Again with the "la la la la I can't hear you" defense. Yes, they are. They are property because people create them, and people own what they create. Our society recognizes this fact, our laws recognize this fact. That you, Mr. John Nobody, do not recognize this fact means only that you aren't interested in living in the real world.
Property can be traded, bought, sold.
Right. So can written works, musical compositions, recordings, movies, and inventions. So, especially, can computer programs.
what is actually being sold?
The copy of the recording. Duh.
If the song is the property, then once you sell it to me, it becomes MY PROPERTY
The copy becomes your property, yes. You own the copy. You can do whatever you want with the copy... except copy it. Because you don't own the original, and only the owner of the original has the right to make more copies.
That exclusive right to copy is YOUR PROPERTY.
Rights are not property. The work itself is the property.
Man, you're really bending over backwards to try to twist this into an "I can steal whatever I want" thing, aren't you? Doesn't that make you feel kind of guilty, on some level at least?
You see the Linux world through the press releases of Linux-based companies.
What's a "Linux-based company?"
For the last five years, Linux has been progressing really quickly.
That's not really an accurate statement, is it? There have been no new releases of Linux since 2001; just bug fixes and patches. There has been no significant work on the user experience since 2001, when Eazel closed its doors. There have been no real functional enhancements since before 2001. What's worse, there is no roadmap for the delivery of new core features like metadata and search.
Linux has been essentially stagnant, and there's no sign that that's going to change any time soon.
Linux-related sales have gone from the couple millions to the couple billions.
It's a trillion-dollar industry. You're saying that Linux, over the past five years, has gone from being insignificant to six decimal places to being insignificant to three decimal places.
The real issues keeping most companies from switching to Linux on their desktops are that they have already invested a lot of capital in their existing Windows setup
That's kind of a scapegoat argument, isn't it? It's not that your product offers no advantages whatsoever beyond the price point per license. It's that the competitor is entrenched. Is that it?
Linux never made a promise.
Sigh. Okay, whatever. I'm pretty sure bragging about an operating system that's going to take on Microsoft and Apple is "making a promise," but whatever you say.
Either way, it's a big loss. Either there was promise that remained unfulfilled, or there was never any promise at all.
Linux cannot be defeated by any competing business model.
Of course not, not if you define "defeated" as having nothing to do with units delivered. If you want to define success in terms of how many Internet message board comments get posted about your product, go right ahead. Meanwhile, what really matters is penetration, and Linux doesn't have any.
You don't actually think SCO has a legitimate case, do you?
It no longer matters at all. The reputation of Linux has been permanently soiled by its legal entanglements. Nobody in his right mind would choose to invest either time or money in it now.
RMS's analogy is restricted to software patents
No, it's not. Go read his screed. And it's not an analogy, it's a metaphor. And it's not a metaphor as much as it is a bald-faced insult to everybody who's ever invented anything.
advocates of "Linux" (which Stallman is not, by the way)
Of course he is. What are you talking about now?
It is understood that someone's personal opinions shared with others in a casual conversation needn't use the same language as someone would use in a business setting.
When somebody goes on a public Internet message board and makes pronouncements in his official capacity, that's not "someone's personal opinions in a casual conversation." It's ex cathedra.
His primary goal is to ensure that a free (as in speech) computer operating system always exists
Yeah, yeah, we all know about Stallman's insane political agenda. The less said about that, the better. The man's a freak. Must you sully his reputation further by giving detailed examples of exactly how he's a freak?
His statement therefore does not sabotage his primary goal.
Yes, it does. His goal was to persuade. He didn't. He dissuaded. He blew it.
Well, as a member of the Linux community
Company, not community.
I think your language alienates me and is patently offensive.
In other words, you feel the same way about me that everybody who's ever created anything feels toward you, and towards Perens, and towards Stallman, and towards the rest of the "gimme gimme" gang. I wonder if you'll use this moment of
They can scribble on it, modify it, burn it, eat it, play it, and read it any time they wish to do so.
You're referring to the copy, not to the contents of the copy. The book and the words contained within the book are two different things.
You traded your creation (which was your exclusive property as long as you kept it to yourself) for the exclusive right to make copies of it.
No, that's not correct. The law protects all works, published and unpublished, for the duration of the copyright. When the copyright expires, all works, published and unpublished, are seized by the government and placed in the public domain.
Once the right expires
That's not correct either, and is really a pretty dangerous way of saying it. Rights do not expire. Rights are unalienable. They are neither given nor taken away.
What expires is the legal protection given to intellectual property rights. After a certain period of time, the author of a work is no longer legally entitled to claim ownership over a work, or to seek remedies for infringements of his rights over that work.
It's kind of like a statute of limitations. If somebody vandalizes your car, you can press criminal charges against him...up to the point when the statute of limitations runs out. After that time, you can no longer seek criminal restitution against the person who vandalized your car. You still have your right to be secure in your property; it's just that the legal protection of that right in that instance has expired.
your version of the real world is defined by what a judge or a legal system says instead of what is
We're talking about the law. The law is defined as --surprise! --what a judge or legal system says it is. I don't think "I'm smarter than all the lawyers and lawmakers and judges everywhere, nyaah" is going to win a lot of people over to your side.
Good thing it's not 1000 years back, or you might be wanting to burn me at the stake for saying the earth goes arround the Sun.
Yes, great idea. Compare yourself to Galileo. That's not a wild misrepresentation of the truth. "Eppur si muove" and all that. Bravo.
You can play semantics games all you want, the reality is they are different by any measuremnet - and you are trying to treat them like they are the same.
This coffee cup is as different from a plot of land as can be. The cup was made; the land just is. The cup can be taken from one place to another; the land doesn't move. The cup can be used to hold or carry things; the land just sits there. They are "different by any measuremnet"...and yet they are both property.
You're a lwayer, aren't you?
No, I'm not a "lwayer." I'm not sure where you got that idea.
By rejecting bullshit licenses like the CDDL, and embracing ones like the GPL for starters.
I don't follow you. How does that translate into "leveraging these facts to your advantage?"
create art, I create literature, and I create a lot of code. In fact, alot of it had been copyrighted
All of it is copyrighted. Everything that's written or recorded is protected by copyright from the moment it's created to the time that the legal protection expires.
Nobody in the industries that create get copyrights and patents for property sake, they get them to protect from frivolus lawsuits or to get agreements not to be sue'd from other companies by cross-licensing or to have leverage to counter-sue when attacked.
Um. No. Companies get patents because they want to recover the investment that went into creating their invention. That's the motivation for a business to get a patent: It's to secure a temporary monopoly on the production of a certain thing. That's how we encourage people to go off and invest a ton of time creating new and wonderful inventions, you see: by promising to pay them back for their effort.
You really don't get it, they have nothing to do with property - they have to do with keeping people from competing.
I don't really see how "I'm gonna take somebody else's idea without paying him for it" could be described as "competing," but what the hell. You're the "creative" one. I'm just some guy. Obviously you know best.
Hey, it looks like I might have been wrong about the "You're getting drunk" thing. It's entirely possible that you're just illiterate instead. You know, that kinda makes me suspect that you were lying about the whole "I create literature" thing. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that you're able to create a proper sentence, much less anything that could reasonably be called literature.
Yawn. Some freshman hauls out the "deprivation" argument again, not stopping to think about the fact that that argument breaks down when we talk about real estate. Sigh.
Slashdot, do me a favor, okay? Get together and compare notes. Because I'm getting pretty sick of seeing the same old, bogus arguments being floated in feeble attempts to justify the "I wanna steal, get out of my way!" mindset.
Basically, if you can take something abstract, declare it your own and sell it
Okay, you got that wrong. You can't just "take something abstract." You have to create something entirely new. Then yes, you can sell it and make money. But not for nothing. The money is your reward for your creativity or ingenuity.
Intellectual property wasn't even 'property' in any sense of the word just a few decades ago.
Utterly false. The tradition of the ownership of intellectual property goes back tens of thousands of years. Long before the Egyptians had built the first pyramid, the aborigines of Australia were singing songs. To sing someone else's song without his permission was a serious offense. The offender could have his possessions confiscated, or even be exiled. The American Indians had the same tradition: Telling the stories or singing the songs of another family was considered a serious crime. It still is, even today.
The tradition of intellectual property goes back just as far as any other notion of property. It was really only during the Dark Ages that people --strictly the people of Europe --abandoned the idea of intellectual property. Of course, the also abandoned the idea of intellectualism in general, so I'm not sure we should be so quick to emulate them.
I know it makes all this 'property' look a little artificial, but that's because it is artificial. People need to remember that.
That kind of nihilism isn't productive. By that interpretation, every human convention is artificial. The ownership of real estate by people is equally artificial. More so, even, because nobody creates land. People create intellectual property; they make it out of nothing at all but their own labor and effort. But land is just there. And yet, we recognize the ownership of land. Nobody complains that it's just artificial.
I mean, shit. By exactly the same reasoning I could argue that agriculture is all just artificial and we should go back to being hunters and gatherers. It's a nonsense argument.
Except in legal terms, there are no moral rights not to be copied.
Wrong. The moral imperative is, "Don't take other people's stuff without their permission." I don't know about you, but I learned that one when I was about a year old.
I'm not really interested in the "you aren't deferential enough to the big, important man" parts of your comment. Skipping them (and there were lots) to talk about the actual subject matter at hand.
Linux is, in the minds of today's IT-savvy businesspeople, the next big thing.
It was the "next big thing" five years ago, and it's the "next big thing" today, and it'll be the "next big thing" five years hence, and everybody is starting to realize it.
Embedded systems companies already know that Linux is death. TiVo, a company that based its business around the use of Linux in their video recorders, has yet to turn a profit. Why? Because the first thing oh so many of their customers do is to hack their products to remove the necessity of subscribing to TiVo's service. The "give away the razors and sell the blades" business model has failed for TiVo because people have gone out and built their own blades. Plus ten points for ingenuity, minus several million for business sense.
A product can only be "the next big thing" for so long before it's recognized as vaporware. While there are some environments where Linux is a good alternative today --SGI is putting Linux on supercomputers, ILM is using Linux for single-purpose compositing workstations that basically don't need an OS at all, Web hosting companies like it because it's cheap --it's just not useful for general-purpose computers or servers. It was supposed to be taking over the desktop by now; it's not. Products like Open Office, which were lauded with such enthusiasm just a couple of years ago, have turned out to be a flop, cheaper but less useful by far than Office.
Meanwhile, the TCO of the Mac has just fallen and fallen. For a small-business or home computer user, Linux isn't even on the radar. The exuberant enthusiasm of the late 90s --Gnome and Eazel and all that -- has just evaporated in the harsh light of the free market.
There comes a time when being the "next big thing" isn't enough. For Linux, that time was about a year ago.
It's a tremendous success.
Um, no. Apple is a tremendous success. Their profits for the quarter ending 12/25/04 were up 400 percent over the same quarter the previous year. That's what "tremendous success" means: actually moving units. No Linux venture has been a "tremendous success."
Everyone is talking about it.
Everyone used to be talking about it. Now everyone is talking about why Apple and even Microsoft -- albeit at a much slower pace -- have delivered on their promises, while Linux has never delivered on any of its promises. Linux today occupies basically the same niche it occupied three years ago: Web servers and single-purpose desktops, cash registers and embedded personal electronics, and it's vanishing from the single-purpose desktop as it falls behind on applications, and it's disappearing from embedded personal electronics as vendors learn "the TiVo lesson." It hasn't grown at all. It hasn't broken any new ground. Hell, it hasn't even broken any old ground. Basic ease-of-use features that have been around for years are still mysteries on Linux. Core applications are still lacking. All promise and no delivery, all sizzle and no steak.
Non-technical people know the word, even if they don't know what it means.
Yes, but not in a good way. To the non-IT mind, Linux means "that thing that sank TiVo," or "that thing that everybody is getting sued over." Linux is that thing that everybody was talking about but that now is really only useful for Web servers and cash registers. Linux is that thing that I was supposed to be using by now. Linux is made by that guy who said that anybody who owns a patent is a blood-sucker who's a parasite on society. These are not good brand associations.
Otherwise, Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, the Libertarian party -- all would be companies!
They are. Look the word up. You have to get all the way down to definitio
Ah, but you see, it is exactly what the pro-patent people do, they say that the product of your own labour is not your property because they did the same (similar) labor themselves and got the same (similar) product.
First of all, patents are by definition granted for inventions that aren't obvious. Your assertion that 100 people could all simultaneously invent the same thing that works in the same way is absurd.
But aside from that, if it did happen that Person A were to create an invention and get a patent, then Person B were to invent the exact same thing independently, nobody would say that Person B didn't own his invention. It's just that he didn't get there first, which means he couldn't use his invention until Person A's patent expired.
Now, here's why that never, ever happens: When you get a patent, you have to send in a detailed description of your invention. That description goes into a database. When Person B starts working on an invention, he goes forth and does a patent search to see if anybody has gotten there before him. When he finds Person A's patent and realizes that he's been beaten to it, he decides to invest his labor in inventing something else instead, maybe in materially improving Person A's invention.
And thus is progress advanced.
So two things: One, you don't understand how patents work, and two, you don't understand that patents are actually beneficial because they help people to avoid duplicating other people's effort.
Another "Daily Kos" reader goes forth to spread the gospel. Don't you people ever get tired of just parroting what your paid political consultant tells you?
But you are basically trying to say that you have a right to "pounce" me if I use ideas you think are "yours".
I think you meant "sue," and the answer is "yes."
Excuse me if I tell you go to hell.
It doesn't really matter what you tell me. It matters what you tell a judge when you get sued for copyright, trademark or patent infringement. I think he's going to find "go to hell" to be a singularly unacceptable defense.
Ideas are not property.
Some are. Inventions are property. Writings are property. Music is property. Et cetera.
physical property has natural limits on supply and demand
So do some kinds of ideas. If I have an invention and you want to use it, there's a supply-and-demand situation right there. If I have a written work and you want to read it, that's supply-and-demand. I think the word you're grasping for here is "scarcity," which is just fancy economist talk for "some folks have it and some folks don't." It applies to ideas just like it applies to anything else.
Having physical property deprives another person use
Not always. I can own land, but my ownership of that land doesn't deprive anybody of its use. It's not like I can roll the land up and carry it away with me. You can walk right across it if you want to. You can even climb over the fence if you're so motivated. I can't stop you.
But we still consider land to be property.
I can leverage these facts to my advantage
How's that?
No I got your point christal clear.
Your grammar and spelling are getting worse and worse. Are you getting slowly drunk over there? Or are you just getting irritable?
It's disengenuious to sujest that the only people who don't care about owning ideas are the cone who aren't "blessed with creativity". Turnarround was fair play.
The blather was meant to convey that I was not taking you seriously.
No, really? I thought it was just you being your usual self. Oh, wait. It seems we were both right.
you know nothing of my own success in doing PR for this movement over some years
Well, if the shoe fits, Bruce. The "movement" (ugh, a term even worse than "community" in connotation) is wildly unpopular among computer buyers, the product is failing to gain mindshare, the brand has lost all its luster among the partisan in-fighting between the Gnu people and the Red Hat people and the Fedora people and these people and those people, and now you've managed to remind Sun --and, by extension, every other company that had ideas about doing business with you -- that the only safe course of action is to stay far, far away. The momentum is gone, man. Poof. Casper.
If this is your idea of a PR success, I'd really hate to see what you consider PR failure.
But tell you what. You go back to believing that you know best and that everybody else is an idiot. If that makes you happy, who am I to stand in the way?
Did you read the last paragraph of the parent post?
Yes. Contrived hypotheticals do not impress me. If you can find a case where two identical patentable inventions were created at precisely the same time by two inventors working on opposite sides of the world, let's talk about it. As it is, you're basically asking me who would own the copyright if two authors sat down and, entirely by coincidence, wrote the exact same book, word for word, at precisely the same moment. Possible? Sure. But so utterly improbable that it's never happened and could never reasonably be expected to happen, ever. I don't think a discussion of that kind of hypothetical could ever go anywhere productive.
For the record, most people who challenge our current implementations of copyright and/or patent have specific and legitimate arguments based upon real-world experience in various industry.
Great. Let's hear one. Or, even better, let's hear some kind of logical, internally consistent argument that explains why this chair I'm sitting on is my property and the litter of puppies that my dog had last month are my property and the tree growing in my back yard is my property but these words that I'm creating right now aren't my property. And if this argument just happens to be compatible with basic Western ideas of civil rights, so much the better.
I don't really think that "la la la la I can't hear you" is a good way to persuade people to adopt your point of view. If you want to convince people to stop thinking of the product of their own labor as their property, you're gonna have to be a little more persuasive than this. Because, see, ideas are property. They are because people agree that they are. If you want to change that status quo, you're gonna have to change it. Just sitting there with your fingers in your ears isn't gonna do anything.
Well, lets hear the great ideas that you've worked your ass off for.
I don't think I've ever had a great idea. I had one idea that I thought was great, about five years ago. It turned out I was mistaken. I had an idea in late 2003 that I thought was pretty good, and it's allowed me to make a living for a bit more than a year now, so it must be at least okay, but I wouldn't go so far as to say great.
But see, you kinda missed my point. My point -- which, silly me, I thought was crystal-clear--was that only people who don't recognize the value of ideas are opposed to patents. You don't recognize the value of ideas, obviously, because you say that "ideas were happening anyhow." After I poured over this for many hours trying to translate it into English, I gathered that you believe that ideas just happen. Not that people spend their whole lives trying to create them, not that they're the product of years of intense labor, but rather that they just happen.Therefore they have no value to you. Which, you know... kinda illustrates my point.
I hope your inventions don't use math (unless you paid the royalities), smoocher!
You mean "moocher." To "smooch" means to kiss. And while I do think you're a very attractive guy who'll make somebody a wonderful husband someday, I'm just not that into you.
It doesn't really matter what I think. It's about public opinion. And yeah, the association of you people with the anti-capitalist faction is pretty strong in the public eye. It's understandable, considering your most vocal advocate says things in print like "patent holders that the enemy of everyone," don't you think? Seriously, if I were your publicist, I'd have that guy duct-taped to a chair whenever there's a reporter anywhere within five miles.
The rest of your comment seemed to just be defensive blather. Also not good for the biz, you know? Besides, it's a shame. It seemed for a second there that we had an actual dialogue going --you know, beyond your really distasteful arrogance. But I guess it was just a passing thing.
If, in ten years, somebody posts an "anybody remember Linux?" article on the Internet, will you be surprised?
It's also a really excellent way to communicate that I'm, you know, stunned.
(Remember that "you're deliberately being condescending" thing? I promised not to hold it against you. It's only fair to let you know that I'm no longer sure I can keep that promise.)
No doubt there are hundreds of forms of property ownership that our society has chosen to prohibit, limit, or tax.
Not a good way to be persuasive. It's about image, remember? First you got everybody all concerned by saying that you weren't down with property. Then you royally pissed everybody off by invoking slavery. (Why is it always the rich white guys who invoke slavery?) And now you're trying to hand-wave it away by trivializing slavery, by saying that it's just one example among many equivalent examples.
Seriously, I'm offering you advice here: This is a public-affairs disaster. It's a world-ender. Cut it out right now.
You're trying to sell something here. You're trying to persuade people to swallow your idea. You're not going about it in a very persuasive way.
Bottom line: Property is a good thing. People have good feelings about property. When you say "property," people think about buying their first house, or when they paid off their first car loan. Owning things gives people a sense of satisfaction, and being an owner of something is a position that commands the respect of one's peers. This is how things work.
Now, you could get uppity and try to argue that this isn't civilized or something. And I don't mean "could" in the hypothetical sense. I mean you, personally, enjoy that capacity. But it's not a good way to make friends. Telling people that their opinions are primitive or unenlightened is a good way to alienate one's audience.
People want to own ideas because creating ideas is hard work for most people. The only people who think ideas shouldn't be owned are either individuals who have never had a good idea themselves or people who are so blessed with an excess of creativity that they aren't aware that most people don't find it so easy. The first group of people are moochers and slackers, and the second group are just insufferable. So don't associate yourself in public with either.
You might try to appeal to people's sense of community, but that word has kind of been poisoned by your peers over the past few years. People have started to refer to this community and that community, when what they're really talking about is groups of people joined together for a common purpose. We already have a word for that -- company --but some have rejected this word because it's hard to advance an anti-capitalist agenda while calling yourself a word that is a loose synonym for a business concern. These people have adopted the word "community" instead, but they don't really mean a community. They mean a company. So the whole word has kind of been spoiled in this context.
Don't say "collective," either, because that's even worse than "community."
Instead, try using the word collaboration. Instead of talking about the evils of property, talk about the virtue of collaboration. Another good, positive word is transparency. You can use these words together, by saying that transparency helps collaboration.
So when you want to say "Sun is evil because they're greedy and they should just give all their property to us for free," try saying this instead: "We admire Sun's ingenuity, but we're a little concerned about their lack of transparency. If they were to make their business a little more transparent, everybody would benefit from the collaboration that would result. By choosing not to adopt a philosophy of transparency, Sun is passing up an opportunity to create new, valuable partnerships."
See? You can be positive, pro-innovation and pro-business while getting your message out at the same time. It's really not that hard. You just have to (1) stop being so strident and (2) get that Stallman guy to shut the hell up, like, forever and ever. 'Cause seriously, every time he publishes and article, you guys really take a beating in the court of public opinion.
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VT paid list price for their supercomputer. At least for the G5s. I guess it's possible that they got a discount on the Infiniband switches or something.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental freedom which the government cannot take away because it was never "granted" in the first place. It simply exists as a basic, inalienable human right. The body of law, which only recently became in vogue among lawyers to call "intellectual property," is a limited granted privilege.
Why? Why is one a natural right and the other not? Please, for the name of God, come up with some rationalization that doesn't boil down to, "We shouldn't recognize property rights because I want to be able to take other people's stuff whenever I want."
I am positively stunned. I know I shouldn't be. I know I should be more cynical than this. But I'm absolutely shocked that you would have the audacity to compare patents to slavery.
It seems like every time I turn around, there's another blinding example of why Linux is in the middle of a PR crisis. Making such utterly absurd comparisons in public isn't helping, okay? You really, really have to cut that out unless you want to be just another piece of historical trivia, yet another failed venture, yet another "where are they now?"
Re:"Apples == expensive" not a stereotype
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he's a fanatic -- he wants Iraq to be an Islamic state.
Sistani has encouraged his supporters to participate in the political process, and his discouraged them from backing an Islamist government. Sistani is an apolitical fundamentalist, which makes him more our friend than our foe. Freedom of religion, remember?
That was never what I said.
You criticized the fact that there are lots of candidates on the ballots, and that the ballots weren't announced until late in the process. These are the things that a caucus system would have attempted to correct. So we agree: Caucuses would have been better. But, as I said, better some than none.
I think we should have seen direct elections back in early 2004
Elections for what? Remember, not only did Iraq not even have a legitimate constitution then; it didn't even have a plan for writing one. First a plan had to be established, only then could it be put into motion. If you want to complain that the process took too long, complain to Lakhdar Brahimi, UN special envoy responsible for helping the Iraqis establish their plan.
But personally, I think you'd be a dumbass to complain about the time. Postwar reconstruction can take decades. To go from a complete power vacuum to having elections for an interim assembly in less than two years is a remarkable achievement.
That would be Iyad Allawi, formerly a carbomber
You've been reading too much Baathist propaganda. Which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. The problem arises when you stop considering the source and you start believing the Baathist propaganda. On al-Jazeera, Allawi has been accused of everything from being a terrorist to being a child molester to being on the CIA payroll to having -- horror of horrors! -- a Jewish grand-uncle. None of it is true, of course. And yet the stories live on, repeated by people who seem to be in love with the idea that Iraqi democracy might fail. I don't think most of these people are actually opposed to Iraqi democracy, of course. Some certainly are, but most of them are just more enamored with the thought of seeing the US fail, and completely bereft of an understanding of the gravity of the situation. These are the ones who giggle at the prospect that 25 million people might continue to live in fear or, worse, totalitarian oppression if it means that the US might suffer a setback.
hand picked by the Bush people
Allawi was chosen by the Iraqi Governing Council, an independent body of Iraqi citizens who established the Iraqi Interim Government in May 2004, under the advice of Lakhdar Brahimi. Nobody from the administration, State or the CPA was consulted.
And Allawi's (puppet) government chose the date at the insistence of the Bush Administration
Sigh. Facts just run right off you like water off a duck's back, don't they? "Bush picked the date." No, the IIG picked the date. "Well, Bush made them pick the date." Whatever.
At least, I could find no mention of it on google.
Look harder. It was big news. The story broke right before the two guys from "Iraq the Model" visited Washington. There was an LA Times story, I think. LexisNexis will give you want you want.
Um, no. There are people who use it, yes. But there are also people who make, distribute, sell and promote it. These people, who are all working with a common purpose, comprise a -- surprise! --group.
It is NOT a product.
Of course it is. It's a thing that some people offer to other people. It's a product.
However, your ramble goes a long way toward demonstrating my point. The "this Linux is a product, that Linux isn't a product" nonsense is an excellent example of why Linux has a massive PR problem.
You simply cannot tell "at a glance" that millions of lines of code are indeed "low quality".
Hang on a sec. Let's go real slow here. Are you saying, with a straight face, that your customers are not going to form an opinion about your product when they use it? Because I feel pretty safe here in saying that they are.
You sound as if you are deliberately trying to be offensive.
That's okay. You sound, as usual, as if you're deliberately trying to be condescending. You don't hold mine against me and I won't hold yours against you.
The gimmie-gimmie-gimmie is coming from folks who think they have the right to own ideas and keep others from using those ideas.
Well, that's kind of implicit in any culture that accepts the right to own property, isn't it? I understand where you are and where you want to go, but this isn't the right way to get there. (Nor, in my opinion, is the destination someplace you really want to go...which kind of raises the question of why I'm offering my input. Oh, well. I've never pretended to make a whole lot of sense, even to myself.)
Here's the world you live in: People own things. Ownership is both accepted and considered virtuous. To come out against ownership is, in a nutshell, to come out against mom and apple pie. It's a complete non-starter from a PR point of view. It's not going to make you any friends.
If you want to win people over, play to your strengths. Talk about the virtue of collaboration. When people question you about why you oppose property rights, don't tell them! Nobody is interested in hearing about why you oppose property rights. "Why do you oppose property rights?" is code for "Please tell me that you don't oppose property rights."
Here's the right answer in this situation: "We strongly support the right to own property and to do whatever one wants with one's property. Sun has been a great innovator, generating thousands of new and unique ideas. We congratulate Sun for their achievement, and we thank them for offering the use of their property to others free of charge. We are a little bit concerned about the fact that"... blah blah blah.
See? See the difference between that approach and "anybody who holds a patent is a blood-sucker who should be burned at the stake?"
There was no software patenting before the court case that made it legal in the U.S.
I guess you're talking about Diamond v. Diehr, 1981. In that case, the Supreme Court ordered the PTO to grant a patent for an invention that included a computer program. Before that case, the PTO had held that computer programs were more like mathematical algorithms than machines, so they could not be patented. In Diamond, the high court recognized the absurdity of that position and ordered the PTO to change the rules.
More important, though, I think you're either unclear on or deliberately choosing to misrepresent the role of the courts. A court cannot "make anything legal." That's strictly the job of the legislature...and technically, not even they can do that. The legislature is empowered only to prohibit, not to allow. All the courts can do is interpret the laws. In Diamond, the high court told the PTO that their rules were not in accordance with their charter under the law as passed by Congress.
You see, patents on computer programs were always legal. The PTO was misinterpreting complex computer programs, and illegally choosing to deny patents on them.
You make it sound like there was a law prohibiting the patenting of a computer program, and that the Supreme Court struck it down. This is not correct, and it seriously misinterprets the truth of the situation. That's also a disaster from a PR point of view. The buying public doesn't take kindly to folks who bend the truth in order to persuade the people to buy what they're selling.
Well, apart from being untrue, that's kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it? There's a group of people who make and want to promote this thing called Linux. They want everybody to adopt it...but there are some things standing in the way. First and foremost is the fact that this group of people can't even agree on what Linux is. There are dozens of varieties of the damn thing, with no clear points of distinction among them. Heck, just a few hours ago there was a discussion on this very site about which Linux is right for which user, a discussion that went nowhere at all.
But let's set all this aside. Let's pretend there were a single product, Linux, that everybody involved wanted to support. The product would have a huge branding problem because it doesn't seem to be associated with anything good. There are people who want to advance the opinion that Linux is synonymous with freedom, but these are the same people who like to bitch when Sun gives things away for free. So that approach has, to date, been kind of self-defeating.
And anybody who looks at Linux can tell, at a glance, that it's not a high-quality product. It just doesn't have much fit and finish. Nor is it a fun, whimsical product, nor is it a trendy product, nor is it a professional-grade, no-nonsense product.
The only value Linux really has going for it right now is that it's cheap...and cheap by itself is going to be a hard sell. The adage "you get what you pay for" is (1) universally understood, and (2) nearly always true.
So "Linux, Inc.," for lack of a better name, is in a really desperate situation right now. There's a customer base that it wants to attract --individual users of cheap computers who are fed up with Windows and who aren't exactly on the front of the "digital lifestyle" curve --but the product seems to be doing everything possible to dissuade those people from signing up. It's kind of self-defeating.
Linux either needs a massive leadership transplant, or...well, maybe it just needs leadership, period. Because it's not gaining positive mindshare like this.
Your thought patterns are one with the dinosaurs of the corporate world.
I know it's fashionable to think of the incumbent as a dinosaur, but doesn't that analogy only work if you're a mammal? It's entirely possible that your business model isn't symbolic of mammals, but rather of trilobites: small, irrelevant, just as extinct.
It's not sufficient just to be different from the one's with the power. You also have to be better. Right now, that's strictly a matter of opinion, and from the lay of the land, it doesn't seem to be a particularly widely held opinion.
In your opinion they "lied" about it. Howzabout, in the name of intellectual honesty, you take a step back off that bold and, in my personal opinion, overly enthusiastic assertion? It would help defuse the "Gimme, gimme, gimme" public image that you people have cultivated ever so diligently over the past few years.
Although, frankly, it won't help much. As long as your A-number-one spokesman is out there spewing crap like "Patent parasites don't really produce anything, they only suck the blood of those who do," you're going to have a massive PR problem.
Apple is the world's most influential brand. Know why "Linux" isn't on that list? I mean, apart from the fact that "Linux" is so splintered that it doesn't really mean anything to most people? The problem lies entirely in public relations. You people need to send the message that you're about cooperation, about helping people, about excellence. You don't. You send the message that you're about the destruction of property rights that we've held as axiomatic for centuries.
Personally, I think Linux is a pretty bad product that lacks any particular potential to become a good product. But that doesn't need to stand in the way of commercial success. There's a huge market niche that's just waiting to be filled by a mediocre, cheap product. The thing stopping Linux from being a huge, mediocre, cheap success isn't the product itself -- though that will have to be fixed. It's the branding.
Right now, "Linux" is "Gimme gimme." That's gonna have to change. And you can start the process of changing it.
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I sleep much better knowing that RMS heads up the Free Software Foundation.
Oh, God, me too.
That way he's not out there doing any actual harm.
Ideas are not property.
... except copy it. Because you don't own the original, and only the owner of the original has the right to make more copies.
Again with the "la la la la I can't hear you" defense. Yes, they are. They are property because people create them, and people own what they create. Our society recognizes this fact, our laws recognize this fact. That you, Mr. John Nobody, do not recognize this fact means only that you aren't interested in living in the real world.
Property can be traded, bought, sold.
Right. So can written works, musical compositions, recordings, movies, and inventions. So, especially, can computer programs.
what is actually being sold?
The copy of the recording. Duh.
If the song is the property, then once you sell it to me, it becomes MY PROPERTY
The copy becomes your property, yes. You own the copy. You can do whatever you want with the copy
That exclusive right to copy is YOUR PROPERTY.
Rights are not property. The work itself is the property.
Man, you're really bending over backwards to try to twist this into an "I can steal whatever I want" thing, aren't you? Doesn't that make you feel kind of guilty, on some level at least?
You see the Linux world through the press releases of Linux-based companies.
What's a "Linux-based company?"
For the last five years, Linux has been progressing really quickly.
That's not really an accurate statement, is it? There have been no new releases of Linux since 2001; just bug fixes and patches. There has been no significant work on the user experience since 2001, when Eazel closed its doors. There have been no real functional enhancements since before 2001. What's worse, there is no roadmap for the delivery of new core features like metadata and search.
Linux has been essentially stagnant, and there's no sign that that's going to change any time soon.
Linux-related sales have gone from the couple millions to the couple billions.
It's a trillion-dollar industry. You're saying that Linux, over the past five years, has gone from being insignificant to six decimal places to being insignificant to three decimal places.
The real issues keeping most companies from switching to Linux on their desktops are that they have already invested a lot of capital in their existing Windows setup
That's kind of a scapegoat argument, isn't it? It's not that your product offers no advantages whatsoever beyond the price point per license. It's that the competitor is entrenched. Is that it?
Linux never made a promise.
Sigh. Okay, whatever. I'm pretty sure bragging about an operating system that's going to take on Microsoft and Apple is "making a promise," but whatever you say.
Either way, it's a big loss. Either there was promise that remained unfulfilled, or there was never any promise at all.
Linux cannot be defeated by any competing business model.
Of course not, not if you define "defeated" as having nothing to do with units delivered. If you want to define success in terms of how many Internet message board comments get posted about your product, go right ahead. Meanwhile, what really matters is penetration, and Linux doesn't have any.
You don't actually think SCO has a legitimate case, do you?
It no longer matters at all. The reputation of Linux has been permanently soiled by its legal entanglements. Nobody in his right mind would choose to invest either time or money in it now.
RMS's analogy is restricted to software patents
No, it's not. Go read his screed. And it's not an analogy, it's a metaphor. And it's not a metaphor as much as it is a bald-faced insult to everybody who's ever invented anything.
advocates of "Linux" (which Stallman is not, by the way)
Of course he is. What are you talking about now?
It is understood that someone's personal opinions shared with others in a casual conversation needn't use the same language as someone would use in a business setting.
When somebody goes on a public Internet message board and makes pronouncements in his official capacity, that's not "someone's personal opinions in a casual conversation." It's ex cathedra.
His primary goal is to ensure that a free (as in speech) computer operating system always exists
Yeah, yeah, we all know about Stallman's insane political agenda. The less said about that, the better. The man's a freak. Must you sully his reputation further by giving detailed examples of exactly how he's a freak?
His statement therefore does not sabotage his primary goal.
Yes, it does. His goal was to persuade. He didn't. He dissuaded. He blew it.
Well, as a member of the Linux community
Company, not community.
I think your language alienates me and is patently offensive.
In other words, you feel the same way about me that everybody who's ever created anything feels toward you, and towards Perens, and towards Stallman, and towards the rest of the "gimme gimme" gang. I wonder if you'll use this moment of
They can scribble on it, modify it, burn it, eat it, play it, and read it any time they wish to do so.
...up to the point when the statute of limitations runs out. After that time, you can no longer seek criminal restitution against the person who vandalized your car. You still have your right to be secure in your property; it's just that the legal protection of that right in that instance has expired.
You're referring to the copy, not to the contents of the copy. The book and the words contained within the book are two different things.
You traded your creation (which was your exclusive property as long as you kept it to yourself) for the exclusive right to make copies of it.
No, that's not correct. The law protects all works, published and unpublished, for the duration of the copyright. When the copyright expires, all works, published and unpublished, are seized by the government and placed in the public domain.
Once the right expires
That's not correct either, and is really a pretty dangerous way of saying it. Rights do not expire. Rights are unalienable. They are neither given nor taken away.
What expires is the legal protection given to intellectual property rights. After a certain period of time, the author of a work is no longer legally entitled to claim ownership over a work, or to seek remedies for infringements of his rights over that work.
It's kind of like a statute of limitations. If somebody vandalizes your car, you can press criminal charges against him
your version of the real world is defined by what a judge or a legal system says instead of what is
...and yet they are both property.
We're talking about the law. The law is defined as --surprise! --what a judge or legal system says it is. I don't think "I'm smarter than all the lawyers and lawmakers and judges everywhere, nyaah" is going to win a lot of people over to your side.
Good thing it's not 1000 years back, or you might be wanting to burn me at the stake for saying the earth goes arround the Sun.
Yes, great idea. Compare yourself to Galileo. That's not a wild misrepresentation of the truth. "Eppur si muove" and all that. Bravo.
You can play semantics games all you want, the reality is they are different by any measuremnet - and you are trying to treat them like they are the same.
This coffee cup is as different from a plot of land as can be. The cup was made; the land just is. The cup can be taken from one place to another; the land doesn't move. The cup can be used to hold or carry things; the land just sits there. They are "different by any measuremnet"
You're a lwayer, aren't you?
No, I'm not a "lwayer." I'm not sure where you got that idea.
By rejecting bullshit licenses like the CDDL, and embracing ones like the GPL for starters.
I don't follow you. How does that translate into "leveraging these facts to your advantage?"
create art, I create literature, and I create a lot of code. In fact, alot of it had been copyrighted
All of it is copyrighted. Everything that's written or recorded is protected by copyright from the moment it's created to the time that the legal protection expires.
Nobody in the industries that create get copyrights and patents for property sake, they get them to protect from frivolus lawsuits or to get agreements not to be sue'd from other companies by cross-licensing or to have leverage to counter-sue when attacked.
Um. No. Companies get patents because they want to recover the investment that went into creating their invention. That's the motivation for a business to get a patent: It's to secure a temporary monopoly on the production of a certain thing. That's how we encourage people to go off and invest a ton of time creating new and wonderful inventions, you see: by promising to pay them back for their effort.
You really don't get it, they have nothing to do with property - they have to do with keeping people from competing.
I don't really see how "I'm gonna take somebody else's idea without paying him for it" could be described as "competing," but what the hell. You're the "creative" one. I'm just some guy. Obviously you know best.
Hey, it looks like I might have been wrong about the "You're getting drunk" thing. It's entirely possible that you're just illiterate instead. You know, that kinda makes me suspect that you were lying about the whole "I create literature" thing. So far, I haven't seen any evidence that you're able to create a proper sentence, much less anything that could reasonably be called literature.
Yawn. Some freshman hauls out the "deprivation" argument again, not stopping to think about the fact that that argument breaks down when we talk about real estate. Sigh.
Slashdot, do me a favor, okay? Get together and compare notes. Because I'm getting pretty sick of seeing the same old, bogus arguments being floated in feeble attempts to justify the "I wanna steal, get out of my way!" mindset.
Basically, if you can take something abstract, declare it your own and sell it
Okay, you got that wrong. You can't just "take something abstract." You have to create something entirely new. Then yes, you can sell it and make money. But not for nothing. The money is your reward for your creativity or ingenuity.
Intellectual property wasn't even 'property' in any sense of the word just a few decades ago.
Utterly false. The tradition of the ownership of intellectual property goes back tens of thousands of years. Long before the Egyptians had built the first pyramid, the aborigines of Australia were singing songs. To sing someone else's song without his permission was a serious offense. The offender could have his possessions confiscated, or even be exiled. The American Indians had the same tradition: Telling the stories or singing the songs of another family was considered a serious crime. It still is, even today.
The tradition of intellectual property goes back just as far as any other notion of property. It was really only during the Dark Ages that people --strictly the people of Europe --abandoned the idea of intellectual property. Of course, the also abandoned the idea of intellectualism in general, so I'm not sure we should be so quick to emulate them.
I know it makes all this 'property' look a little artificial, but that's because it is artificial. People need to remember that.
That kind of nihilism isn't productive. By that interpretation, every human convention is artificial. The ownership of real estate by people is equally artificial. More so, even, because nobody creates land. People create intellectual property; they make it out of nothing at all but their own labor and effort. But land is just there. And yet, we recognize the ownership of land. Nobody complains that it's just artificial.
I mean, shit. By exactly the same reasoning I could argue that agriculture is all just artificial and we should go back to being hunters and gatherers. It's a nonsense argument.
Except in legal terms, there are no moral rights not to be copied.
Wrong. The moral imperative is, "Don't take other people's stuff without their permission." I don't know about you, but I learned that one when I was about a year old.
I'm not really interested in the "you aren't deferential enough to the big, important man" parts of your comment. Skipping them (and there were lots) to talk about the actual subject matter at hand.
Linux is, in the minds of today's IT-savvy businesspeople, the next big thing.
It was the "next big thing" five years ago, and it's the "next big thing" today, and it'll be the "next big thing" five years hence, and everybody is starting to realize it.
Embedded systems companies already know that Linux is death. TiVo, a company that based its business around the use of Linux in their video recorders, has yet to turn a profit. Why? Because the first thing oh so many of their customers do is to hack their products to remove the necessity of subscribing to TiVo's service. The "give away the razors and sell the blades" business model has failed for TiVo because people have gone out and built their own blades. Plus ten points for ingenuity, minus several million for business sense.
A product can only be "the next big thing" for so long before it's recognized as vaporware. While there are some environments where Linux is a good alternative today --SGI is putting Linux on supercomputers, ILM is using Linux for single-purpose compositing workstations that basically don't need an OS at all, Web hosting companies like it because it's cheap --it's just not useful for general-purpose computers or servers. It was supposed to be taking over the desktop by now; it's not. Products like Open Office, which were lauded with such enthusiasm just a couple of years ago, have turned out to be a flop, cheaper but less useful by far than Office.
Meanwhile, the TCO of the Mac has just fallen and fallen. For a small-business or home computer user, Linux isn't even on the radar. The exuberant enthusiasm of the late 90s --Gnome and Eazel and all that -- has just evaporated in the harsh light of the free market.
There comes a time when being the "next big thing" isn't enough. For Linux, that time was about a year ago.
It's a tremendous success.
Um, no. Apple is a tremendous success. Their profits for the quarter ending 12/25/04 were up 400 percent over the same quarter the previous year. That's what "tremendous success" means: actually moving units. No Linux venture has been a "tremendous success."
Everyone is talking about it.
Everyone used to be talking about it. Now everyone is talking about why Apple and even Microsoft -- albeit at a much slower pace -- have delivered on their promises, while Linux has never delivered on any of its promises. Linux today occupies basically the same niche it occupied three years ago: Web servers and single-purpose desktops, cash registers and embedded personal electronics, and it's vanishing from the single-purpose desktop as it falls behind on applications, and it's disappearing from embedded personal electronics as vendors learn "the TiVo lesson." It hasn't grown at all. It hasn't broken any new ground. Hell, it hasn't even broken any old ground. Basic ease-of-use features that have been around for years are still mysteries on Linux. Core applications are still lacking. All promise and no delivery, all sizzle and no steak.
Non-technical people know the word, even if they don't know what it means.
Yes, but not in a good way. To the non-IT mind, Linux means "that thing that sank TiVo," or "that thing that everybody is getting sued over." Linux is that thing that everybody was talking about but that now is really only useful for Web servers and cash registers. Linux is that thing that I was supposed to be using by now. Linux is made by that guy who said that anybody who owns a patent is a blood-sucker who's a parasite on society. These are not good brand associations.
Otherwise, Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, the Libertarian party -- all would be companies!
They are. Look the word up. You have to get all the way down to definitio
Ah, but you see, it is exactly what the pro-patent people do, they say that the product of your own labour is not your property because they did the same (similar) labor themselves and got the same (similar) product.
First of all, patents are by definition granted for inventions that aren't obvious. Your assertion that 100 people could all simultaneously invent the same thing that works in the same way is absurd.
But aside from that, if it did happen that Person A were to create an invention and get a patent, then Person B were to invent the exact same thing independently, nobody would say that Person B didn't own his invention. It's just that he didn't get there first, which means he couldn't use his invention until Person A's patent expired.
Now, here's why that never, ever happens: When you get a patent, you have to send in a detailed description of your invention. That description goes into a database. When Person B starts working on an invention, he goes forth and does a patent search to see if anybody has gotten there before him. When he finds Person A's patent and realizes that he's been beaten to it, he decides to invest his labor in inventing something else instead, maybe in materially improving Person A's invention.
And thus is progress advanced.
So two things: One, you don't understand how patents work, and two, you don't understand that patents are actually beneficial because they help people to avoid duplicating other people's effort.
Another "Daily Kos" reader goes forth to spread the gospel. Don't you people ever get tired of just parroting what your paid political consultant tells you?
But you are basically trying to say that you have a right to "pounce" me if I use ideas you think are "yours".
I think you meant "sue," and the answer is "yes."
Excuse me if I tell you go to hell.
It doesn't really matter what you tell me. It matters what you tell a judge when you get sued for copyright, trademark or patent infringement. I think he's going to find "go to hell" to be a singularly unacceptable defense.
Ideas are not property.
Some are. Inventions are property. Writings are property. Music is property. Et cetera.
physical property has natural limits on supply and demand
So do some kinds of ideas. If I have an invention and you want to use it, there's a supply-and-demand situation right there. If I have a written work and you want to read it, that's supply-and-demand. I think the word you're grasping for here is "scarcity," which is just fancy economist talk for "some folks have it and some folks don't." It applies to ideas just like it applies to anything else.
Having physical property deprives another person use
Not always. I can own land, but my ownership of that land doesn't deprive anybody of its use. It's not like I can roll the land up and carry it away with me. You can walk right across it if you want to. You can even climb over the fence if you're so motivated. I can't stop you.
But we still consider land to be property.
I can leverage these facts to my advantage
How's that?
No I got your point christal clear.
Your grammar and spelling are getting worse and worse. Are you getting slowly drunk over there? Or are you just getting irritable?
It's disengenuious to sujest that the only people who don't care about owning ideas are the cone who aren't "blessed with creativity". Turnarround was fair play.
Hm. I'm gonna guess "drunk" here.
The blather was meant to convey that I was not taking you seriously.
No, really? I thought it was just you being your usual self. Oh, wait. It seems we were both right.
you know nothing of my own success in doing PR for this movement over some years
Well, if the shoe fits, Bruce. The "movement" (ugh, a term even worse than "community" in connotation) is wildly unpopular among computer buyers, the product is failing to gain mindshare, the brand has lost all its luster among the partisan in-fighting between the Gnu people and the Red Hat people and the Fedora people and these people and those people, and now you've managed to remind Sun --and, by extension, every other company that had ideas about doing business with you -- that the only safe course of action is to stay far, far away. The momentum is gone, man. Poof. Casper.
If this is your idea of a PR success, I'd really hate to see what you consider PR failure.
But tell you what. You go back to believing that you know best and that everybody else is an idiot. If that makes you happy, who am I to stand in the way?
Did you read the last paragraph of the parent post?
Yes. Contrived hypotheticals do not impress me. If you can find a case where two identical patentable inventions were created at precisely the same time by two inventors working on opposite sides of the world, let's talk about it. As it is, you're basically asking me who would own the copyright if two authors sat down and, entirely by coincidence, wrote the exact same book, word for word, at precisely the same moment. Possible? Sure. But so utterly improbable that it's never happened and could never reasonably be expected to happen, ever. I don't think a discussion of that kind of hypothetical could ever go anywhere productive.
For the record, most people who challenge our current implementations of copyright and/or patent have specific and legitimate arguments based upon real-world experience in various industry.
Great. Let's hear one. Or, even better, let's hear some kind of logical, internally consistent argument that explains why this chair I'm sitting on is my property and the litter of puppies that my dog had last month are my property and the tree growing in my back yard is my property but these words that I'm creating right now aren't my property. And if this argument just happens to be compatible with basic Western ideas of civil rights, so much the better.
Bottom line. It is not property.
... kinda illustrates my point.
I don't really think that "la la la la I can't hear you" is a good way to persuade people to adopt your point of view. If you want to convince people to stop thinking of the product of their own labor as their property, you're gonna have to be a little more persuasive than this. Because, see, ideas are property. They are because people agree that they are. If you want to change that status quo, you're gonna have to change it. Just sitting there with your fingers in your ears isn't gonna do anything.
Well, lets hear the great ideas that you've worked your ass off for.
I don't think I've ever had a great idea. I had one idea that I thought was great, about five years ago. It turned out I was mistaken. I had an idea in late 2003 that I thought was pretty good, and it's allowed me to make a living for a bit more than a year now, so it must be at least okay, but I wouldn't go so far as to say great.
But see, you kinda missed my point. My point -- which, silly me, I thought was crystal-clear--was that only people who don't recognize the value of ideas are opposed to patents. You don't recognize the value of ideas, obviously, because you say that "ideas were happening anyhow." After I poured over this for many hours trying to translate it into English, I gathered that you believe that ideas just happen. Not that people spend their whole lives trying to create them, not that they're the product of years of intense labor, but rather that they just happen.Therefore they have no value to you. Which, you know
I hope your inventions don't use math (unless you paid the royalities), smoocher!
You mean "moocher." To "smooch" means to kiss. And while I do think you're a very attractive guy who'll make somebody a wonderful husband someday, I'm just not that into you.
Oh, so you think I'm an anti-capitalist.
It doesn't really matter what I think. It's about public opinion. And yeah, the association of you people with the anti-capitalist faction is pretty strong in the public eye. It's understandable, considering your most vocal advocate says things in print like "patent holders that the enemy of everyone," don't you think? Seriously, if I were your publicist, I'd have that guy duct-taped to a chair whenever there's a reporter anywhere within five miles.
The rest of your comment seemed to just be defensive blather. Also not good for the biz, you know? Besides, it's a shame. It seemed for a second there that we had an actual dialogue going --you know, beyond your really distasteful arrogance. But I guess it was just a passing thing.
If, in ten years, somebody posts an "anybody remember Linux?" article on the Internet, will you be surprised?
Saying you are stunned is a rhetorical device.
It's also a really excellent way to communicate that I'm, you know, stunned.
(Remember that "you're deliberately being condescending" thing? I promised not to hold it against you. It's only fair to let you know that I'm no longer sure I can keep that promise.)
No doubt there are hundreds of forms of property ownership that our society has chosen to prohibit, limit, or tax.
Not a good way to be persuasive. It's about image, remember? First you got everybody all concerned by saying that you weren't down with property. Then you royally pissed everybody off by invoking slavery. (Why is it always the rich white guys who invoke slavery?) And now you're trying to hand-wave it away by trivializing slavery, by saying that it's just one example among many equivalent examples.
Seriously, I'm offering you advice here: This is a public-affairs disaster. It's a world-ender. Cut it out right now.
You're trying to sell something here. You're trying to persuade people to swallow your idea. You're not going about it in a very persuasive way.
Bottom line: Property is a good thing. People have good feelings about property. When you say "property," people think about buying their first house, or when they paid off their first car loan. Owning things gives people a sense of satisfaction, and being an owner of something is a position that commands the respect of one's peers. This is how things work.
Now, you could get uppity and try to argue that this isn't civilized or something. And I don't mean "could" in the hypothetical sense. I mean you, personally, enjoy that capacity. But it's not a good way to make friends. Telling people that their opinions are primitive or unenlightened is a good way to alienate one's audience.
People want to own ideas because creating ideas is hard work for most people. The only people who think ideas shouldn't be owned are either individuals who have never had a good idea themselves or people who are so blessed with an excess of creativity that they aren't aware that most people don't find it so easy. The first group of people are moochers and slackers, and the second group are just insufferable. So don't associate yourself in public with either.
You might try to appeal to people's sense of community, but that word has kind of been poisoned by your peers over the past few years. People have started to refer to this community and that community, when what they're really talking about is groups of people joined together for a common purpose. We already have a word for that -- company --but some have rejected this word because it's hard to advance an anti-capitalist agenda while calling yourself a word that is a loose synonym for a business concern. These people have adopted the word "community" instead, but they don't really mean a community. They mean a company. So the whole word has kind of been spoiled in this context.
Don't say "collective," either, because that's even worse than "community."
Instead, try using the word collaboration. Instead of talking about the evils of property, talk about the virtue of collaboration. Another good, positive word is transparency. You can use these words together, by saying that transparency helps collaboration.
So when you want to say "Sun is evil because they're greedy and they should just give all their property to us for free," try saying this instead: "We admire Sun's ingenuity, but we're a little concerned about their lack of transparency. If they were to make their business a little more transparent, everybody would benefit from the collaboration that would result. By choosing not to adopt a philosophy of transparency, Sun is passing up an opportunity to create new, valuable partnerships."
See? You can be positive, pro-innovation and pro-business while getting your message out at the same time. It's really not that hard. You just have to (1) stop being so strident and (2) get that Stallman guy to shut the hell up, like, forever and ever. 'Cause seriously, every time he publishes and article, you guys really take a beating in the court of public opinion.
VT paid list price for their supercomputer. At least for the G5s. I guess it's possible that they got a discount on the Infiniband switches or something.
Freedom of speech is a fundamental freedom which the government cannot take away because it was never "granted" in the first place. It simply exists as a basic, inalienable human right. The body of law, which only recently became in vogue among lawyers to call "intellectual property," is a limited granted privilege.
Why? Why is one a natural right and the other not? Please, for the name of God, come up with some rationalization that doesn't boil down to, "We shouldn't recognize property rights because I want to be able to take other people's stuff whenever I want."
I am positively stunned. I know I shouldn't be. I know I should be more cynical than this. But I'm absolutely shocked that you would have the audacity to compare patents to slavery.
It seems like every time I turn around, there's another blinding example of why Linux is in the middle of a PR crisis. Making such utterly absurd comparisons in public isn't helping, okay? You really, really have to cut that out unless you want to be just another piece of historical trivia, yet another failed venture, yet another "where are they now?"
Virginia Tech did.
he's a fanatic -- he wants Iraq to be an Islamic state.
Sistani has encouraged his supporters to participate in the political process, and his discouraged them from backing an Islamist government. Sistani is an apolitical fundamentalist, which makes him more our friend than our foe. Freedom of religion, remember?
That was never what I said.
You criticized the fact that there are lots of candidates on the ballots, and that the ballots weren't announced until late in the process. These are the things that a caucus system would have attempted to correct. So we agree: Caucuses would have been better. But, as I said, better some than none.
I think we should have seen direct elections back in early 2004
Elections for what? Remember, not only did Iraq not even have a legitimate constitution then; it didn't even have a plan for writing one. First a plan had to be established, only then could it be put into motion. If you want to complain that the process took too long, complain to Lakhdar Brahimi, UN special envoy responsible for helping the Iraqis establish their plan.
But personally, I think you'd be a dumbass to complain about the time. Postwar reconstruction can take decades. To go from a complete power vacuum to having elections for an interim assembly in less than two years is a remarkable achievement.
That would be Iyad Allawi, formerly a carbomber
You've been reading too much Baathist propaganda. Which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. The problem arises when you stop considering the source and you start believing the Baathist propaganda. On al-Jazeera, Allawi has been accused of everything from being a terrorist to being a child molester to being on the CIA payroll to having -- horror of horrors! -- a Jewish grand-uncle. None of it is true, of course. And yet the stories live on, repeated by people who seem to be in love with the idea that Iraqi democracy might fail. I don't think most of these people are actually opposed to Iraqi democracy, of course. Some certainly are, but most of them are just more enamored with the thought of seeing the US fail, and completely bereft of an understanding of the gravity of the situation. These are the ones who giggle at the prospect that 25 million people might continue to live in fear or, worse, totalitarian oppression if it means that the US might suffer a setback.
hand picked by the Bush people
Allawi was chosen by the Iraqi Governing Council, an independent body of Iraqi citizens who established the Iraqi Interim Government in May 2004, under the advice of Lakhdar Brahimi. Nobody from the administration, State or the CPA was consulted.
And Allawi's (puppet) government chose the date at the insistence of the Bush Administration
Sigh. Facts just run right off you like water off a duck's back, don't they? "Bush picked the date." No, the IIG picked the date. "Well, Bush made them pick the date." Whatever.
At least, I could find no mention of it on google.
Look harder. It was big news. The story broke right before the two guys from "Iraq the Model" visited Washington. There was an LA Times story, I think. LexisNexis will give you want you want.
There are people using Linux. Period.
Um, no. There are people who use it, yes. But there are also people who make, distribute, sell and promote it. These people, who are all working with a common purpose, comprise a -- surprise! --group.
It is NOT a product.
Of course it is. It's a thing that some people offer to other people. It's a product.
However, your ramble goes a long way toward demonstrating my point. The "this Linux is a product, that Linux isn't a product" nonsense is an excellent example of why Linux has a massive PR problem.
You simply cannot tell "at a glance" that millions of lines of code are indeed "low quality".
Hang on a sec. Let's go real slow here. Are you saying, with a straight face, that your customers are not going to form an opinion about your product when they use it? Because I feel pretty safe here in saying that they are.
You sound as if you are deliberately trying to be offensive.
...which kind of raises the question of why I'm offering my input. Oh, well. I've never pretended to make a whole lot of sense, even to myself.)
... blah blah blah.
...and technically, not even they can do that. The legislature is empowered only to prohibit, not to allow. All the courts can do is interpret the laws. In Diamond, the high court told the PTO that their rules were not in accordance with their charter under the law as passed by Congress.
That's okay. You sound, as usual, as if you're deliberately trying to be condescending. You don't hold mine against me and I won't hold yours against you.
The gimmie-gimmie-gimmie is coming from folks who think they have the right to own ideas and keep others from using those ideas.
Well, that's kind of implicit in any culture that accepts the right to own property, isn't it? I understand where you are and where you want to go, but this isn't the right way to get there. (Nor, in my opinion, is the destination someplace you really want to go
Here's the world you live in: People own things. Ownership is both accepted and considered virtuous. To come out against ownership is, in a nutshell, to come out against mom and apple pie. It's a complete non-starter from a PR point of view. It's not going to make you any friends.
If you want to win people over, play to your strengths. Talk about the virtue of collaboration. When people question you about why you oppose property rights, don't tell them! Nobody is interested in hearing about why you oppose property rights. "Why do you oppose property rights?" is code for "Please tell me that you don't oppose property rights."
Here's the right answer in this situation: "We strongly support the right to own property and to do whatever one wants with one's property. Sun has been a great innovator, generating thousands of new and unique ideas. We congratulate Sun for their achievement, and we thank them for offering the use of their property to others free of charge. We are a little bit concerned about the fact that"
See? See the difference between that approach and "anybody who holds a patent is a blood-sucker who should be burned at the stake?"
There was no software patenting before the court case that made it legal in the U.S.
I guess you're talking about Diamond v. Diehr, 1981. In that case, the Supreme Court ordered the PTO to grant a patent for an invention that included a computer program. Before that case, the PTO had held that computer programs were more like mathematical algorithms than machines, so they could not be patented. In Diamond, the high court recognized the absurdity of that position and ordered the PTO to change the rules.
More important, though, I think you're either unclear on or deliberately choosing to misrepresent the role of the courts. A court cannot "make anything legal." That's strictly the job of the legislature
You see, patents on computer programs were always legal. The PTO was misinterpreting complex computer programs, and illegally choosing to deny patents on them.
You make it sound like there was a law prohibiting the patenting of a computer program, and that the Supreme Court struck it down. This is not correct, and it seriously misinterprets the truth of the situation. That's also a disaster from a PR point of view. The buying public doesn't take kindly to folks who bend the truth in order to persuade the people to buy what they're selling.
You think only in terms of organizations
...but there are some things standing in the way. First and foremost is the fact that this group of people can't even agree on what Linux is. There are dozens of varieties of the damn thing, with no clear points of distinction among them. Heck, just a few hours ago there was a discussion on this very site about which Linux is right for which user, a discussion that went nowhere at all.
...and cheap by itself is going to be a hard sell. The adage "you get what you pay for" is (1) universally understood, and (2) nearly always true.
...well, maybe it just needs leadership, period. Because it's not gaining positive mindshare like this.
Well, apart from being untrue, that's kind of what we're talking about here, isn't it? There's a group of people who make and want to promote this thing called Linux. They want everybody to adopt it
But let's set all this aside. Let's pretend there were a single product, Linux, that everybody involved wanted to support. The product would have a huge branding problem because it doesn't seem to be associated with anything good. There are people who want to advance the opinion that Linux is synonymous with freedom, but these are the same people who like to bitch when Sun gives things away for free. So that approach has, to date, been kind of self-defeating.
And anybody who looks at Linux can tell, at a glance, that it's not a high-quality product. It just doesn't have much fit and finish. Nor is it a fun, whimsical product, nor is it a trendy product, nor is it a professional-grade, no-nonsense product.
The only value Linux really has going for it right now is that it's cheap
So "Linux, Inc.," for lack of a better name, is in a really desperate situation right now. There's a customer base that it wants to attract --individual users of cheap computers who are fed up with Windows and who aren't exactly on the front of the "digital lifestyle" curve --but the product seems to be doing everything possible to dissuade those people from signing up. It's kind of self-defeating.
Linux either needs a massive leadership transplant, or
Your thought patterns are one with the dinosaurs of the corporate world.
I know it's fashionable to think of the incumbent as a dinosaur, but doesn't that analogy only work if you're a mammal? It's entirely possible that your business model isn't symbolic of mammals, but rather of trilobites: small, irrelevant, just as extinct.
It's not sufficient just to be different from the one's with the power. You also have to be better. Right now, that's strictly a matter of opinion, and from the lay of the land, it doesn't seem to be a particularly widely held opinion.
In your opinion they "lied" about it. Howzabout, in the name of intellectual honesty, you take a step back off that bold and, in my personal opinion, overly enthusiastic assertion? It would help defuse the "Gimme, gimme, gimme" public image that you people have cultivated ever so diligently over the past few years.
Although, frankly, it won't help much. As long as your A-number-one spokesman is out there spewing crap like "Patent parasites don't really produce anything, they only suck the blood of those who do," you're going to have a massive PR problem.
Apple is the world's most influential brand. Know why "Linux" isn't on that list? I mean, apart from the fact that "Linux" is so splintered that it doesn't really mean anything to most people? The problem lies entirely in public relations. You people need to send the message that you're about cooperation, about helping people, about excellence. You don't. You send the message that you're about the destruction of property rights that we've held as axiomatic for centuries.
Personally, I think Linux is a pretty bad product that lacks any particular potential to become a good product. But that doesn't need to stand in the way of commercial success. There's a huge market niche that's just waiting to be filled by a mediocre, cheap product. The thing stopping Linux from being a huge, mediocre, cheap success isn't the product itself -- though that will have to be fixed. It's the branding.
Right now, "Linux" is "Gimme gimme." That's gonna have to change. And you can start the process of changing it.