" Because his theory makes logical sense, and yours is rooted in paranoia."
No it's not, my opinion is based on decades of well established patterns of behavior by MS the corporation and top level MS executives.
I judge Ms like I would judge any other being. If they are habitually nice then I trust them and believe they will act justly, if they are habitually evil mean and destructive to people around around them then I will not trust them.
Exactly where have you had your buried for the last couple of decades anyway? Do you live in a world where MS has been kind, just, fair?
You never know. IF they can't play the music they already paid for or watch the movies they already paid for or play some cute foreign commercial their friend sent them, then it could happen.
All companies exist to make money. Google has the phrase "don't be evil" in their vision statement. I presume they put that there to remind all their employees that it's possible to make money and not have to resort to evil tactics.
I tell you what. Why don't you bet your house, car, and a year worth of salary on the day linux will die or the day "no one writes another line of code for it".
"Blinded? No, some of us just genuinely don't care."
Right!. Some of you don't care. Linus didn't care either.
What RMS is pointing out is that you SHOULD care. Linus didn't care, he was warned about it, but he didn't listen and in the end it bit him in the ass.
RMS is telling the world what happens when you don't care. It sometimes bites you in the ass when you don't care about these things.
"Since the GPL itself is all about economics, why is Stallman so loathe to even mention economics? "
I hear him and other representitives talk about economics all the time. I guess I don't see where this accusation comes from? Are you maybe saying that when they do talk about economics they are not saying what you want to hear?
"Especially when the moral or ethical case is one that would leave even most philosophy professors scratching their heads."
If a simple ordinary person like me can clearly understand what their ethical case is all about then I would suggest a philosophy professor would have no problems with it.
" What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights"
Again I understand the profound difference between right to use and right to modify. It seems like you don't.
"or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work?"
There are reasonable restrictions of redistribution with the GPL. With the GPL you can redistribute all you want, you can even modify and redistribute all you want the only compensation asked of you is that if you modify and redistribute you include the totatliy of the source code with the binary. That's the compensation to the programmer. All they want is some code in return for their code.
It seems to me you are stuck on money as being the only possible renumeration, apparently it has never occured to you that a programmer may want in kind renumeration.
"And why does the effectively zero marginal cost of production of software somehow make software distribution into an ethical, rather than economic, issue in a way that it doesn't for real goods?"
It doesn't.
"Furthermore, I don't see why I should be guaranteed rights to the source code unless I've compensated somebody for those rights - one way of compensating somebody, in fact, is accepting the terms of the GPL and agreeing to contribute back any useful modifications that I make if I redistribute them."
Ok now you are getting it. The price of GPLed code is very high but it's not monetary. The price of GPLed code is so high that some companies like MS do not even let their programmers see any GPLed code. They don't want to pay THAT price. They would be happy to pay money but they are not willing to pay in kind code contributions.
It's never a smart business decision to lock yourself to a vendor especially when that vendor has a history of doing it's best to try and trap its customers into their proprietary systems.
I know that most business people never look past the current quarter but those that have a more strategic insight know that it's a false economy to go with any vendor which only sells proprietary products.
"I believe the difference is the level of aggregation of Safari's new RSS and Mozilla's bookmarks, including the ability to do searches on RSS feeds. Not sure how capable Mozilla is in this realm, though."
In mozilla I can put an RSS feed on the toolbar. It updates itself regularly. I cna then click on the toolbar and check the headlines without leaving the page I am looking at.
With Safari I have to actually open up the URL in order to see the RSS feed which means I have to leave my page or open up another tab or something.
I vastly prefer the firebird way. I am surprised how useless the safari implementation of RSS turned out to be. I guess you can search them, well la di freakin da, spotlight will search all the cached pages in firebird anyway.
You missed my point. MS regularly participates in the political process even though it does not (and can not) have the backing of 100% of it's employees.
Why should they all of a sudden on this one issue decide that they need to have a 100% of their employees and shareholders before they can act?
"'A company as large as Microsoft has employees that will have opinions on social issues that cover the entire spectrum. It's threatening to employees for the corporation to take a public position on these kinds of personal issues."
That's not true. I know of ehtical business people. None of them work at MS but that's another story.
Either way like I said suing the shit out of MS is an excellent way to compete with them. Like you say they are willing to give out hundreds of millions of dollars to remove uncertainty of legal litigation and to boost up their stock price.
You still haven't told me why people should not sue them though? If I was a corrupt business person (like you say all business people are) then why shouldn't I keep filing suits against MS and collecting hundreds of millions of dollars? Seems like easy money to me.
Who cares what they are charging (BTW an additional 20% price increase? that's outrageous). the fact is they are artificially inflating the price of the software and therefore ripping off the consumers.
this is a total failure of the market to regulate itself.
Microsoft gives a lot of money to republican party. Do all of their employees and shareholders agree with this? MS gives a lot money to democrats (less money then they give to republicans but a lot of meny nevertheless) do all their employees agree with that?
"A company as large as Microsoft has employees that will have opinions on social issues that cover the entire spectrum. It's threatening to employees for the corporation to take a public position on these kinds of personal issues."
In that case MS should immediately stop all political activities with which 100% of all MS employees agree. In other words MS should immediately stop giving money to politicians, lobbying for anything, and being involved in all politics.
And this is exactly why the market is failing in this case. The consumer doesn't care because the consumer does not realize that the company is artifically inflating the price of software they buy by eliminiating the open source competition.
By cleverly denying open source developers the code Nikon greases the palms of the commercial software developers who will never face competition from free open source software. The consumer gets ripped off without ever even knowing about it. A failure of the market forces by manipulation of the law (DMCA) and de-facto price fixing.
" If I go into a store and someone tells me that the expensive item I'm going to purchase isn't very good, most likely I'll go and check online, get some more reviews, and make sure their claim isn't anecdotal. One opinion isn't going to keep me away from a product . . . I want a larger sample size."
In this case you go into fry's and the sales person tells you that the nikon is "incompatible" with your image software and stores it's data in a "proprietary" format. You go online and after a little research you find out that the sales person was right because everything he told you is 100% absolutely positively true.
The market only works for well informed consumers. IN this case the market does not work because consumers are not educated and frankly could not understand what's going on even if you tried to educate them.
The markets are not a panacea, they don't always work and this is a perfect example.
"It made good economic sense for them to do that. I doubt they, or the people they hired, thought they did anything wrong. "
Wow, so they paid out two hundred million dollars even though they knew they were going to win huh?
"No shit? I guess that explains why everyone and their mother uses the legal system to stick knives in Microsoft."
Why not? It's a dog eat dog. MS plays by no rules, they have no ethics or morals. You can't play nice with MS, they will cut your throat and make your children drink your blood.
"Borland is effectively dead. The courts had nothing to do with it."
They aren't dead yet. Chances are somebody will buy them before they die. I bet they have a couple of lawsuits against MS still left in them. I hear MS is giving away 200 million dollars to anybody who files suit even if the suit is meritless and MS is sure to win.
What's interesting is that Eclipse refactoring, debugging etc are language independent. There are plug ins for ruby, php, python etc that are all pretty nice.
It's a nice platform that you can use to code virtually any language.
And yet Borland sued MS for poaching their top talent and MS settled for a a couple of hundred million.
You must admit that it's pretty damned hard to run a company when Bill Gates wants to put you out of business. It's amazing to me Bill failed with borland I guess we can thank the court system for that.
Delphi/Object pascal does need some updating though. They really need something to make sure an application you wrote with delphi can be easily compiled by somebody else. Maybe something like ant or a way to specify dependencies via relative paths or something.
Right now if you built a non trivial delphi app and sent me the code I would have to install every single component you used (the same versions in most cases) and place them in the exact same directory structure as you in order to compile your code.
Slashdot Mirror
" Because his theory makes logical sense, and yours is rooted in paranoia."
No it's not, my opinion is based on decades of well established patterns of behavior by MS the corporation and top level MS executives.
I judge Ms like I would judge any other being. If they are habitually nice then I trust them and believe they will act justly, if they are habitually evil mean and destructive to people around around them then I will not trust them.
Exactly where have you had your buried for the last couple of decades anyway? Do you live in a world where MS has been kind, just, fair?
They have been working on this thing for four or five years now. It's not like they started yesterday and have another five years to go.
Just exactly how much work do you think they are planning to do in the next two months to take it to beta and final production anyway?
You never know. IF they can't play the music they already paid for or watch the movies they already paid for or play some cute foreign commercial their friend sent them, then it could happen.
"This is just a guess, but it seems plausable."
Why is your theory any more plausable then the theory that MS is artificially ranking IIS sites higher?
To me the latter is more plausable given MS history.
All companies exist to make money. Google has the phrase "don't be evil" in their vision statement. I presume they put that there to remind all their employees that it's possible to make money and not have to resort to evil tactics.
I tell you what. Why don't you bet your house, car, and a year worth of salary on the day linux will die or the day "no one writes another line of code for it".
I'll take that bet any day of the week shillboy.
"Blinded? No, some of us just genuinely don't care."
Right!. Some of you don't care. Linus didn't care either.
What RMS is pointing out is that you SHOULD care. Linus didn't care, he was warned about it, but he didn't listen and in the end it bit him in the ass.
RMS is telling the world what happens when you don't care. It sometimes bites you in the ass when you don't care about these things.
"Since the GPL itself is all about economics, why is Stallman so loathe to even mention economics? "
I hear him and other representitives talk about economics all the time. I guess I don't see where this accusation comes from? Are you maybe saying that when they do talk about economics they are not saying what you want to hear?
"Especially when the moral or ethical case is one that would leave even most philosophy professors scratching their heads."
If a simple ordinary person like me can clearly understand what their ethical case is all about then I would suggest a philosophy professor would have no problems with it.
" What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights"
Again I understand the profound difference between right to use and right to modify. It seems like you don't.
"or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work?"
There are reasonable restrictions of redistribution with the GPL. With the GPL you can redistribute all you want, you can even modify and redistribute all you want the only compensation asked of you is that if you modify and redistribute you include the totatliy of the source code with the binary. That's the compensation to the programmer. All they want is some code in return for their code.
It seems to me you are stuck on money as being the only possible renumeration, apparently it has never occured to you that a programmer may want in kind renumeration.
"And why does the effectively zero marginal cost of production of software somehow make software distribution into an ethical, rather than economic, issue in a way that it doesn't for real goods?"
It doesn't.
"Furthermore, I don't see why I should be guaranteed rights to the source code unless I've compensated somebody for those rights - one way of compensating somebody, in fact, is accepting the terms of the GPL and agreeing to contribute back any useful modifications that I make if I redistribute them."
Ok now you are getting it. The price of GPLed code is very high but it's not monetary. The price of GPLed code is so high that some companies like MS do not even let their programmers see any GPLed code. They don't want to pay THAT price. They would be happy to pay money but they are not willing to pay in kind code contributions.
It's never a smart business decision to lock yourself to a vendor especially when that vendor has a history of doing it's best to try and trap its customers into their proprietary systems.
I know that most business people never look past the current quarter but those that have a more strategic insight know that it's a false economy to go with any vendor which only sells proprietary products.
If MS stopped supporting JPGs then you can bet your ass they would.
"I believe the difference is the level of aggregation of Safari's new RSS and Mozilla's bookmarks, including the ability to do searches on RSS feeds. Not sure how capable Mozilla is in this realm, though."
In mozilla I can put an RSS feed on the toolbar. It updates itself regularly. I cna then click on the toolbar and check the headlines without leaving the page I am looking at.
With Safari I have to actually open up the URL in order to see the RSS feed which means I have to leave my page or open up another tab or something.
I vastly prefer the firebird way. I am surprised how useless the safari implementation of RSS turned out to be. I guess you can search them, well la di freakin da, spotlight will search all the cached pages in firebird anyway.
You missed my point. MS regularly participates in the political process even though it does not (and can not) have the backing of 100% of it's employees.
Why should they all of a sudden on this one issue decide that they need to have a 100% of their employees and shareholders before they can act?
In other words I am calling bullshit.
"Windows doesn't stop you doing this."
You don't actually use windows do you?
"'A company as large as Microsoft has employees that will have opinions on social issues that cover the entire spectrum. It's threatening to employees for the corporation to take a public position on these kinds of personal issues."
That's not true. I know of ehtical business people. None of them work at MS but that's another story.
Either way like I said suing the shit out of MS is an excellent way to compete with them. Like you say they are willing to give out hundreds of millions of dollars to remove uncertainty of legal litigation and to boost up their stock price.
You still haven't told me why people should not sue them though? If I was a corrupt business person (like you say all business people are) then why shouldn't I keep filing suits against MS and collecting hundreds of millions of dollars? Seems like easy money to me.
Who cares what they are charging (BTW an additional 20% price increase? that's outrageous). the fact is they are artificially inflating the price of the software and therefore ripping off the consumers.
this is a total failure of the market to regulate itself.
I am trying hard to remember the last time US used it's armed forced to defend itself.
I think it may have been in WWII but even then we ended up attacking germany even though the japanese attacked us.
Microsoft gives a lot of money to republican party. Do all of their employees and shareholders agree with this? MS gives a lot money to democrats (less money then they give to republicans but a lot of meny nevertheless) do all their employees agree with that?
"A company as large as Microsoft has employees that will have opinions on social issues that cover the entire spectrum. It's threatening to employees for the corporation to take a public position on these kinds of personal issues."
In that case MS should immediately stop all political activities with which 100% of all MS employees agree. In other words MS should immediately stop giving money to politicians, lobbying for anything, and being involved in all politics.
And this is exactly why the market is failing in this case. The consumer doesn't care because the consumer does not realize that the company is artifically inflating the price of software they buy by eliminiating the open source competition.
By cleverly denying open source developers the code Nikon greases the palms of the commercial software developers who will never face competition from free open source software. The consumer gets ripped off without ever even knowing about it. A failure of the market forces by manipulation of the law (DMCA) and de-facto price fixing.
" If I go into a store and someone tells me that the expensive item I'm going to purchase isn't very good, most likely I'll go and check online, get some more reviews, and make sure their claim isn't anecdotal. One opinion isn't going to keep me away from a product . . . I want a larger sample size."
In this case you go into fry's and the sales person tells you that the nikon is "incompatible" with your image software and stores it's data in a "proprietary" format. You go online and after a little research you find out that the sales person was right because everything he told you is 100% absolutely positively true.
The market only works for well informed consumers. IN this case the market does not work because consumers are not educated and frankly could not understand what's going on even if you tried to educate them.
The markets are not a panacea, they don't always work and this is a perfect example.
"It made good economic sense for them to do that. I doubt they, or the people they hired, thought they did anything wrong. "
Wow, so they paid out two hundred million dollars even though they knew they were going to win huh?
"No shit? I guess that explains why everyone and their mother uses the legal system to stick knives in Microsoft."
Why not? It's a dog eat dog. MS plays by no rules, they have no ethics or morals. You can't play nice with MS, they will cut your throat and make your children drink your blood.
"Borland is effectively dead. The courts had nothing to do with it."
They aren't dead yet. Chances are somebody will buy them before they die. I bet they have a couple of lawsuits against MS still left in them. I hear MS is giving away 200 million dollars to anybody who files suit even if the suit is meritless and MS is sure to win.
What's interesting is that Eclipse refactoring, debugging etc are language independent. There are plug ins for ruby, php, python etc that are all pretty nice.
It's a nice platform that you can use to code virtually any language.
And yet Borland sued MS for poaching their top talent and MS settled for a a couple of hundred million.
You must admit that it's pretty damned hard to run a company when Bill Gates wants to put you out of business. It's amazing to me Bill failed with borland I guess we can thank the court system for that.
Delphi/Object pascal does need some updating though. They really need something to make sure an application you wrote with delphi can be easily compiled by somebody else. Maybe something like ant or a way to specify dependencies via relative paths or something.
Right now if you built a non trivial delphi app and sent me the code I would have to install every single component you used (the same versions in most cases) and place them in the exact same directory structure as you in order to compile your code.