If the government one day declared that no patents are allowed, patents would simply stop to exist.
And what would take their place? When companies pay people to think up great new ideas, they want to get something in return for the investment - that won't change no matter what government does. With patents, one way to get a return is to patent the ideas and sell products that use them. If you eliminate patents, imagine an investor considering funding research. She will think, "I could incur the cost of paying for the research and then sell the products. But then other investors will simply be able to begin manufacturing and selling the products without having to pay for any research. I'll just let someone else pay for the research and invest in a factory once the technology has already been developed."
See the problem? The investor paying for the research will be worse off than the rest of her peers. Like all humans, investors are trying to benefit themselves, so they'll wait for someone else to make the sacrifice.
This is a possible scenario, but there's another - perhaps more likely - outcome. With patents gone, investors continue to fund research but use a different device to increase return on investment: secrecy. Technology is developed behind closed doors and hidden from the public. This might mean products whose inner workings cannot be hidden are less likely to be sold on the market, or that the ideas are cloaked within a bigger product (say, a new device for a car). In the former case, the public doesn't benefit at all, and in the latter case, the net effect is the same as patents, except that there's no deadline for them to expire.
I am NOT saying that all technology and great ideas spring from capital investment or the pursuit of greater personal wealth. I am NOT saying that the patent process is perfect by any means, or that patents do not cause harm. There *is* a cost to giving the developer of new technology a temporary monopoly on that technology.
But what is undeniable is that *some* good ideas and technology are made possible by people selfishly trying to become wealthy. Patents give people a selfish reason (and everyone is selfish to some degree) to think up great ideas and, importantly, publish them to the world; they also ensure that the monopoly will run out eventually (which isn't necessarily the case with secrecy).
There has to be some balance between the benefits of patents (more research) and the harm of patents (temporary monopolies). Eliminating patents will at best force entrepreneurs to use secrecy instead of patents; at worst, it will cause selfish people to go from doing research to doing something that is less beneficial to society but more lucrative for them. You can get rid of patents, but you can't get rid of selfishness - and our laws should reflect this.
I need apples for my apple pie. You are telling me to go with grapefruits because of an artificial government granted monopoly with the distribution of apples. After all there is competition in the fruit market....
Your analogy is flawed because you cannot create a fruit by yourself from scratch (i.e. without an existing fruit). This means that the people growing apples didn't "design" apples (they evolved naturally), and thus apple growers cannot claim that, without their creative/intellectual work, no apples would exist. Also, if you don't like existing fruit, you cannot go off and create your own X-fruit to compete with other fruit.
In the music world, however, new songs are constantly being produced. If you don't like the Rolling Stones, or you think their music is too expensive, there are lots of other rock bands you can buy music from. And you can even start your own band make your own songs if you like. You can call copyright a "monopoly" in the sense that you have complete control of your *own* music, but similarly you have a "monopoly" over your own house because it's your own property. The fact is, the monopoly you have over your own copyrighted work doesn't prevent anyone else from competing with you (i.e. producing their own songs), which is the problem that monopolies like Standard Oil and Microsoft create.
We aren't talking about competition of artists here but true competition of distribution. An artist isn't allowed to have multiple distributors FOR THE SAME CONTENT because they are required to sign the rights to the content to the label. No competition == high prices.
No one is required to sign the rights of their content to a label. Artists are free to keep the copyrights of their songs all they want, or they can license it through multiple distributors. Many artists, however, choose to sign with only one record label, and that is their choice.
If people don't like the price they can go without. That's your system is it? How about competition?
Um, I didn't say go without music. I'm saying go without the artists whose music you think is too expensive. Go with artists who are cheaper. Competition is there; artists compete with each other for fame and fortune. You have a choice between them, and you base your decision on (A) the quality of their music and (B) the price of their music. How is this any different from other industries where competition thrives? You might think that a Ferrari is a nicer car than a Toyota Camry, but you "can go without" the Ferrari because the Camry is cheaper.
If the record companies were required to license their songs to multiple manufacturers and you had a choice between which of them you bought the CD from you don't think the prices would be lower?
What would be the point of this? Record companies would simply license the songs at "high" prices, and then the CD manufacturers would pass the cost on to consumers.
Um, could you tell me exactly what you mean by "overpriced?" If they set it too high, people won't buy it and they make less money; if they set it too low, they make less money. So they set it at a price in between. This happens in every industry. Record companies are setting CD prices where they are because a *lot* of people think that CDs are worth $10. You might not (I don't either); that's okay, we don't have to buy the CDs. But "overpriced" is a relative term: you and I don't set prices; the general public does.
In the case of CPUs, the existence of AMD has certainly pushed down prices for Intel compatible chips, and there is a huge cost involved in setting up a Fab which means you have to be pretty big to get the economies of scale necessary to compete.
That is just AMD producing a competing product. Yes, you need a lot of infrastructure to efficiently mass-produce CPUs, but that is not the major cost: all of the engineering that went into designing the chip is represented in the cost of the CPU.
The equivalent in the grocery market would be setting up your own store to sell food cheaper than the big supermarket down the road. There is nothing to stop you doing this, and there are small shops around.
Is this the equivalent of AMD or of piracy? If the former, I agree. If the latter, I don't. It's more like setting up a small bank to compete with the larger one up the street, but when you withdraw money from the small bank, instead of actually giving you your money, they print up some counterfeit money and keep your money. It's not some kind of natural, fair competition; it's a way to cheat and circumvent the rules of capitalism.
"Piracy" is capitalism. Capitalism will push prices down to the marginal cost of production, which in the case of software is pretty much $0. The only costs are for blank CDs and bandwidth, which the "pirates" do pay for.
Capitalism does not push prices down to the marginal cost of production, and you can see that with objects that are not easily copyable but whose value is still in the brainwork put into them. Take CPUs for an example. The reason you pay hundreds of dollars for a good CPU isn't that the chip actually took hundreds of dollars to manufacture; you are paying for all of the engineering that went into it. However, the fact that making copies of CPUs is not easy for the public keeps prices high enough to fund the engineering. The real cost of software is obviously not in memory or bandwidth; it's in the development. Are you claiming that the price of software should be completely independent of development cost?
You seem to be confusing capitalism with anarchy. The free market is not free of rules. There are rules which people have to obey for it to work; it doesn't work if, for example, I can just run into a grocery store and steal several apples (no I'm not saying that piracy is the same as "stealing"). When you get software, unless it's public domain, you have to enter an agreement with the copyright holder. Violating this agreement is called "piracy," and we enforce the agreement through copyright law so that economic people have the freedom to make such economic contracts without them being completely meaningless.
The parents to your post aren't argumenting that the people pirating software are right; they're arguing that it doesn't have the effect that the BSA says it does.
My post has nothing to do with the BSA statistics. The poster I was replying to said that "home users" should be allowed to "play with" proprietary software; given the context of this discussion, I am interpreting this to mean that they should be allowed to pirate it. That is all that I was disputing.
Oh yes he can choose Linux on which a lot of his apps won't work or he can choose OS X not only which will not run his apps but will require him to buy a new computer. Ain't capitalism grand?
What you are referring to is the issue of the Microsoft monopoly. Monopolies are a problem in capitalism and need to be fixed, but they are a completely separate issue from copyright infringement, and piracy is not the solution to antitrust problems.
I am not sure that there is an actual correlation between decreasing scientific ability and the unquestioning surrender of civil rights, but since both are occuring simultaneously in the USA, well, perhaps this needs to be studied.
Although I would dispute that the surrender of civil rights has been "unquestioning" (there are lots of people who oppose the Patriot Act and stuff like the NSA surveillance program), I find both problems worrying.
That said, to connect them is completely ludicrous. The restrictions on civil liberties are a part of the government's attempt to prevent further terrorism following 9/11. The reasons for problems in American science education are not as clear, but they might have more to do with things like teachers not being paid very well, lack of emphasis of science (or academics for that matter) inside schools, and lack of accountability for performance. The problems in American education go back much further than the 9/11. The relationship between these two issues is about as strong as that between pirates and global warming.
I also dispute that we "must decide between having an intelligent, capable population, and a population that is easily lead." There are plenty of examples of very controlled populations that were extremely intelligent. Lots of very good scientists worked to develop technology like the first jet fighter and the V2 rocket in Nazi Germany; they were so good that we got many of them to work on our own space projects. Soviet scientists were also top-notch, good enough that they beat us to putting a satellite and a human in orbit.
But even environments that are just strict, though not oppressive like my previous examples, have often proven to be conducive to education. The few poor, inner city schools that succeed typically have students wear uniforms and emphasize respect for the school and teachers over the student's individuality and expression.
I personally don't enjoy such environments, and I'm not arguing that we should be giving up civil liberties. I'm just saying that being more free doesn't mean you know more science.
How much does it cost you if I sit with a copy machine at home producing thousands of counterfeit dollars, while you go to work for weeks to earn that same money?
It is true that "stealing a chair" is not quite an accurate analogy for copyright infringement. If I pirate X amount of software that you own, that doesn't mean that you lose X worth of software. Counterfeiting is a much better analogy because it involves devaluing a commodity. What piracy does do is devalue that software for everyone. By "devalue" I obviously don't mean that the software becomes less useful for users; I mean that it forces the price down.
If counterfeiting were as easy and common as piracy, there would be a lot less incentive to work. Instead of working for several weeks to get their paycheck, workers would just fire up their copy machine and get the money in an instant. Since money is society's incentive to keep people working, easy counterfeiting would be pretty damaging to the economy.
Without piracy, prices are set by a sort of macroeconomic negotiation, where programmers can ask as much as they want and consumers can reject them as much as they want. This system makes neither side completely happy; the programmers want to set the price to infinity, and the consumers want to set it to $0. But it does allow for a compromise based on the *quality* of the software that works fairly well, as can be seen in just about every other industry.
With piracy, quality basically doesn't matter anymore. It is as easy to pirate a crappy program as it is an excellent program. Consumers can set the price to $0 if they like. Since the software is economically worthless, the price is now set by things unrelated to quality. They will pay to get things like support or a shiny box and CD. But now the economic system encourages better tech support and better boxes, not better software.
Now, as a supporter of open source software, I think that this discussion leaves out a very important point: programming is fun (at least for a lot of people). But even so, programming can sometimes also be boring, and this is why the proprietary model holds that programmers need to be paid for good software to be produced. Whether or not you agree with whether the model works, it is disrespectful and unethical to interfere with the proprietary model by pirating proprietary software, just like it would be for proprietary programmers to interfere with the open source model by pirating open source code (by incorporating it into proprietary software). In order to allow these two models to compete, society provides the copyright system so that programmers can set the terms for what users can do with their software.
Again, piracy is not stealing. It's like counterfeiting or cheating on an exam. You aren't directly taking something from someone else; you are making the work of other people less valuable by being dishonest.
I don't object at all with home users playing wit business software.
When its being used for amateur things then its ok.
The fact of the matter is, programmers don't have to write any software in the first place for the rest of society, whether it be businesses or amateurs. Therefore, they have no obligation to allow their software to be used by amateurs for free. Programmers have a *right* to decide the terms under which they distribute *their* own software, and when somebody agrees to those terms and subsequently violates them (i.e. pirates the software) they are undermining the rights of software developers.
For example, let's say you distribute software under the GPL. If some "amateur" out there downloads your code, and then produces an improvement to it that is distributed as without source code, he has violated the terms under which you gave him your code. It doesn't matter whether he's an amateur working at home or Microsoft -- it's a violation of your rights.
The counter-balance to the programmer's rights is that the user has a choice of whether or not to agree to the programmer's terms. If a home user doesn't like the idea of paying $200 for Windows, he has the choice of using something else like Linux or OS X. No one can force him to buy it. But that doesn't mean he has a right to simply disregard Microsoft's restrictions on the software and "play with business software" at home. Being an amateur doesn't mean that you are above the law.
He went in all fire and zeal, and was basically told by the party leadership to STFU and play ball or he will get NO SUPPORT on ANYTHING - including basic normal federal funding for highway projects and such.
Hmm, 'basic normal federal funding'. Is that what we call pork nowadays?
I write my programs to run on Unix and Windows. And they of course never have a bias when it comes to the polarity of the earth, I just switch the polarity bit.
Um... what the heck does the Earth's magnetic field have to do with Unix/Windows programming??
as for myself I make programs at work and the last thing I want to do when I get home is program for recreational purposes. I think that sentiment likely goes for a vast majority of programmers, especially ones with a family or a (so-called) life.
Actually, I think you're very much the exception, not the rule. Most if not all programmers I know really do enjoy writing code, and if you talk to them about the software they've been doing in their spare time, they love to tell you about it. In fact, the code I write for fun, not work, is probably better and certainly more enjoyable than something I do because I "have to."
Don't worry, McAfee and Norton are working on it as we speak. As soon as they can put together something more fearful than the cute little proofs of concept that have been floating around expect them to announce a full "epidemic".
Okay, come on. You have no evidence to show this. Their business model doesn't "require" them to do anything like this; there are plenty of problems in the Windows world to keep them busy. Yes, there is a conflict of interest when they tell Mac users "You are in danger." Duh. There is a conflict of interest when Apple tells you "The next version of OS X will change your life." Anyone can see that. But you're suggesting that just because they have a conflict of interest and they are a corporation, they are doing illegal/unethical things.
This is precisely the same reasoning the RIAA uses when it says that DRM is necessary. It says that users have a conflict of interest when they have the technology to easily infringe copyright with no one looking. Yes, users do have that conflict of interest and yes, a lot of users actually do illegal/unethical things with their music when no one is looking. But (at least here on Slashdot) we argue that it's wrong, with no supporting evidence, to make the assumption that, just because there is this conflict of interest, users are doing something wrong. Why do you make equally baseless accusations here, just because this a company, not an individual?
I truly want to be (politely) corrected if I am wrong, but my understanding is if his work were under the GPL, then my work which is incorporating his work, would also have to be GPL.
That is correct if you choose to redistribute it. If you don't send your code to anyone else, you can just use it, which is what I imagine you're doing anyways with a web app.
The people who replied in the forum you linked to and complained about there not being a license are basically being silly. If he released it as public domain, then that code will be just as "free" (if not more so) than if he had released it under a FOSS license like the GPL. If he had released it as GPL, there would be no reason he couldn't release his next version as a completely proprietary program.
Microsoft already forked java and called it C#. Now C# is evolving faster then Java and is making serious inroads into the java development market. Furthermore there are at least two open source implementations of java. So there are three forks right there.
Calling C# a "fork of Java" is, frankly, ridiculous. C# is not supposed to interoperate with Java, it's not supposed to support Java in anyway, and there is absolutely no code from Java that's in MS's C# implementation; it's merely Microsoft's way of doing the same thing Java does. If C# is a fork of Java, then GNOME is a fork of KDE. In fact, there's probably actually been some code traded between GNOME and KDE, so even there C# is still a completely different beast.
Second, yes, there are open source implementations. However, has it gained wide acceptance? No, not really. These implementations have always lagged behind, and probably will forever. If Java was opened tomorrow, a fork would have 100% of the functionality Sun has right from the start. If Sun released an update, forks might have to do some work to adapt them to their specific code, but it would be easier than reimplementing it from scratch. So, forks would be able to keep up with Sun's Java much more rapidly than now if Java were open.
But really, what Sun is worried about isn't some small groups using their own Java compiler and classes, especially when the goal of projects like gcj and others is complying with Sun's specifications. What they are most worried about is someone like Microsoft coming in, adding their own proprietary extensions to the language and API, and then using their huge userbase to push their competing version of Java. This is kind of like what MS did with the web and Internet Explorer. What's wrong with Microsoft pushing a competing version? Microsoft has no desire to hold to the "write once, run anywhere" mantra of Java. Look at.Net: write once, run only on Microsoft platforms.
So in short, yes, forking will be easier if Java is open. What Sun really should do is go to ISO and get Java standardized, like C++. Look at how it has benefited C++. C++ is very widely used, because it can be used in any software, open source or proprietary. It is platform-independent, which gains more users. There are no forks of C++; at worst, there are extensions to individual compilers (__gnu_cxx::hash_map, as an example), but this could be fixed by just including hash maps in the standard library. C++ has withered use by proprietary software that might try to push changes on other people, and it's survived the forking that can take place in the open source world. Why? Because an independent standards body like the ISO is essentially untouchable.
I'm sure we also agree that if Java were open, it would become a major tool in the hands of open source, and would become a hallmark feature of Linux distros, like another Sun product (OpenOffice.org) has become. Java already has a large community, but it would explode in size if it became open source.
The summary is bogus. As far as I can tell from the article, all they're doing is unbundling the monitors (and possibly keyboards and mice) from the computer.
Yup, it looks like that's exactly what's happening. From TFA: "Such components include central processing units -- the brain of the computer that powers its basic functions -- as well as monitors, keyboards and mice that customers can combine to create customized packages they can load in a shopping cart and take home right away." So, I guess what the rest of the world calls a "computer" is a "central processing unit" according to Yahoo. How disappointing. "Do it yourself" has been reduced to "buy the keyboard yourself."
The point of many people posting here is that open sourcing java wouldn't necessarily make it better. There is even a viewpoint that it would make it worse.
I very much see the merit of keeping it closed. I agree that keeping it closed does prevent forking, which would be a bad thing for Java (it's a bad thing for most software projects). I merely suggest that the benefits of opening it will outweight the risks.
The point of the person you replied to is that frankly it doesn't matter how good or bad it is, they wont use it because they don't agree with the restrictions it imposes upon them. That's a valid choice, and a more logical viewpoint than your own.
It's a "valid choice," but then again, almost anything is a valid choice. I disagree that it's "more logical" than my own. I simply didn't elaborate on why I think that open source would be good for Java (many of the reasons have already been stated in the article and in other posts); that doesn't make my view "non-logical." If you want me to elaborate, I'd be more than happy to.
The person I replied to did, however, elaborate on why they believe what they do, and I think it is hardly logical at all. Their belief is that the restrictions of Sun's license are morally offensive, not just too restrictive for what they want to do technically (which is, presumably, make a modified version of Java). Because they believe these restrictions are a "religious" issue, they believe that these restrictions are unacceptable under any circumstances whatsoever. If I don't particularly care that I can't modify the source code to Java, since I didn't want to anyway, why should these restrictions be unacceptable? I wouldn't even want to violate them, whether they were placed on me or not.
Again, if I need a home, I would prefer to own it, not rent it. But it's easy to imagine circumstance under which I would rather rent, not buy, a home. Do you consider the viewpoint "Renting is unethical because it sacrifices freedom for convenience. Therefore, I refuse to rent anything under any circumstances and will only own what I use." to be very logical?
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
Consider this question: why does software exist? Because it makes life easier. It's convenient to be able to, for example, type up a paper electronically and save it. It's pragmatic to go search Google for something I need to learn about. These aren't fundamental rights; they are just practical, convenient tools.
Ultimately, the only value software has is when it's *used.* A program is good not because it can be modified, or because you can see how it works; the only important thing is that you can *use* it somehow. Sometimes being able to see and modify the source code of a program is useful because you can *use* your modified version later. Sometimes the benefits of modifying the software are not worth all the time you would have to spend making them.
I like open source because I think it makes *better* software that is more *useful* to me, not as part of some moral struggle. Look at it like renting a house. Yes, you give up the "freedom" to add a new room, remodel the kitchen, and install a new sink, but perhaps that is worth only spending a couple hundred dollars a month instead of buying a house for hundred thousand dollars. You use the word "freedom" to invoke ideas like the "free speech," which is somewhat misleading. You should say "freedom" as in "own, not rent." Yes, I like to have control over my software and own things instead of rent them, but if you were offered the chance to rent a million dollar mansion for $1 a month, versus buying a $100,000 smaller home, you choose the option with less "freedom" but more convenience.
Anyway, for you this might be about religion, which is, to be honest, silly; being religious about things like software completely insulates your views from ration and reality. For the rest of us, this is a question about economics and technical merit: does open source, through larger, unpaid developer communities, build better software than the proprietary model, through smaller groups of royalty-paid developers? Personally, I prefer the former, but there is no completely obvious winner. On the other hand, if one adopts your view, a useless but open source "Hello World" would be morally superior to any proprietary software that actually makes people's lives easier. Remind yourself that software exists to be convenient, not so that you get to label someone as unethical.
My favourite analogy to this is asking which one is more bulletproof, an apple or a kevlar vest. You'd shoot the apple into smitherines then say "Obviously the kevlar vest would crumble similarly if I shot it therefore neither are bulletproof".
Your choice of fruit for the analogy helps make your point quite nicely.
Schwartz praises MacNealy for holding down job cuts in R&D. But you have to ask "What the hell are 30,000 people doing at Sun?" when Apple somehow manages to make the best personal computer hardware, and personal computer OS software, and the best consumer electronics device on the market, all with one quarter of the number of employees as Microsoft.
You also realize that Apple and Sun are in very different markets, right? Non-geeks won't see too many Sun logos while they're walking down the street. That's because Sun makes servers and workstations, not PCs or MP3 players. The work Sun does really happens within the geek world and is not very visible to the general public.
Apple, on the other hand, makes a business out of being visible. I concede that Apple does make a lot of good technology, but you consider Apple to be the "best" when that is really debatable. The "best PC hardware?" Unlike Sun, Apple isn't responsible for the design of its hardware; Intel is (IBM was before). Sun, on the other hand, makes SPARC. The "best PC OS?" Well, first of all, Solaris isn't intended as a PC operating system, but second of all, since when is OS X "the best?" Apple manages to improve how people perceive the quality of the operating system by making sure that it's installed only on hardware Apple controls; this isn't innovation, it's just taking control from the user. "Just works(tm)" largely translates into "just our hardware." That's a crutch that Solaris, Linux, Windows and nearly everyone else doesn't have. Finally, unlike Solaris, (and I as a sucker for eye-candy can say) OS X just looks very nice and polished. I like it so much that I use an Aqua-like theme here on my Linux desktop. For some reason, we are often under the illusion that slick icons and a pretty GUI mean that a technology is superior. The same applies to the shiny white cases of Macs and iPods. This effect is how Apple manages to sell $99 pouches for iPods (there's an example of 0% innovation and 100% Apple trendiness).
So, although Apple does make good tech, it's sometimes hard to tell how much of it is real innovation and how much of it is the spell of Apple eye-candy and marketing. Sun makes servers and workstations; people don't use these machines to show how stylish they are or even necessarily to have fun. Sun can't make commercials with black silhouettes of people dancing to music as they write a Java program on their new SPARC workstation; it just isn't "hip." But that doesn't mean that people at Sun are sitting on their hands while the Apple guys are rocking out with their iPods. What are 30,000 people doing at Sun? Creating lots of technology that benefits millions of people who will probably never hear about it.
It will probably get passed around the net as if Bush said he developed the iPod. Al Gore never did say he "invented the internet" either.
Perhaps, but what Al Gore did say is that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." What Bush said is that the US developed technologies that "were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." You can say that Newton developed math that was a "key ingredient in the development of the iPod," but you can't say Newton "took the initiative in developing the iPod."
In short, yeah, both one-liners would be unfair. But Gore's is a little more fair.
My proposal wasn't to encourage a new monopoly around Apple.
You might not want an Apple monopoly, but guess who does? If you think that Apple will pass up any opportunity to lock people into Macs over alternative platforms, you're deluding yourself. The only reason they can get away with it now is that Apple has as little marketshare as Linux.
Using, developing, and evangelizing for Linux right now, other than for your own personal fun, which I can't begrudge, is equivalent to voting for a third party candidate in the U.S. The best choice? Sure. But you're "throwing your vote away."
I would agree with you that Linux would be like a third party candidate if Apple had significantly more marketshare than Linux. But Macs do not represent nearly 50% of the country in the way a losing major party candidate does. They represent less than 5% of personal computers, with Linux not far behind. Furthermore, if Macs did have anything more than 20% of the market, you can be sure that many of Mac's porting problems would be solved by now, and the platforms that we'd need to encourage would be Linux and BSD. So, in reality, OS X and Linux are both "third party" candidates (should we say second?), since their marketshares are pretty similar.
I maintain my claim that people using Apple's closed office suite is a win for openness. Not directly, or immediate, but an important step. If enough people use Word Perfect, Apple's suite, or Star Office, that the general perception of a.doc as a universally readable format appropriate for exchange, archiving, etc decreases, then open standards and open source eventually fill the hole. (Initially, figuratively, in perception, and eventually, literally, in open source market share).
I can see why you're saying what you're saying, but it fails to solve the real problem. Is.doc a problem in itself? The problem is that it's closed. We need to replace that with, not another closed format, but an open one. ODF is what we ought to be pushing, not a second, equally problematic format.
> Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around
I may have misremembered that, I won't deny. But I believe the back-room politics that went on were more complex than that. (Sources welcome.)
MS stopped developing IE 5 in 2003. That is (as far as I know) all that the public knows about why it happened, so it is possible (though extremely unlikely, IMHO) that any "back-room politics" happened. Look at it from Microsoft's perspective. That browser was doing nothing for them; they weren't even actively developing IE for Windows at the time! So, they just cut the umbilical cord in 2003 and it died in 2006.
In short, the problem here is that you think OS X is far ahead of Linux both in terms of marketshare and technology. Its marketshare is within a percentage point or two of Linux's. At the moment, I will say Apple has considerably more advanced eye-candy (i.e., a hardware-accelerated windowing system (Quartz)), but beyond that, I see little more that it offers (and Xgl will be catching up with Apple soon). Nearly every problem Linux has that Apple doesn't stem from one (or both) of two things: Apple charges (lots) of money for its computers, and Apple hand-selects the hardware that it software runs on. Linux has to deal with the same problem Microsoft has to solve (running on lots of generic hardware) without the marketshare and clout that Microsoft can use to get hardware manufacturers to develop their own drivers.
As a Linux developer, I want to respect Mac users as well, since I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of software not being ported to your platform. However, the program I'm working on at the moment, while it has been ported from Linux to Windows (partially d
And perhaps most significantly, there is no IE7 for Mac. Microsoft has totally abandoned the platform. Apple having the balls the ship their OS with a non-MS browser, at the risk of damaging their sacred user experience, is responsible for the impossibility of another Microsoft lock on the web in the medium-term.
Um, sorry, but this is not because Apple has "the balls" to do this; they had no choice. Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around, so Apple can't do anything other than push their own browser.
Every Mac that moves off the shelves of your local, brightly colored Apple store is not just a blow to Windows, but it's a win for the accessible web, the open, standardized office suite file format, etc.
Really? Take a look at the office suit that Apple is promoting. Is it open or standardized? Yeah right. It's the same, closed Microsoft Office as Windows users are using (yeah I know there are differences between the Windows and Mac versions, but the point is that neither contribute to "accessibility" or "openness"). Look at the accessibility and openness Apple is pushing with their DRMed music format for iPods and so forth. Every Mac that moves off the shelf is a blow to Microsoft, but it's still a blow to openness (or at least irrelevant if it's a former MS customer).
In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.
Riiiight... First of all, why do you suggest we "chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly" only to set up a monopoly around Apple? Apple tries to restrict the user as much as Microsoft; I will point again to their music format. Don't kid yourself; Steve Jobs would love to be in Microsoft's position every bit as much as Bill Gates does. The difference would be that instead of only controlling the software, Apple would also control the hardware, since they build a lot more than just the OS.
You are completely ignoring why nerds like Linux and BSD. They can have complete control of their systems. They can tinker with it all they like without trouble a Mac user would have trying to do the same thing (the Mac user lacks a lot of the source code to a lot of his software (I know about Darwin, but there's a lot more to MacOS than Darwin)). You can say, "Don't tinker with it! It's perfect the way it is." But the reason nerds tinker with computers is that they aren't perfect, they never will be, and nerds enjoy opening the hood and seeing what's inside.
At the same time, you are also ignoring why Linux distros are "not ready yet for the masses." I have helped friends install Linux on their machines. What are the most common problems? They need still want to play Windows games, or need to run some Windows program. A Mac will have exactly the same problem. They want to use proprietary codecs for playing videos and such. Thanks to EasyUbuntu and similar scripts, this is largely solved now, but no free OS will ever be able to ship with these codecs. Apple solves this problem -- by charging you money!
And then there are hardware support issues, especially wireless drivers. Linux has a tough time with this because wifi card manufacturers rarely make Linux drivers. But they also almost never write MacOS drivers. So how does Apple solve this problem? They don't! They just decide what hardware you can and can't run, make drivers for their small amount of hardware, and tada! you have no more hardware support problems, because you can't even *try* to support generic hardware. What's the problem here? You pay a huge amount for Apple's hand-picked hardware. If Apple simply sold OS X and you tried to use it on generic hardware, you'd have exactly the same problems (in fact, they'd probably have worse problems,
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And what would take their place? When companies pay people to think up great new ideas, they want to get something in return for the investment - that won't change no matter what government does. With patents, one way to get a return is to patent the ideas and sell products that use them. If you eliminate patents, imagine an investor considering funding research. She will think, "I could incur the cost of paying for the research and then sell the products. But then other investors will simply be able to begin manufacturing and selling the products without having to pay for any research. I'll just let someone else pay for the research and invest in a factory once the technology has already been developed."
See the problem? The investor paying for the research will be worse off than the rest of her peers. Like all humans, investors are trying to benefit themselves, so they'll wait for someone else to make the sacrifice.
This is a possible scenario, but there's another - perhaps more likely - outcome. With patents gone, investors continue to fund research but use a different device to increase return on investment: secrecy. Technology is developed behind closed doors and hidden from the public. This might mean products whose inner workings cannot be hidden are less likely to be sold on the market, or that the ideas are cloaked within a bigger product (say, a new device for a car). In the former case, the public doesn't benefit at all, and in the latter case, the net effect is the same as patents, except that there's no deadline for them to expire.
I am NOT saying that all technology and great ideas spring from capital investment or the pursuit of greater personal wealth. I am NOT saying that the patent process is perfect by any means, or that patents do not cause harm. There *is* a cost to giving the developer of new technology a temporary monopoly on that technology.
But what is undeniable is that *some* good ideas and technology are made possible by people selfishly trying to become wealthy. Patents give people a selfish reason (and everyone is selfish to some degree) to think up great ideas and, importantly, publish them to the world; they also ensure that the monopoly will run out eventually (which isn't necessarily the case with secrecy).
There has to be some balance between the benefits of patents (more research) and the harm of patents (temporary monopolies). Eliminating patents will at best force entrepreneurs to use secrecy instead of patents; at worst, it will cause selfish people to go from doing research to doing something that is less beneficial to society but more lucrative for them. You can get rid of patents, but you can't get rid of selfishness - and our laws should reflect this.
I need apples for my apple pie. You are telling me to go with grapefruits because of an artificial government granted monopoly with the distribution of apples. After all there is competition in the fruit market....
Your analogy is flawed because you cannot create a fruit by yourself from scratch (i.e. without an existing fruit). This means that the people growing apples didn't "design" apples (they evolved naturally), and thus apple growers cannot claim that, without their creative/intellectual work, no apples would exist. Also, if you don't like existing fruit, you cannot go off and create your own X-fruit to compete with other fruit.
In the music world, however, new songs are constantly being produced. If you don't like the Rolling Stones, or you think their music is too expensive, there are lots of other rock bands you can buy music from. And you can even start your own band make your own songs if you like. You can call copyright a "monopoly" in the sense that you have complete control of your *own* music, but similarly you have a "monopoly" over your own house because it's your own property. The fact is, the monopoly you have over your own copyrighted work doesn't prevent anyone else from competing with you (i.e. producing their own songs), which is the problem that monopolies like Standard Oil and Microsoft create.
We aren't talking about competition of artists here but true competition of distribution. An artist isn't allowed to have multiple distributors FOR THE SAME CONTENT because they are required to sign the rights to the content to the label. No competition == high prices.
No one is required to sign the rights of their content to a label. Artists are free to keep the copyrights of their songs all they want, or they can license it through multiple distributors. Many artists, however, choose to sign with only one record label, and that is their choice.
If people don't like the price they can go without. That's your system is it? How about competition?
Um, I didn't say go without music. I'm saying go without the artists whose music you think is too expensive. Go with artists who are cheaper. Competition is there; artists compete with each other for fame and fortune. You have a choice between them, and you base your decision on (A) the quality of their music and (B) the price of their music. How is this any different from other industries where competition thrives? You might think that a Ferrari is a nicer car than a Toyota Camry, but you "can go without" the Ferrari because the Camry is cheaper.
If the record companies were required to license their songs to multiple manufacturers and you had a choice between which of them you bought the CD from you don't think the prices would be lower?
What would be the point of this? Record companies would simply license the songs at "high" prices, and then the CD manufacturers would pass the cost on to consumers.
CDs are vastly overpriced.
Um, could you tell me exactly what you mean by "overpriced?" If they set it too high, people won't buy it and they make less money; if they set it too low, they make less money. So they set it at a price in between. This happens in every industry. Record companies are setting CD prices where they are because a *lot* of people think that CDs are worth $10. You might not (I don't either); that's okay, we don't have to buy the CDs. But "overpriced" is a relative term: you and I don't set prices; the general public does.
In the case of CPUs, the existence of AMD has certainly pushed down prices for Intel compatible chips, and there is a huge cost involved in setting up a Fab which means you have to be pretty big to get the economies of scale necessary to compete.
That is just AMD producing a competing product. Yes, you need a lot of infrastructure to efficiently mass-produce CPUs, but that is not the major cost: all of the engineering that went into designing the chip is represented in the cost of the CPU.
The equivalent in the grocery market would be setting up your own store to sell food cheaper than the big supermarket down the road. There is nothing to stop you doing this, and there are small shops around.
Is this the equivalent of AMD or of piracy? If the former, I agree. If the latter, I don't. It's more like setting up a small bank to compete with the larger one up the street, but when you withdraw money from the small bank, instead of actually giving you your money, they print up some counterfeit money and keep your money. It's not some kind of natural, fair competition; it's a way to cheat and circumvent the rules of capitalism.
"Piracy" is capitalism. Capitalism will push prices down to the marginal cost of production, which in the case of software is pretty much $0. The only costs are for blank CDs and bandwidth, which the "pirates" do pay for.
Capitalism does not push prices down to the marginal cost of production, and you can see that with objects that are not easily copyable but whose value is still in the brainwork put into them. Take CPUs for an example. The reason you pay hundreds of dollars for a good CPU isn't that the chip actually took hundreds of dollars to manufacture; you are paying for all of the engineering that went into it. However, the fact that making copies of CPUs is not easy for the public keeps prices high enough to fund the engineering. The real cost of software is obviously not in memory or bandwidth; it's in the development. Are you claiming that the price of software should be completely independent of development cost?
You seem to be confusing capitalism with anarchy. The free market is not free of rules. There are rules which people have to obey for it to work; it doesn't work if, for example, I can just run into a grocery store and steal several apples (no I'm not saying that piracy is the same as "stealing"). When you get software, unless it's public domain, you have to enter an agreement with the copyright holder. Violating this agreement is called "piracy," and we enforce the agreement through copyright law so that economic people have the freedom to make such economic contracts without them being completely meaningless.
The parents to your post aren't argumenting that the people pirating software are right; they're arguing that it doesn't have the effect that the BSA says it does.
My post has nothing to do with the BSA statistics. The poster I was replying to said that "home users" should be allowed to "play with" proprietary software; given the context of this discussion, I am interpreting this to mean that they should be allowed to pirate it. That is all that I was disputing.
Oh yes he can choose Linux on which a lot of his apps won't work or he can choose OS X not only which will not run his apps but will require him to buy a new computer. Ain't capitalism grand?
What you are referring to is the issue of the Microsoft monopoly. Monopolies are a problem in capitalism and need to be fixed, but they are a completely separate issue from copyright infringement, and piracy is not the solution to antitrust problems.
I am not sure that there is an actual correlation between decreasing scientific ability and the unquestioning surrender of civil rights, but since both are occuring simultaneously in the USA, well, perhaps this needs to be studied.
Although I would dispute that the surrender of civil rights has been "unquestioning" (there are lots of people who oppose the Patriot Act and stuff like the NSA surveillance program), I find both problems worrying.
That said, to connect them is completely ludicrous. The restrictions on civil liberties are a part of the government's attempt to prevent further terrorism following 9/11. The reasons for problems in American science education are not as clear, but they might have more to do with things like teachers not being paid very well, lack of emphasis of science (or academics for that matter) inside schools, and lack of accountability for performance. The problems in American education go back much further than the 9/11. The relationship between these two issues is about as strong as that between pirates and global warming.
I also dispute that we "must decide between having an intelligent, capable population, and a population that is easily lead." There are plenty of examples of very controlled populations that were extremely intelligent. Lots of very good scientists worked to develop technology like the first jet fighter and the V2 rocket in Nazi Germany; they were so good that we got many of them to work on our own space projects. Soviet scientists were also top-notch, good enough that they beat us to putting a satellite and a human in orbit.
But even environments that are just strict, though not oppressive like my previous examples, have often proven to be conducive to education. The few poor, inner city schools that succeed typically have students wear uniforms and emphasize respect for the school and teachers over the student's individuality and expression.
I personally don't enjoy such environments, and I'm not arguing that we should be giving up civil liberties. I'm just saying that being more free doesn't mean you know more science.
How much does it cost you if I sit with a copy machine at home producing thousands of counterfeit dollars, while you go to work for weeks to earn that same money?
It is true that "stealing a chair" is not quite an accurate analogy for copyright infringement. If I pirate X amount of software that you own, that doesn't mean that you lose X worth of software. Counterfeiting is a much better analogy because it involves devaluing a commodity. What piracy does do is devalue that software for everyone. By "devalue" I obviously don't mean that the software becomes less useful for users; I mean that it forces the price down.
If counterfeiting were as easy and common as piracy, there would be a lot less incentive to work. Instead of working for several weeks to get their paycheck, workers would just fire up their copy machine and get the money in an instant. Since money is society's incentive to keep people working, easy counterfeiting would be pretty damaging to the economy.
Without piracy, prices are set by a sort of macroeconomic negotiation, where programmers can ask as much as they want and consumers can reject them as much as they want. This system makes neither side completely happy; the programmers want to set the price to infinity, and the consumers want to set it to $0. But it does allow for a compromise based on the *quality* of the software that works fairly well, as can be seen in just about every other industry.
With piracy, quality basically doesn't matter anymore. It is as easy to pirate a crappy program as it is an excellent program. Consumers can set the price to $0 if they like. Since the software is economically worthless, the price is now set by things unrelated to quality. They will pay to get things like support or a shiny box and CD. But now the economic system encourages better tech support and better boxes, not better software.
Now, as a supporter of open source software, I think that this discussion leaves out a very important point: programming is fun (at least for a lot of people). But even so, programming can sometimes also be boring, and this is why the proprietary model holds that programmers need to be paid for good software to be produced. Whether or not you agree with whether the model works, it is disrespectful and unethical to interfere with the proprietary model by pirating proprietary software, just like it would be for proprietary programmers to interfere with the open source model by pirating open source code (by incorporating it into proprietary software). In order to allow these two models to compete, society provides the copyright system so that programmers can set the terms for what users can do with their software.
Again, piracy is not stealing. It's like counterfeiting or cheating on an exam. You aren't directly taking something from someone else; you are making the work of other people less valuable by being dishonest.
I don't object at all with home users playing wit business software.
When its being used for amateur things then its ok.
The fact of the matter is, programmers don't have to write any software in the first place for the rest of society, whether it be businesses or amateurs. Therefore, they have no obligation to allow their software to be used by amateurs for free. Programmers have a *right* to decide the terms under which they distribute *their* own software, and when somebody agrees to those terms and subsequently violates them (i.e. pirates the software) they are undermining the rights of software developers.
For example, let's say you distribute software under the GPL. If some "amateur" out there downloads your code, and then produces an improvement to it that is distributed as without source code, he has violated the terms under which you gave him your code. It doesn't matter whether he's an amateur working at home or Microsoft -- it's a violation of your rights.
The counter-balance to the programmer's rights is that the user has a choice of whether or not to agree to the programmer's terms. If a home user doesn't like the idea of paying $200 for Windows, he has the choice of using something else like Linux or OS X. No one can force him to buy it. But that doesn't mean he has a right to simply disregard Microsoft's restrictions on the software and "play with business software" at home. Being an amateur doesn't mean that you are above the law.
He went in all fire and zeal, and was basically told by the party leadership to STFU and play ball or he will get NO SUPPORT on ANYTHING - including basic normal federal funding for highway projects and such.
Hmm, 'basic normal federal funding'. Is that what we call pork nowadays?
I write my programs to run on Unix and Windows. And they of course never have a bias when it comes to the polarity of the earth, I just switch the polarity bit.
... what the heck does the Earth's magnetic field have to do with Unix/Windows programming??
Um
as for myself I make programs at work and the last thing I want to do when I get home is program for recreational purposes. I think that sentiment likely goes for a vast majority of programmers, especially ones with a family or a (so-called) life.
Actually, I think you're very much the exception, not the rule. Most if not all programmers I know really do enjoy writing code, and if you talk to them about the software they've been doing in their spare time, they love to tell you about it. In fact, the code I write for fun, not work, is probably better and certainly more enjoyable than something I do because I "have to."
Don't worry, McAfee and Norton are working on it as we speak. As soon as they can put together something more fearful than the cute little proofs of concept that have been floating around expect them to announce a full "epidemic".
Okay, come on. You have no evidence to show this. Their business model doesn't "require" them to do anything like this; there are plenty of problems in the Windows world to keep them busy. Yes, there is a conflict of interest when they tell Mac users "You are in danger." Duh. There is a conflict of interest when Apple tells you "The next version of OS X will change your life." Anyone can see that. But you're suggesting that just because they have a conflict of interest and they are a corporation, they are doing illegal/unethical things.
This is precisely the same reasoning the RIAA uses when it says that DRM is necessary. It says that users have a conflict of interest when they have the technology to easily infringe copyright with no one looking. Yes, users do have that conflict of interest and yes, a lot of users actually do illegal/unethical things with their music when no one is looking. But (at least here on Slashdot) we argue that it's wrong, with no supporting evidence, to make the assumption that, just because there is this conflict of interest, users are doing something wrong. Why do you make equally baseless accusations here, just because this a company, not an individual?
I truly want to be (politely) corrected if I am wrong, but my understanding is if his work were under the GPL, then my work which is incorporating his work, would also have to be GPL.
That is correct if you choose to redistribute it. If you don't send your code to anyone else, you can just use it, which is what I imagine you're doing anyways with a web app.
The people who replied in the forum you linked to and complained about there not being a license are basically being silly. If he released it as public domain, then that code will be just as "free" (if not more so) than if he had released it under a FOSS license like the GPL. If he had released it as GPL, there would be no reason he couldn't release his next version as a completely proprietary program.
Microsoft already forked java and called it C#. Now C# is evolving faster then Java and is making serious inroads into the java development market. Furthermore there are at least two open source implementations of java. So there are three forks right there.
.Net: write once, run only on Microsoft platforms.
Calling C# a "fork of Java" is, frankly, ridiculous. C# is not supposed to interoperate with Java, it's not supposed to support Java in anyway, and there is absolutely no code from Java that's in MS's C# implementation; it's merely Microsoft's way of doing the same thing Java does. If C# is a fork of Java, then GNOME is a fork of KDE. In fact, there's probably actually been some code traded between GNOME and KDE, so even there C# is still a completely different beast.
Second, yes, there are open source implementations. However, has it gained wide acceptance? No, not really. These implementations have always lagged behind, and probably will forever. If Java was opened tomorrow, a fork would have 100% of the functionality Sun has right from the start. If Sun released an update, forks might have to do some work to adapt them to their specific code, but it would be easier than reimplementing it from scratch. So, forks would be able to keep up with Sun's Java much more rapidly than now if Java were open.
But really, what Sun is worried about isn't some small groups using their own Java compiler and classes, especially when the goal of projects like gcj and others is complying with Sun's specifications. What they are most worried about is someone like Microsoft coming in, adding their own proprietary extensions to the language and API, and then using their huge userbase to push their competing version of Java. This is kind of like what MS did with the web and Internet Explorer. What's wrong with Microsoft pushing a competing version? Microsoft has no desire to hold to the "write once, run anywhere" mantra of Java. Look at
So in short, yes, forking will be easier if Java is open. What Sun really should do is go to ISO and get Java standardized, like C++. Look at how it has benefited C++. C++ is very widely used, because it can be used in any software, open source or proprietary. It is platform-independent, which gains more users. There are no forks of C++; at worst, there are extensions to individual compilers (__gnu_cxx::hash_map, as an example), but this could be fixed by just including hash maps in the standard library. C++ has withered use by proprietary software that might try to push changes on other people, and it's survived the forking that can take place in the open source world. Why? Because an independent standards body like the ISO is essentially untouchable.
I'm sure we also agree that if Java were open, it would become a major tool in the hands of open source, and would become a hallmark feature of Linux distros, like another Sun product (OpenOffice.org) has become. Java already has a large community, but it would explode in size if it became open source.
The summary is bogus. As far as I can tell from the article, all they're doing is unbundling the monitors (and possibly keyboards and mice) from the computer.
Yup, it looks like that's exactly what's happening. From TFA: "Such components include central processing units -- the brain of the computer that powers its basic functions -- as well as monitors, keyboards and mice that customers can combine to create customized packages they can load in a shopping cart and take home right away." So, I guess what the rest of the world calls a "computer" is a "central processing unit" according to Yahoo. How disappointing. "Do it yourself" has been reduced to "buy the keyboard yourself."
The point of many people posting here is that open sourcing java wouldn't necessarily make it better. There is even a viewpoint that it would make it worse.
I very much see the merit of keeping it closed. I agree that keeping it closed does prevent forking, which would be a bad thing for Java (it's a bad thing for most software projects). I merely suggest that the benefits of opening it will outweight the risks.
The point of the person you replied to is that frankly it doesn't matter how good or bad it is, they wont use it because they don't agree with the restrictions it imposes upon them. That's a valid choice, and a more logical viewpoint than your own.
It's a "valid choice," but then again, almost anything is a valid choice. I disagree that it's "more logical" than my own. I simply didn't elaborate on why I think that open source would be good for Java (many of the reasons have already been stated in the article and in other posts); that doesn't make my view "non-logical." If you want me to elaborate, I'd be more than happy to.
The person I replied to did, however, elaborate on why they believe what they do, and I think it is hardly logical at all. Their belief is that the restrictions of Sun's license are morally offensive, not just too restrictive for what they want to do technically (which is, presumably, make a modified version of Java). Because they believe these restrictions are a "religious" issue, they believe that these restrictions are unacceptable under any circumstances whatsoever. If I don't particularly care that I can't modify the source code to Java, since I didn't want to anyway, why should these restrictions be unacceptable? I wouldn't even want to violate them, whether they were placed on me or not.
Again, if I need a home, I would prefer to own it, not rent it. But it's easy to imagine circumstance under which I would rather rent, not buy, a home. Do you consider the viewpoint "Renting is unethical because it sacrifices freedom for convenience. Therefore, I refuse to rent anything under any circumstances and will only own what I use." to be very logical?
Yes, this is about religion. It's about an idealogical divide between people who would rather have free-as-in-beer convenient software, rather than free-as-in-freedom software that preserves your rights. Frankly, your arrogant pragmatism nauseates me.
Consider this question: why does software exist? Because it makes life easier. It's convenient to be able to, for example, type up a paper electronically and save it. It's pragmatic to go search Google for something I need to learn about. These aren't fundamental rights; they are just practical, convenient tools.
Ultimately, the only value software has is when it's *used.* A program is good not because it can be modified, or because you can see how it works; the only important thing is that you can *use* it somehow. Sometimes being able to see and modify the source code of a program is useful because you can *use* your modified version later. Sometimes the benefits of modifying the software are not worth all the time you would have to spend making them.
I like open source because I think it makes *better* software that is more *useful* to me, not as part of some moral struggle. Look at it like renting a house. Yes, you give up the "freedom" to add a new room, remodel the kitchen, and install a new sink, but perhaps that is worth only spending a couple hundred dollars a month instead of buying a house for hundred thousand dollars. You use the word "freedom" to invoke ideas like the "free speech," which is somewhat misleading. You should say "freedom" as in "own, not rent." Yes, I like to have control over my software and own things instead of rent them, but if you were offered the chance to rent a million dollar mansion for $1 a month, versus buying a $100,000 smaller home, you choose the option with less "freedom" but more convenience.
Anyway, for you this might be about religion, which is, to be honest, silly; being religious about things like software completely insulates your views from ration and reality. For the rest of us, this is a question about economics and technical merit: does open source, through larger, unpaid developer communities, build better software than the proprietary model, through smaller groups of royalty-paid developers? Personally, I prefer the former, but there is no completely obvious winner. On the other hand, if one adopts your view, a useless but open source "Hello World" would be morally superior to any proprietary software that actually makes people's lives easier. Remind yourself that software exists to be convenient, not so that you get to label someone as unethical.
My favourite analogy to this is asking which one is more bulletproof, an apple or a kevlar vest. You'd shoot the apple into smitherines then say "Obviously the kevlar vest would crumble similarly if I shot it therefore neither are bulletproof".
Your choice of fruit for the analogy helps make your point quite nicely.
Schwartz praises MacNealy for holding down job cuts in R&D. But you have to ask "What the hell are 30,000 people doing at Sun?" when Apple somehow manages to make the best personal computer hardware, and personal computer OS software, and the best consumer electronics device on the market, all with one quarter of the number of employees as Microsoft.
You also realize that Apple and Sun are in very different markets, right? Non-geeks won't see too many Sun logos while they're walking down the street. That's because Sun makes servers and workstations, not PCs or MP3 players. The work Sun does really happens within the geek world and is not very visible to the general public.
Apple, on the other hand, makes a business out of being visible. I concede that Apple does make a lot of good technology, but you consider Apple to be the "best" when that is really debatable. The "best PC hardware?" Unlike Sun, Apple isn't responsible for the design of its hardware; Intel is (IBM was before). Sun, on the other hand, makes SPARC. The "best PC OS?" Well, first of all, Solaris isn't intended as a PC operating system, but second of all, since when is OS X "the best?" Apple manages to improve how people perceive the quality of the operating system by making sure that it's installed only on hardware Apple controls; this isn't innovation, it's just taking control from the user. "Just works(tm)" largely translates into "just our hardware." That's a crutch that Solaris, Linux, Windows and nearly everyone else doesn't have. Finally, unlike Solaris, (and I as a sucker for eye-candy can say) OS X just looks very nice and polished. I like it so much that I use an Aqua-like theme here on my Linux desktop. For some reason, we are often under the illusion that slick icons and a pretty GUI mean that a technology is superior. The same applies to the shiny white cases of Macs and iPods. This effect is how Apple manages to sell $99 pouches for iPods (there's an example of 0% innovation and 100% Apple trendiness).
So, although Apple does make good tech, it's sometimes hard to tell how much of it is real innovation and how much of it is the spell of Apple eye-candy and marketing. Sun makes servers and workstations; people don't use these machines to show how stylish they are or even necessarily to have fun. Sun can't make commercials with black silhouettes of people dancing to music as they write a Java program on their new SPARC workstation; it just isn't "hip." But that doesn't mean that people at Sun are sitting on their hands while the Apple guys are rocking out with their iPods. What are 30,000 people doing at Sun? Creating lots of technology that benefits millions of people who will probably never hear about it.
It will probably get passed around the net as if Bush said he developed the iPod. Al Gore never did say he "invented the internet" either.
Perhaps, but what Al Gore did say is that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." What Bush said is that the US developed technologies that "were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod." You can say that Newton developed math that was a "key ingredient in the development of the iPod," but you can't say Newton "took the initiative in developing the iPod."
In short, yeah, both one-liners would be unfair. But Gore's is a little more fair.
My proposal wasn't to encourage a new monopoly around Apple.
.doc as a universally readable format appropriate for exchange, archiving, etc decreases, then open standards and open source eventually fill the hole. (Initially, figuratively, in perception, and eventually, literally, in open source market share).
.doc a problem in itself? The problem is that it's closed. We need to replace that with, not another closed format, but an open one. ODF is what we ought to be pushing, not a second, equally problematic format.
You might not want an Apple monopoly, but guess who does? If you think that Apple will pass up any opportunity to lock people into Macs over alternative platforms, you're deluding yourself. The only reason they can get away with it now is that Apple has as little marketshare as Linux.
Using, developing, and evangelizing for Linux right now, other than for your own personal fun, which I can't begrudge, is equivalent to voting for a third party candidate in the U.S. The best choice? Sure. But you're "throwing your vote away."
I would agree with you that Linux would be like a third party candidate if Apple had significantly more marketshare than Linux. But Macs do not represent nearly 50% of the country in the way a losing major party candidate does. They represent less than 5% of personal computers, with Linux not far behind. Furthermore, if Macs did have anything more than 20% of the market, you can be sure that many of Mac's porting problems would be solved by now, and the platforms that we'd need to encourage would be Linux and BSD. So, in reality, OS X and Linux are both "third party" candidates (should we say second?), since their marketshares are pretty similar.
I maintain my claim that people using Apple's closed office suite is a win for openness. Not directly, or immediate, but an important step. If enough people use Word Perfect, Apple's suite, or Star Office, that the general perception of a
I can see why you're saying what you're saying, but it fails to solve the real problem. Is
> Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around
I may have misremembered that, I won't deny. But I believe the back-room politics that went on were more complex than that. (Sources welcome.)
MS stopped developing IE 5 in 2003. That is (as far as I know) all that the public knows about why it happened, so it is possible (though extremely unlikely, IMHO) that any "back-room politics" happened. Look at it from Microsoft's perspective. That browser was doing nothing for them; they weren't even actively developing IE for Windows at the time! So, they just cut the umbilical cord in 2003 and it died in 2006.
In short, the problem here is that you think OS X is far ahead of Linux both in terms of marketshare and technology. Its marketshare is within a percentage point or two of Linux's. At the moment, I will say Apple has considerably more advanced eye-candy (i.e., a hardware-accelerated windowing system (Quartz)), but beyond that, I see little more that it offers (and Xgl will be catching up with Apple soon). Nearly every problem Linux has that Apple doesn't stem from one (or both) of two things: Apple charges (lots) of money for its computers, and Apple hand-selects the hardware that it software runs on. Linux has to deal with the same problem Microsoft has to solve (running on lots of generic hardware) without the marketshare and clout that Microsoft can use to get hardware manufacturers to develop their own drivers.
As a Linux developer, I want to respect Mac users as well, since I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of software not being ported to your platform. However, the program I'm working on at the moment, while it has been ported from Linux to Windows (partially d
And perhaps most significantly, there is no IE7 for Mac. Microsoft has totally abandoned the platform. Apple having the balls the ship their OS with a non-MS browser, at the risk of damaging their sacred user experience, is responsible for the impossibility of another Microsoft lock on the web in the medium-term.
... First of all, why do you suggest we "chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly" only to set up a monopoly around Apple? Apple tries to restrict the user as much as Microsoft; I will point again to their music format. Don't kid yourself; Steve Jobs would love to be in Microsoft's position every bit as much as Bill Gates does. The difference would be that instead of only controlling the software, Apple would also control the hardware, since they build a lot more than just the OS.
Um, sorry, but this is not because Apple has "the balls" to do this; they had no choice. Microsoft stopped IE for Mac, not the other way around, so Apple can't do anything other than push their own browser.
Every Mac that moves off the shelves of your local, brightly colored Apple store is not just a blow to Windows, but it's a win for the accessible web, the open, standardized office suite file format, etc.
Really? Take a look at the office suit that Apple is promoting. Is it open or standardized? Yeah right. It's the same, closed Microsoft Office as Windows users are using (yeah I know there are differences between the Windows and Mac versions, but the point is that neither contribute to "accessibility" or "openness"). Look at the accessibility and openness Apple is pushing with their DRMed music format for iPods and so forth. Every Mac that moves off the shelf is a blow to Microsoft, but it's still a blow to openness (or at least irrelevant if it's a former MS customer).
In fact, I encourage nerds of all colors to switch, even _away from_ Linux. Massing around Apple is, in my opinion, the best way to continue to chip away at Microsoft's broad monopoly over the next few years. Linux can't do it on its own... KDE, GNOME, and 3rd party apps are still (perpetually, seemingly) not ready yet for the masses. OS X is.
Riiiight
You are completely ignoring why nerds like Linux and BSD. They can have complete control of their systems. They can tinker with it all they like without trouble a Mac user would have trying to do the same thing (the Mac user lacks a lot of the source code to a lot of his software (I know about Darwin, but there's a lot more to MacOS than Darwin)). You can say, "Don't tinker with it! It's perfect the way it is." But the reason nerds tinker with computers is that they aren't perfect, they never will be, and nerds enjoy opening the hood and seeing what's inside.
At the same time, you are also ignoring why Linux distros are "not ready yet for the masses." I have helped friends install Linux on their machines. What are the most common problems? They need still want to play Windows games, or need to run some Windows program. A Mac will have exactly the same problem. They want to use proprietary codecs for playing videos and such. Thanks to EasyUbuntu and similar scripts, this is largely solved now, but no free OS will ever be able to ship with these codecs. Apple solves this problem -- by charging you money!
And then there are hardware support issues, especially wireless drivers. Linux has a tough time with this because wifi card manufacturers rarely make Linux drivers. But they also almost never write MacOS drivers. So how does Apple solve this problem? They don't! They just decide what hardware you can and can't run, make drivers for their small amount of hardware, and tada! you have no more hardware support problems, because you can't even *try* to support generic hardware. What's the problem here? You pay a huge amount for Apple's hand-picked hardware. If Apple simply sold OS X and you tried to use it on generic hardware, you'd have exactly the same problems (in fact, they'd probably have worse problems,