they do.
And because of that, the ethical rules should change too, but they haven't, yet. In a world where Ubuntu and OpenBSD can be made without having policemen to stop them being copied, why should we employ policemen and jails to prevent Windows or OSX being copied? Jailing people is violent and evil, m'kay, and should only ever be used as a last resort. The primary justification for employing copyright protections in the first place was just to produce copyrighted works - if the works are now getting made without those protections, then there's no excuse for attacking and threatening people just to make an equivalent work that might compete with it...
Umm, I think that's Moglen's point, more or less. I'm still waiting for the *cough*quicktime*cough* movie to download...
Oh, you knocked that straw man down nicely, sir.
For starters, even SCO believes there is hardly any SCO copyrighted code in the Linux kernel (at MOST, we're talking about 326 lines in Linux, here). SCO is suing over IBM copyrighted code in the Linux kernel. Really.
Secondly, I never said anything at all about the relationship between the Microsoft/Novell deal and the SCO/Linux lawsuit. Your initial post seemed to deny ANY link between Microsoft and SCO, and I felt the need to correct you on that howler.
In my opinion, the main relationship between them is that Microsoft has realised that using SCO as a sockpuppet to attack Linux with has run it's course, so it's switched to a completely different tactic, namely some sort of as-yet-unclear patent FUD/threat, and it spotted the opportunity when Novell came knocking at the door and asking for cash.
Here's the facts:
1) At the outset of the lawsuit, Microsoft paid SCO $10 million in "license fees", that were, apparently, illegally kept by SCO rather than passed on to Novell. A few years back Santa Cruz actually had to pay Microsoft for the rights to distribute Unix, now Microsoft has somehow decided it needs to pay SCO for something Unixy.
2)Microsoft then convinced Baystar, an investment management firm, to invest another $50 million or so, by saying 'if you start to lose money, we'll cover your loss' (but when Baystar started to lose money, Microsoft stopped returning Baystar's calls, literally, so Baystar started dumping every piece of SCO stock they could, as fast as their contracts would let them).
3) Meanwhile, IBM has uncovered a huge pile of emails between Darl McBride, the SCO CEO, and Microsoft, which SCO was trying to hide from IBM.
All of this is on the record in court filings. Nothing controversial about any of it. read all about it on Groklaw.
So why did Microsoft feel the need to pump huge amounts of money into a dying pissant software company at exactly the same time as it's attacking Linux with bogus copyright claims? What did Darl Mcbride and Microsoft feel the need to send each other dozens of emails that IBM wasn't supposed to know about? What's the simplest, Occams-razorish answer?
To avoid the scary threat of being called a conspiracy theorist must i do a stretch and say shit like 'uuuuuh, Microsoft maybe wants to put out it's own version of Unix and surprise us all for Christmas 2008 and uhhhhh Microsoft was just doing a good deed by putting some random Investment Firm in touch with some random Tech company and uhhhh, Darl Mcbride and Bill Gates were maybe planning on going on a fishing trip in Oregon sometime, yeh that's it, a fishing trip'.
Come on, what's YOUR simpler and more compelling theory that explains the observed facts?
Erm, that's why you check the md5 (or hopefully some better) hash of the iso you just downloaded with the checksum provided by your distro manufacturer's homepage, yeah?
Good luck getting the md5 checksum of your pirate Vista iso from a trustworthy soul at Microsoft...
(Okay, md5 isn't the epitome of security these days, but it's still probably ridiculously difficult for someone to generate the appropriate gribble that can be put inside an iso with a preinstalled rootkit so as to match the original hash)
The hundreds of eyewitnesses in the video, and the fact that neither the UCPD or the University denies this incident happened?
Not quite. Section 7 of the GPL doesn't work retroactively. It doesn't say 'You're breaking the GPL if one of your customers happens to get sued', it says 'You're breaking the GPL if you distribute while knowing about a GPL-incompatible legal restriction that will be imposed on your licensees'
If Novell stops distributing code as soon as it hears about an actual Microsoft patent claim (or some other legal machinery that prevents it's customers from exercising their full GPL rights), then it won't be liable for previous instances where it supplied someone with GPL code.
Of course, it does lose the right to distribute the code from that moment on, which is hopefully a Big Deal.