Think of it as a bonus for people doing video production. I'm not talking about playing video on an iPod, but rather people who want to carry video data from one place to another.
Networking geeks have an old saying: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." It takes a little more than three minutes to send a gigabyte of data through a T3, assuming ideal transfer conditions. By that standard, 80GB would take 240 minutes, or six hours. If we assume an average walking rate of 4mph for the average person, a pair of sneakers and an 80gig iPod would have better bandwidth than a T3 out to a range of about 20 miles, including the time necessary to load and unload the data via FireWire (@ 100MB/sec).
Video people already like FireWire. Apple won a Clio for it a few years ago, because it gave video production companies a way to move large chunks of data around easily. Directors have come to love the idea that they can buy a Powerbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro for about the price of one day's postprocessing fees, and have immediate feedback to what they're shooting.
For those people, the iPod is an inexpensive, ultra-portable data storage module. You could fill a briefcase with the things for a few thousand dollars and have more than enough space to carry the raw footage for an entire movie around with you.
The same general idea works for photographers and musicians. It's easy to accumulate 80 gigs of high-quality, first-pass data when you're in the content creation business, and an iPod gives you a convenient way to stick all that information into your pocket and carry it wherever you need to go.
Apple already knows that the sweet spot for actual music storage is about 5 gigs. They have a whole line of products for people who just want a straightforward music player. The higher-capacity models are for people who want to carry data.
See the second response above. If you have the right to redistribute my work, it has to be written down somewhere. Please state which body of law gives you the right to distribute my work and is independent of copyright.
Now granted, the world of information products tied to physical media -- books, CDs, DVDs, etc -- contains a doctrine of first sale with regard to the physical object itself. You can resell the block of paper or circle of plastic without having to pay royalties to the creator every time. OTOH, someone who buys tickets to a concert and then tries to resell them at a profit can be convicted of scalping.
Distinctions like that are what make IP law such jolly fun.
'Permission' pretty much equals 'license'. The license is the document that spells out the terms of the permission.
Now, please realize that a license does not have to be written down on paper. In the absence of an actual written-out license, the courts will treat the written-down version of a creator's behavior as the license. If I put a song I wrote on a P2P network, I'll have a really hard time suing people for downloading it even if they can't present an actual document saying they have permission to do that.
Generally speaking, though, it's better to have the terms of permission witten out nice and clear and complete. That saves the judge lots of headaches when people disagree about what is and isn't allowed.
Okay, same question as above.. what body of law gives you the right to distribute someone else's work?
To continue the example above, let's say I give you permission to read the manuscript in the safety deposit box. You try to distribute that permission by selling it to geminidomino, and I refuse to let geminidomino read the manuscript. What argument will you present to a court to support the idea that you have a right to distribute "permission to read the manuscript" independent of the rights I grant you by license?
Well, to flip the concept on its head, what body of law gives you the right to use work created by someone else?
Let's say I write a book and lock the manuscript in a safety deposit box. You learn that the manuscript exists, and want to read it. I say no. What argument will you present in court to support the idea that you have a right to use (i.e.: read) my work? Please note that I'm not talking about making a copy of the book or distributing the book to anyone else. The only issue under discussion for the sake of this discussion is your right to use work I've created without my permission.
AFAIK, you have no such right. The license I grant you contains the terms under which you are allowed to use the work, however broad or narrow those terms might be. Aside from the terms granted to you by the license, though, you have no right to use my work at all.
You're missing the effect that losing this case will have on all the RIAA's other current and future lawsuits against other hypothetical file sharers.
Right now the RIAA files lawsuits with basically the same mindset spammers use: the cost is so low, and the potential benefits are so high, that there's no reason not to give it a whirl. Losing this case, having to pay damages, and getting a precedent that allows other people to sue for more damages will raise the cost on these kinds of lawsuits dramatically. Getting a judgement that finds the RIAA guilty of extortion, racketeering, or any other illegal activity in the pursuit of this lawsuit will give all other defendants the opportunity to use an "unclean hands" defense in their own suits, which reduces the RIAA's chance of winning and cuts into the potential benefits of filing a suit in the first place.
Remember that the RIAA is only suing everyday citizens because they've been forced to. First they wanted to make ISPs do their dirty work for them, but they lost the cases that would have allowed them to do so. Then they wanted to shut down the people who make filesharing software, but a series of defeats shut down that line of attack, too. Now they're stuck having to use PR-killing lawsuits against ordinary people on the street, and this case has the potential to put a few crimps into that strategy, too.
In the long run, there's a fairly good chance that the RIAA will be pushed all the way back to the point of having to do well-supported lawsuits against high-volume filesharers, which wil be much more expensive than their current form-letter campaign, and will have absolutely no intmidation value on the general public. Filesharing systems will become ubiquitous, non-infringing uses of filesharing will become well established, and the RIAA will lose any hope of being able to control the way people share information online. That will put the RIAA into competition with a huge, massively redundant, and utterly legal distribution system that it can neither overwhelm nor control.
And then as soon as the users were actually held responsible... Bullies!!! Suing children! And single mothers!!!! The horror -- single mothers!!!! Gee, all that righteous jabbering about responsibility suddenly disappeared!
And exactly how does this issue of personal responsibility correlate to the fact that, according to the complaint in this particular case, Ms. Anderson did not, in fact, use P2P services at all, and had not, at any time, copied or distributed any works the RIAA or any of its members hold rights to?
When we get a case about a diabled single mother who's obviously and admittedly guilty of sharing of protected works without any legal right to do so, please feel free to recalibrate your Slashdot hipocrisy meter. Right here and right now, there's a chance that you're getting a false reading due to the fact that this woman has apparently done absolutely nothing wrong.
"Bleeding hearts wringing their hands over the fact that an apparently innocent woman has been wrongfully accused and subjected to intimidation and violations of her privacy that may very well count as extortion and racketeering," just doesn't have the same rich, chunky moral superiority to it. You may as well be saying, "Kafka's _The Trial_.. what a fucking whiner."
There is nothing in any law, copyright or otherwise, that requires you to provide a license to share your own works.
That's not quite correct. Technically, copyright law does impose a default license on the use, copying and distribution of any protected work. That license is: none at all.
Copyright law also grants creators the right to choose some other, less restrictive license if they want to. It doesn't say they have to choose a less restrictive license, and unless someone can prove that they do have a less restrictive license from the creator, the default "none at all" license is the one the courts will use.
Thing is, that "none at all" license doesn't give a creator any legal way to distribute their work to others. It gives them the legal tools to lock the work in a vault and throw away the key, but that's about it. Any creator who wants to distribute their work does have to choose some kind of license that's less restrictive than the default "none at all" one, because without that alternative license, there's no way for the distribution to be legal. That's just a basic fact of copyright law, and has nothing to do with P2P at all.
So instead of saying that Limewire is forcing creators to choose a license, it's more correct to say that Limewire requires creators to post the licenses that copyright law forces them to choose if they want to distribute the work at all.
Copyright law doesn't force anyone to distribute their work, but it does force them to choose a license if they decide to distribute their work.
At a more general level, the idea that some protected works have licenses and others makes things complicated and messy. It's much tidier, from a legal point of view, to say, "there is always a license", and then let people bicker about the specific terms of the license on any given work. Copyright law sets the default license that will be used in the absence of any other word from the creator, and gives the creator the right to set any other terms that they choose.
Apple had to spend a long time courting the music industry even to get the iTMS off the drawing board. They did it by making predictions that turned out to be true, over and over again, until a few people in the labels started paying attention. It was a hard struggle, though, because there were plenty of other people willing to tell the labels what they wanted to hear: namely that access controls would work, and that they could bolt all the restrictions of their circles-of-plastic business model onto the online distribution model.
Well, time and experience showed that the folks at Apple knew what they were talking about. And so people at the labels gradually came to agree that Apple had some idea of what was actually going on.
Now that the iTMS is big news, though, and the latest iPod gets more press coverage than most of the upcoming movies, ALL the players in the music industry feel the need to haul themselves up on their hind legs and be heard, including the ones who wouldn't have enough brains to poke a stick into an anthill after spending three weeks at a Power Simian business seminar.
Yeah, the music industry would love to get more money out of Apple if it was basically a matter of letting the (pardon the pun) apple fall out of the tree. NOBODY in business passes up a chance at easy money if they can get it. The sensible people in the music industry, though.. and let's all do them the favor of believing there are some.. are willing to live with the script that runs:
MUSIC INDUSTRY: Hey Apple, want to give us more money?
APPLE: No.
MUSIC INDUSTRY: Okay. Just asking.
The ones were hearing about now, in this article, are the sub-chimps who just haven't got the clue. They have yet to realize that having one label pull out of the iTMS will hurt that label a whole lot more than it hurts Apple over the long run.
Apparently game theory is another realm of knowledge the RIIA never bothered to acquire, beause they're now in a prisoner's dilemma they can't escape. The only way the RIAA can hurt Apple is for all the labels to pull out at once, and for all of them to stay out until Apple agrees to the terms of the RIAA as a whole. If only one or two pull out, the ones that remain in will weep crocodile tears all the way to the bank. And sales from the existing catalog don't even begin to touch on the contract concessions the non-participating labels will have to make with artists.. "What do you mean signing with you means my music WON'T go into the iTMS? There ARE other labels out there, you know."
What we're hearing now are the rumblings of soon-to-be-extinct morons who aren't ready to lie down and have someone shovel dirt onto their faces yet. But die they will, and sooner rather than later. There's too much money in iTMS sales to ignore, and if the big labels insist on pretending that it doesn't exist, artists will find other ways to get their stuff listed with Apple.
The only two plausible options in this scenario are: A) the labels shut up and let Apple set its price point where it wants, or B) the people who refuse to do business with Apple suffer enough losses that they get fired. Apple has no reason to budge on this issue, every reason to hold its ground, a whole bunch of cash on hand to sit out a potential RIAA embargo, and a much better PR stance vis-a-vis its customers.. Apple: "hey, we just relased the Nano!" RIAA: "hey, we just sued another 750 twelve-year-olds!"
Minor quibble: yes it is. Market behavior shows that consumers treat packaged entertainment as a time-based commodity worth, on average, about $5/hr.
The $15 price of a CD is based on the assumption that the average consumer will listen to the disc about 3 timers before moving on to something else. A $20 DVD wil be viewed twice, on average, before going on the shelf and collecting dust. Divide the ticket price of a movie by the running time, and the result will fall in the same general price range. The same is true for the price of a video game divided by the average estimated play time, or book and magazine prices divided by the average reading time.
At the end of the day, the only scale consumers have for estimating the value of packaged entertainment is "the amount of time I spend being entertained by it." The fact that the entire movie _Clerks_ was made for about the same cost as 30 seconds of fight scene in _True Lies_ doesn't make the latter 200+ times more valuable than the former. I personally felt that I got my money's worth out of both of those, but thought that the producers of _Waterworld_ could have just sent $10 to everyone likely to see the movie and made everyone happier for half the cost.
There's no practical way to correlate production costs with the consumer's perception of value in the entertainment market. There are just too many free variables. So in the absence of any other standard, consumers fall back on the one thing that is predictable, which is the amount of time they'll have to invest in the product. And whether they know it consciously or not, they tend to treat the entire product range as a fairly uniform commodity based on that judgement.
Sure, web apps may present some threat to Microsoft, but I don't see them as a nightmare scenario.
What I consider the first part of MS nightmare scenario is working itself out in Massachusets right now: the state government has established a policy on open formats and protocols that wipes out Microsoft's ability to lock people into applications. The second part will start rolling in within the next five years, as Open software starts to establish itself on the corporate desktop.
Microsoft's main profit center is the symbiotic lock-in between Office and Windows. Those two business units support all the other development Microsoft does. People buy Windows in order to run Office, and they buy Office because, among other things, they have to buy it to maintain the investment they've sunk in thousands of documents over the years.
Micorosft got rich targeting the corporate desktop, because that's the low-hanging fruit of the software industry. It offers large numbers of machines all doing basically the same thing. The required feature set is well-defined, and it tends to remain stable over the years. They managed to hold that market by locking users into Office with proprietary formats, and by making Windows a more or less necessary requirement for running Office.
Thing is, OSS is heading for the very same market, because once again, it's the low-hanging fruit of the industry. It's so easy to build a positive feedback cycle around an office suite that you'd almost have to work *not* to do it.
OSS applications are on the leading edge of being mature enough for regular desktop use, and as more people adopt them, you get more pressure to make them even more mature. Sooner or later (and getting sooner all the time), OSS products will be be seen by the regular public as suitable competition for Office and Windows.
When that happens, Microsoft's main revenue stream will be under attack by a set of products that can't be killed by normal business methods. And to be perfectly honest, Microsoft has a lousy track record of trying to diversify into other markets. Its core markets will start drying up, and it won't have any new markets to move into.. certainly not at a level that will replace what it's losing from its core markets, at any rate.
When the money goes, so does the support for peripheral development, experimental products, and just plain 800-pound-gorilla domination tactics. Microsoft won't have the resources to fight an indefinite war against Google, try to edge its way into the online music market, subsidize its Xbox foothold in the console market, and so on. It will have to tighten its belt and fight to hold its ground, and sit around watching opportunitiues pass by because it just can't afford to take a strong, committed risk outisde its core market.
*That's* Microsoft's biggest nightmare the way I see it.
It's one of the steps on the 'feature creep to extinction' path that lurks ahead of all portable devices. It has more to do with critics (both professional and self-appointed) pulling checklists of easy-to-imagine evolutionary changes out of the air than any real demand from the users.
First you get a simple device with a well-defined core function that does that job really well. It has a black-and-white LCD screen. Then you get a color screen, even though it adds no real functional value, because b/w->color is such an obvious evolutionary change that any moron can think of it.. and then refuse to stop bitching about.
Next, you get more processing power, because handling color burns more CPU than handling b/w. If you don't beef up the processor, you'll get sluggish performance, and once again the critics have an easy target.
Once you have more processing power and a color screen, you go into a loop where people demand more and more CPU-intensive video performance. I usually summarize this stage as "once you put a color screen on a product, people will bitch until they can play Quake on it."
And then, once you can play Quake on it, people will abandon the product because they want to play Quake on a 21" screen.
When a product is simple and limited, people judge it more or less on its own merits. As soon as you give it full-color video and any kind of complex I/O, people start comparing it to a laptop or a desktop machine. And given the form factor of any portable device, the product will stay on the losing end of that comparison forever.
It's one of those games where the only way to win is not to play.
I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple have enough sense to know that, and I know they have the institutional courage to keep making a product people actually want, while the critics continue to decry the lack of "improvements" that would knock the product right out of the market.
It's a question of how much information you have. At a rough guess, I'd say that the people who know the locations of all their important files are managing data collections of a thousand documents or less.
Me, I'm a writer. I chunk out a couple thousand files worth of notes in an average year. My slush pile of ideas that might be worth writing about someday contains hundreds, maybe thousands of different concepts, all spread out hither and yon.
Yeah, I *could* probably develop a taxonomy that would let me store everything in a well-ordered manner, but my experiences along those lines lead me to think that I'd spend more time playing librarian than I want to. When I get an idea, I want to hammer it out and move on, not spend five minutes deciding how to file the idea wihin my existing org system, or update the system to accomodate the new idea.
What I actually do is store files by date and time. It gives me a basic layer of organization, and it's easier than trying to come up with a couple thousand suitably-descriptive-and-noncolliding filenames every year. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of 'find' and 'grep' because those let me walk the file trees and locate keywords. Spotlight does pretty much the same thing for me, in a rather friendier way. I, for one, am just darned happy with it.
Bottom line, though, it takes a lot of work to organize a large body of information, and a lot more work to keep an org system in synch with a body of information that keeps growing, and use patterns that change over time. For those situations, a flexible tool like Spotight is handy.
I'm not suggesting people would like it, but remember: this is the same RIAA that wanted ISPs to violate people's privacy wholesale in the name of preventing file sharing. The labels don't care how pissed off people get at Apple as long as that anger doesn't come back to them, and as long as they make money while Apple goes out of business.
And as a secondary point, they could spread out the prices and use smaller increments to avoid the scenario you mentioned. Instead of using $.49, $.99, and $1.49 price tiers, they could use increments of a nickel. And instead of boosting the prices of all related songs, they could base the increments on popularity. The dozen songs that only one other person bought stay at $.49, the three that were bought by 10 other people go up to $.59, and the one that a hundred other people bought goes up $.99. A person looking at that list would still see lots of low-priced songs, but the few they're actually interested in would be among the 'popular and higher priced' ones more often than not.
But again, if that hurts Apple, the labels don't care. They still Don't Get It, and are stumbling their way through the expensive and in-retrospect-stupid mistakes that lie along the path to having a clue. They'll get there eventually, but first they have to find their ten thousand ways *not* to make a lightbulb.
This is internet business we're talking about, folks. Retailers can track sales minute-by-minute, adjust prices moment to moment, and tailor prices to individual customers.
Replace the 'hot new hits' smokescreen with 'anything that's actually popular' and you have what the music industry actually wants. Does 'Highway to Hell' get more action than the latest push-the-star album? No problem.. that song gets a price hike.
It leads to a state of smoke and mirrors, where all the songs that sell less than one copy a month are $.50, anything that actually has an audience is $.99, and anything getting more traffic than normal, for any reason, gets kicked up to $1.99. Even more heinous, but technically feasible, would be per-user and related-hits tracking, so if you buy a $.50 song, all the 'other songs purchased by people who bought this one' go up to $.99 for you personally. In such a system, the only way to get the low prices consistently would be to buy random selections of stuff nobody else wants.
It's a great dodge, from a marketing standpoint. The labels can come out and say that 99% of the music in the iTMS catalog is listed below $.99, while quietly failing to mention that 90% of the actual purchases were at $.99 or more. Then they can wring their hands and claim that those "few" premium-priced songs are the only place they make a profit, and that anyone who wants to take away that price tier is just a nasty mean corpse-raping villain.
Personally, I'm amused that the labels are willing to play chicken with a company that recently announced a major change in its hardware platform. Apple (or Steve Jobs) certainly has the nerve to tell one of the big labels to take a hike if necessary, and it's not like the market is just flooded with other venues where the labels can peddle their goods.
The game theory of the situation is interesting.. if all the labels bailed at once, it would hurt Apple a lot. But if only a few labels leave, the ones that stay will probably do better business, since they'll have less competition. The more labels that go, the better the advantages for the few that stay. So basically, all the labels are in a position where they want someone *else* to sacrifice profits and teach Apple a lesson, while they personally stick around and glean the benefits of both the smackdown and reduced competition. But nobody wants to be the hero who dies for the good of everyone else.
All told, I hope.. and expect.. that Apple will stick to its guns on simple, flat pricing.
Not to mention that coastlines are constantly shifting, and that the amount of loss predicted as attributable to global warming by 2099 is smaller than the margin of error predicted for natural change. If a chunk of coastline is expected to move a quarter mile by 2099, plus or minus 20 feet, the predicted change due to global warming is something like 5-10 feet.
Think of it in terms of the vertical integration stack.
Apple doesn't sell plain hardware, it sells a hardware/OS/middleware/userland/network-services stack in which every layer is tweaked to work with all the others. Since Apple controls the whole stack, it has the freedom to solve technical problems at the layer that will do the most good. The people who make Shake or QuickTime can ask the hardware and OS teams to tweak the platform if that's truly the best way to solve a problem.
If Apple gives up control over the hardware layer, it loses some ability to solve problems where they really need to be solved, and gains a big-ass diplomatic problem when trying to coax third-party hardware vendors into adopting designs that will make the higher levels of Apple's product stack really shine.
Look at it this way: why should Dell spend $10 more per machine to make Shake work really well when they can spend less money per unit and still get acceptable performance? It isn't like Dell makes any money from Shake.
That kind of partitioning is *exactly* why the Windows user experience is so full of petty annoyances.
I don't need to.. It's a license, as in 'End User License Agreement'.
Outside the terms defined by the license, you have no right to use the protected material at all. The 'I Agree' button doesn't constitute agreement to a contract, but that doesn't matter because there's no contract under discussion. All the 'I Agree' button does is shut off your ability to go into court and say, "but I never saw the license."
Contracts are different from licenses, and applying contract logic to a license will get you declared guilty and fined in any court you care to name. Learn the relevant law before you make any major IP decisions.
Try this: Apple is neither a hardware company nor a software company. Apple sells a service called "vertical integration." The hardware, OS, middleware, userland, and network services all fit together in a single package that Just Works, Right Out Of The Box.
IBM is in the same business in enterprise space, and it's done pretty well for them. For that matter, Red Hat also sells vertical integration, it just services a shorter stack.. only OS, middleware and userland.
Yes, Apple makes most of its profits from the hardware, just like Red Hat makes most of its profits from circles of plastic. That doesn't make Apple exclusively a 'hardware' company, though. It does, however, mean that Apple wants to protect the part of its integration stack that brings in the bulk of the money, and supports development across the rest of the stack.
And there's a difference between contracts, which lay down the rules by which two parties agree to exchange things of value called 'consideration', and licenses, which are unilateral statements on the part of whoever owns the copyright.
(and just for reference, 'EULA' stands for 'End User License Agreement')
Both parties have to sign a contract, but only the copyright holder has to sign a license. Outside the terms defined in that license, you have no right to use the protected work at all. Therefore, using a piece of protected work in a way not allowed by its license isn't a contract violation, it's a violation of the law of the land.
I do some consultation for your bank which gives me access to all your financial records.
I sign an NDA that says I'll keep that information confidential.
I steal your financial info (in violation of my NDA) and sell it to Bob Smith.
By your theory, Bob Smith doesn't do anything wrong when he clears out your savings account, since *he* never signed an NDA. He can claim to have bought the information "in good faith." In other words, once the NDA has been broken, you lose all right to protect that information, or file suit to learn who stole it in the first place.
Call me Mister Silly, but I see some problems with that..
The article from the Reg shows that this is probably a non-issue. AppleInsider makes all sorts of grand claims in its own article, but doesn't supply the facts to back them up.
What's actually happening seems to be a fairly normal, even boring, patent registration process for a couple of ideas that look vaguely similar if you want to write a click-whoring article about them. It hardly counts as putting the iPod interface in 'jeopardy'.
There's another path leading out from roadmap item #1:
Apple becomes the company that creates markets for all the Really Cool Stuff that will make its way into the commodity PC market two or three years later, once sufficient consumer demand exists. Apple gets first-mover advantage on all that tech, which means:
2a. Apple's branding of the technology goes into the cultural mindset. Face it, the term 'podcasting' is a kick in the balls for the marketing department of any other portable-audio-device vendor.
3a. Apple sticks to the "limited, 'overpriced' hardware" model, but becomes known as the platform to own if you really want to be on the cutting edge. Apple's market share grows 'modestly' to cover the 20% of the market that generates 80% of the profit.
4a. Apple gets a tasty new line of hardware design, middleware, and brand licensing once Microsoft, Dell, et al decide enough of a market exists to warrant adopting the new technologies.
5a. Apple develops a good relationship with Intel's R&D group, meaning some of Intel's resources get devoted to creating Apple's Next Big Thing, which can then be turned around and licensed to the PC market once sufficient consumer demand exists.
It isn't unreasonable to think that Apple could get $15-25 in technology and brand licensing for every Windows box sold, without ever having to license OS X itself. And the direct revenue from Apple's own version of the technologies, the tighter integration with Intel's R&D wing, the massive branding potential, and the increased market share wouldn't hurt either.
We geeks need to realize that an OS isn't a single, monolithic product. It's a whole package of things, and Apple can make a whole ton of money licensing individual items from the package without ever licensing the whole 'OS' package itself.
Excellent point anout content-specific logic. Kudos for insightful though.
WRT Konfabulator's maturity, disruptive technologies have a habit of starting off too puny to be taken seriously. Early hydraulic systems were pathetically weak compared to the cable systems they replaced. Micro-mills originally had just about enough capacity to produce rebar, and had no hope of producing the tight-tolerance materials used in cars like the huge, sprawling foundries did. Honda entered the US motorcycle market selling mopeds.
Thing is, once you give those pathetic little technologies a market, they mature. Then they start looking for bigger and more interesting challenges.
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen lays out the whole process is wonderful detail, with play-by-play summaries of how disruptive technologies have taken over several different markets.
One, 99% of the people who use computers don't compile their own software, and don't want to. If you think they should, feel free to take it up with them individually.
Two, making software work consistently across multiple platforms is a lot harder than you seem to think. There are a lot of Linux RPMs out there that won't even compile on the various *BSDs, to say nothing of the various Mac and Windows OSes.
Three, Konfabulator and Dashboard supply all the GUI code for their widgets. That isn't a small contribution. It's huge. Use the framework and you get display primitives, an event model, cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, etc, etc, etc, for free, and working according to the native standards of every platform. Roll your own, and you end up in Mozilla-we've-created-our-own-...-hell.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it as a bonus for people doing video production. I'm not talking about playing video on an iPod, but rather people who want to carry video data from one place to another.
Networking geeks have an old saying: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes." It takes a little more than three minutes to send a gigabyte of data through a T3, assuming ideal transfer conditions. By that standard, 80GB would take 240 minutes, or six hours. If we assume an average walking rate of 4mph for the average person, a pair of sneakers and an 80gig iPod would have better bandwidth than a T3 out to a range of about 20 miles, including the time necessary to load and unload the data via FireWire (@ 100MB/sec).
Video people already like FireWire. Apple won a Clio for it a few years ago, because it gave video production companies a way to move large chunks of data around easily. Directors have come to love the idea that they can buy a Powerbook and a copy of Final Cut Pro for about the price of one day's postprocessing fees, and have immediate feedback to what they're shooting.
For those people, the iPod is an inexpensive, ultra-portable data storage module. You could fill a briefcase with the things for a few thousand dollars and have more than enough space to carry the raw footage for an entire movie around with you.
The same general idea works for photographers and musicians. It's easy to accumulate 80 gigs of high-quality, first-pass data when you're in the content creation business, and an iPod gives you a convenient way to stick all that information into your pocket and carry it wherever you need to go.
Apple already knows that the sweet spot for actual music storage is about 5 gigs. They have a whole line of products for people who just want a straightforward music player. The higher-capacity models are for people who want to carry data.
See the second response above. If you have the right to redistribute my work, it has to be written down somewhere. Please state which body of law gives you the right to distribute my work and is independent of copyright.
Now granted, the world of information products tied to physical media -- books, CDs, DVDs, etc -- contains a doctrine of first sale with regard to the physical object itself. You can resell the block of paper or circle of plastic without having to pay royalties to the creator every time. OTOH, someone who buys tickets to a concert and then tries to resell them at a profit can be convicted of scalping.
Distinctions like that are what make IP law such jolly fun.
'Permission' pretty much equals 'license'. The license is the document that spells out the terms of the permission.
Now, please realize that a license does not have to be written down on paper. In the absence of an actual written-out license, the courts will treat the written-down version of a creator's behavior as the license. If I put a song I wrote on a P2P network, I'll have a really hard time suing people for downloading it even if they can't present an actual document saying they have permission to do that.
Generally speaking, though, it's better to have the terms of permission witten out nice and clear and complete. That saves the judge lots of headaches when people disagree about what is and isn't allowed.
Okay, same question as above.. what body of law gives you the right to distribute someone else's work?
To continue the example above, let's say I give you permission to read the manuscript in the safety deposit box. You try to distribute that permission by selling it to geminidomino, and I refuse to let geminidomino read the manuscript. What argument will you present to a court to support the idea that you have a right to distribute "permission to read the manuscript" independent of the rights I grant you by license?
Again, AFAIK, you have no such right.
Well, to flip the concept on its head, what body of law gives you the right to use work created by someone else?
Let's say I write a book and lock the manuscript in a safety deposit box. You learn that the manuscript exists, and want to read it. I say no. What argument will you present in court to support the idea that you have a right to use (i.e.: read) my work? Please note that I'm not talking about making a copy of the book or distributing the book to anyone else. The only issue under discussion for the sake of this discussion is your right to use work I've created without my permission.
AFAIK, you have no such right. The license I grant you contains the terms under which you are allowed to use the work, however broad or narrow those terms might be. Aside from the terms granted to you by the license, though, you have no right to use my work at all.
That's not a very big deal to the RIAA because ...
You're missing the effect that losing this case will have on all the RIAA's other current and future lawsuits against other hypothetical file sharers.
Right now the RIAA files lawsuits with basically the same mindset spammers use: the cost is so low, and the potential benefits are so high, that there's no reason not to give it a whirl. Losing this case, having to pay damages, and getting a precedent that allows other people to sue for more damages will raise the cost on these kinds of lawsuits dramatically. Getting a judgement that finds the RIAA guilty of extortion, racketeering, or any other illegal activity in the pursuit of this lawsuit will give all other defendants the opportunity to use an "unclean hands" defense in their own suits, which reduces the RIAA's chance of winning and cuts into the potential benefits of filing a suit in the first place.
Remember that the RIAA is only suing everyday citizens because they've been forced to. First they wanted to make ISPs do their dirty work for them, but they lost the cases that would have allowed them to do so. Then they wanted to shut down the people who make filesharing software, but a series of defeats shut down that line of attack, too. Now they're stuck having to use PR-killing lawsuits against ordinary people on the street, and this case has the potential to put a few crimps into that strategy, too.
In the long run, there's a fairly good chance that the RIAA will be pushed all the way back to the point of having to do well-supported lawsuits against high-volume filesharers, which wil be much more expensive than their current form-letter campaign, and will have absolutely no intmidation value on the general public. Filesharing systems will become ubiquitous, non-infringing uses of filesharing will become well established, and the RIAA will lose any hope of being able to control the way people share information online. That will put the RIAA into competition with a huge, massively redundant, and utterly legal distribution system that it can neither overwhelm nor control.
The RIAA doesn't like that idea at all.
And then as soon as the users were actually held responsible... Bullies!!! Suing children! And single mothers!!!! The horror -- single mothers!!!! Gee, all that righteous jabbering about responsibility suddenly disappeared!
And exactly how does this issue of personal responsibility correlate to the fact that, according to the complaint in this particular case, Ms. Anderson did not, in fact, use P2P services at all, and had not, at any time, copied or distributed any works the RIAA or any of its members hold rights to?
When we get a case about a diabled single mother who's obviously and admittedly guilty of sharing of protected works without any legal right to do so, please feel free to recalibrate your Slashdot hipocrisy meter. Right here and right now, there's a chance that you're getting a false reading due to the fact that this woman has apparently done absolutely nothing wrong.
"Bleeding hearts wringing their hands over the fact that an apparently innocent woman has been wrongfully accused and subjected to intimidation and violations of her privacy that may very well count as extortion and racketeering," just doesn't have the same rich, chunky moral superiority to it. You may as well be saying, "Kafka's _The Trial_.. what a fucking whiner."
There is nothing in any law, copyright or otherwise, that requires you to provide a license to share your own works.
That's not quite correct. Technically, copyright law does impose a default license on the use, copying and distribution of any protected work. That license is: none at all.
Copyright law also grants creators the right to choose some other, less restrictive license if they want to. It doesn't say they have to choose a less restrictive license, and unless someone can prove that they do have a less restrictive license from the creator, the default "none at all" license is the one the courts will use.
Thing is, that "none at all" license doesn't give a creator any legal way to distribute their work to others. It gives them the legal tools to lock the work in a vault and throw away the key, but that's about it. Any creator who wants to distribute their work does have to choose some kind of license that's less restrictive than the default "none at all" one, because without that alternative license, there's no way for the distribution to be legal. That's just a basic fact of copyright law, and has nothing to do with P2P at all.
So instead of saying that Limewire is forcing creators to choose a license, it's more correct to say that Limewire requires creators to post the licenses that copyright law forces them to choose if they want to distribute the work at all.
Copyright law doesn't force anyone to distribute their work, but it does force them to choose a license if they decide to distribute their work.
At a more general level, the idea that some protected works have licenses and others makes things complicated and messy. It's much tidier, from a legal point of view, to say, "there is always a license", and then let people bicker about the specific terms of the license on any given work. Copyright law sets the default license that will be used in the absence of any other word from the creator, and gives the creator the right to set any other terms that they choose.
Not quite..
Apple had to spend a long time courting the music industry even to get the iTMS off the drawing board. They did it by making predictions that turned out to be true, over and over again, until a few people in the labels started paying attention. It was a hard struggle, though, because there were plenty of other people willing to tell the labels what they wanted to hear: namely that access controls would work, and that they could bolt all the restrictions of their circles-of-plastic business model onto the online distribution model.
Well, time and experience showed that the folks at Apple knew what they were talking about. And so people at the labels gradually came to agree that Apple had some idea of what was actually going on.
Now that the iTMS is big news, though, and the latest iPod gets more press coverage than most of the upcoming movies, ALL the players in the music industry feel the need to haul themselves up on their hind legs and be heard, including the ones who wouldn't have enough brains to poke a stick into an anthill after spending three weeks at a Power Simian business seminar.
Yeah, the music industry would love to get more money out of Apple if it was basically a matter of letting the (pardon the pun) apple fall out of the tree. NOBODY in business passes up a chance at easy money if they can get it. The sensible people in the music industry, though.. and let's all do them the favor of believing there are some.. are willing to live with the script that runs:
MUSIC INDUSTRY: Hey Apple, want to give us more money?
APPLE: No.
MUSIC INDUSTRY: Okay. Just asking.
The ones were hearing about now, in this article, are the sub-chimps who just haven't got the clue. They have yet to realize that having one label pull out of the iTMS will hurt that label a whole lot more than it hurts Apple over the long run.
Apparently game theory is another realm of knowledge the RIIA never bothered to acquire, beause they're now in a prisoner's dilemma they can't escape. The only way the RIAA can hurt Apple is for all the labels to pull out at once, and for all of them to stay out until Apple agrees to the terms of the RIAA as a whole. If only one or two pull out, the ones that remain in will weep crocodile tears all the way to the bank. And sales from the existing catalog don't even begin to touch on the contract concessions the non-participating labels will have to make with artists.. "What do you mean signing with you means my music WON'T go into the iTMS? There ARE other labels out there, you know."
What we're hearing now are the rumblings of soon-to-be-extinct morons who aren't ready to lie down and have someone shovel dirt onto their faces yet. But die they will, and sooner rather than later. There's too much money in iTMS sales to ignore, and if the big labels insist on pretending that it doesn't exist, artists will find other ways to get their stuff listed with Apple.
The only two plausible options in this scenario are: A) the labels shut up and let Apple set its price point where it wants, or B) the people who refuse to do business with Apple suffer enough losses that they get fired. Apple has no reason to budge on this issue, every reason to hold its ground, a whole bunch of cash on hand to sit out a potential RIAA embargo, and a much better PR stance vis-a-vis its customers.. Apple: "hey, we just relased the Nano!" RIAA: "hey, we just sued another 750 twelve-year-olds!"
Short answer: Music is not a commodity.
Minor quibble: yes it is. Market behavior shows that consumers treat packaged entertainment as a time-based commodity worth, on average, about $5/hr.
The $15 price of a CD is based on the assumption that the average consumer will listen to the disc about 3 timers before moving on to something else. A $20 DVD wil be viewed twice, on average, before going on the shelf and collecting dust. Divide the ticket price of a movie by the running time, and the result will fall in the same general price range. The same is true for the price of a video game divided by the average estimated play time, or book and magazine prices divided by the average reading time.
At the end of the day, the only scale consumers have for estimating the value of packaged entertainment is "the amount of time I spend being entertained by it." The fact that the entire movie _Clerks_ was made for about the same cost as 30 seconds of fight scene in _True Lies_ doesn't make the latter 200+ times more valuable than the former. I personally felt that I got my money's worth out of both of those, but thought that the producers of _Waterworld_ could have just sent $10 to everyone likely to see the movie and made everyone happier for half the cost.
There's no practical way to correlate production costs with the consumer's perception of value in the entertainment market. There are just too many free variables. So in the absence of any other standard, consumers fall back on the one thing that is predictable, which is the amount of time they'll have to invest in the product. And whether they know it consciously or not, they tend to treat the entire product range as a fairly uniform commodity based on that judgement.
Sure, web apps may present some threat to Microsoft, but I don't see them as a nightmare scenario.
What I consider the first part of MS nightmare scenario is working itself out in Massachusets right now: the state government has established a policy on open formats and protocols that wipes out Microsoft's ability to lock people into applications. The second part will start rolling in within the next five years, as Open software starts to establish itself on the corporate desktop.
Microsoft's main profit center is the symbiotic lock-in between Office and Windows. Those two business units support all the other development Microsoft does. People buy Windows in order to run Office, and they buy Office because, among other things, they have to buy it to maintain the investment they've sunk in thousands of documents over the years.
Micorosft got rich targeting the corporate desktop, because that's the low-hanging fruit of the software industry. It offers large numbers of machines all doing basically the same thing. The required feature set is well-defined, and it tends to remain stable over the years. They managed to hold that market by locking users into Office with proprietary formats, and by making Windows a more or less necessary requirement for running Office.
Thing is, OSS is heading for the very same market, because once again, it's the low-hanging fruit of the industry. It's so easy to build a positive feedback cycle around an office suite that you'd almost have to work *not* to do it.
OSS applications are on the leading edge of being mature enough for regular desktop use, and as more people adopt them, you get more pressure to make them even more mature. Sooner or later (and getting sooner all the time), OSS products will be be seen by the regular public as suitable competition for Office and Windows.
When that happens, Microsoft's main revenue stream will be under attack by a set of products that can't be killed by normal business methods. And to be perfectly honest, Microsoft has a lousy track record of trying to diversify into other markets. Its core markets will start drying up, and it won't have any new markets to move into.. certainly not at a level that will replace what it's losing from its core markets, at any rate.
When the money goes, so does the support for peripheral development, experimental products, and just plain 800-pound-gorilla domination tactics. Microsoft won't have the resources to fight an indefinite war against Google, try to edge its way into the online music market, subsidize its Xbox foothold in the console market, and so on. It will have to tighten its belt and fight to hold its ground, and sit around watching opportunitiues pass by because it just can't afford to take a strong, committed risk outisde its core market.
*That's* Microsoft's biggest nightmare the way I see it.
Why is portable mini-video in demand at all?
It's one of the steps on the 'feature creep to extinction' path that lurks ahead of all portable devices. It has more to do with critics (both professional and self-appointed) pulling checklists of easy-to-imagine evolutionary changes out of the air than any real demand from the users.
First you get a simple device with a well-defined core function that does that job really well. It has a black-and-white LCD screen. Then you get a color screen, even though it adds no real functional value, because b/w->color is such an obvious evolutionary change that any moron can think of it.. and then refuse to stop bitching about.
Next, you get more processing power, because handling color burns more CPU than handling b/w. If you don't beef up the processor, you'll get sluggish performance, and once again the critics have an easy target.
Once you have more processing power and a color screen, you go into a loop where people demand more and more CPU-intensive video performance. I usually summarize this stage as "once you put a color screen on a product, people will bitch until they can play Quake on it."
And then, once you can play Quake on it, people will abandon the product because they want to play Quake on a 21" screen.
When a product is simple and limited, people judge it more or less on its own merits. As soon as you give it full-color video and any kind of complex I/O, people start comparing it to a laptop or a desktop machine. And given the form factor of any portable device, the product will stay on the losing end of that comparison forever.
It's one of those games where the only way to win is not to play.
I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple have enough sense to know that, and I know they have the institutional courage to keep making a product people actually want, while the critics continue to decry the lack of "improvements" that would knock the product right out of the market.
It's a question of how much information you have. At a rough guess, I'd say that the people who know the locations of all their important files are managing data collections of a thousand documents or less.
Me, I'm a writer. I chunk out a couple thousand files worth of notes in an average year. My slush pile of ideas that might be worth writing about someday contains hundreds, maybe thousands of different concepts, all spread out hither and yon.
Yeah, I *could* probably develop a taxonomy that would let me store everything in a well-ordered manner, but my experiences along those lines lead me to think that I'd spend more time playing librarian than I want to. When I get an idea, I want to hammer it out and move on, not spend five minutes deciding how to file the idea wihin my existing org system, or update the system to accomodate the new idea.
What I actually do is store files by date and time. It gives me a basic layer of organization, and it's easier than trying to come up with a couple thousand suitably-descriptive-and-noncolliding filenames every year. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of 'find' and 'grep' because those let me walk the file trees and locate keywords. Spotlight does pretty much the same thing for me, in a rather friendier way. I, for one, am just darned happy with it.
Bottom line, though, it takes a lot of work to organize a large body of information, and a lot more work to keep an org system in synch with a body of information that keeps growing, and use patterns that change over time. For those situations, a flexible tool like Spotight is handy.
I'm not suggesting people would like it, but remember: this is the same RIAA that wanted ISPs to violate people's privacy wholesale in the name of preventing file sharing. The labels don't care how pissed off people get at Apple as long as that anger doesn't come back to them, and as long as they make money while Apple goes out of business.
And as a secondary point, they could spread out the prices and use smaller increments to avoid the scenario you mentioned. Instead of using $.49, $.99, and $1.49 price tiers, they could use increments of a nickel. And instead of boosting the prices of all related songs, they could base the increments on popularity. The dozen songs that only one other person bought stay at $.49, the three that were bought by 10 other people go up to $.59, and the one that a hundred other people bought goes up $.99. A person looking at that list would still see lots of low-priced songs, but the few they're actually interested in would be among the 'popular and higher priced' ones more often than not.
But again, if that hurts Apple, the labels don't care. They still Don't Get It, and are stumbling their way through the expensive and in-retrospect-stupid mistakes that lie along the path to having a clue. They'll get there eventually, but first they have to find their ten thousand ways *not* to make a lightbulb.
This is internet business we're talking about, folks. Retailers can track sales minute-by-minute, adjust prices moment to moment, and tailor prices to individual customers.
Replace the 'hot new hits' smokescreen with 'anything that's actually popular' and you have what the music industry actually wants. Does 'Highway to Hell' get more action than the latest push-the-star album? No problem.. that song gets a price hike.
It leads to a state of smoke and mirrors, where all the songs that sell less than one copy a month are $.50, anything that actually has an audience is $.99, and anything getting more traffic than normal, for any reason, gets kicked up to $1.99. Even more heinous, but technically feasible, would be per-user and related-hits tracking, so if you buy a $.50 song, all the 'other songs purchased by people who bought this one' go up to $.99 for you personally. In such a system, the only way to get the low prices consistently would be to buy random selections of stuff nobody else wants.
It's a great dodge, from a marketing standpoint. The labels can come out and say that 99% of the music in the iTMS catalog is listed below $.99, while quietly failing to mention that 90% of the actual purchases were at $.99 or more. Then they can wring their hands and claim that those "few" premium-priced songs are the only place they make a profit, and that anyone who wants to take away that price tier is just a nasty mean corpse-raping villain.
Personally, I'm amused that the labels are willing to play chicken with a company that recently announced a major change in its hardware platform. Apple (or Steve Jobs) certainly has the nerve to tell one of the big labels to take a hike if necessary, and it's not like the market is just flooded with other venues where the labels can peddle their goods.
The game theory of the situation is interesting.. if all the labels bailed at once, it would hurt Apple a lot. But if only a few labels leave, the ones that stay will probably do better business, since they'll have less competition. The more labels that go, the better the advantages for the few that stay. So basically, all the labels are in a position where they want someone *else* to sacrifice profits and teach Apple a lesson, while they personally stick around and glean the benefits of both the smackdown and reduced competition. But nobody wants to be the hero who dies for the good of everyone else.
All told, I hope.. and expect.. that Apple will stick to its guns on simple, flat pricing.
Not to mention that coastlines are constantly shifting, and that the amount of loss predicted as attributable to global warming by 2099 is smaller than the margin of error predicted for natural change. If a chunk of coastline is expected to move a quarter mile by 2099, plus or minus 20 feet, the predicted change due to global warming is something like 5-10 feet.
Think of it in terms of the vertical integration stack.
Apple doesn't sell plain hardware, it sells a hardware/OS/middleware/userland/network-services stack in which every layer is tweaked to work with all the others. Since Apple controls the whole stack, it has the freedom to solve technical problems at the layer that will do the most good. The people who make Shake or QuickTime can ask the hardware and OS teams to tweak the platform if that's truly the best way to solve a problem.
If Apple gives up control over the hardware layer, it loses some ability to solve problems where they really need to be solved, and gains a big-ass diplomatic problem when trying to coax third-party hardware vendors into adopting designs that will make the higher levels of Apple's product stack really shine.
Look at it this way: why should Dell spend $10 more per machine to make Shake work really well when they can spend less money per unit and still get acceptable performance? It isn't like Dell makes any money from Shake.
That kind of partitioning is *exactly* why the Windows user experience is so full of petty annoyances.
I don't need to.. It's a license, as in 'End User License Agreement'.
Outside the terms defined by the license, you have no right to use the protected material at all. The 'I Agree' button doesn't constitute agreement to a contract, but that doesn't matter because there's no contract under discussion. All the 'I Agree' button does is shut off your ability to go into court and say, "but I never saw the license."
Contracts are different from licenses, and applying contract logic to a license will get you declared guilty and fined in any court you care to name. Learn the relevant law before you make any major IP decisions.
Try this: Apple is neither a hardware company nor a software company. Apple sells a service called "vertical integration." The hardware, OS, middleware, userland, and network services all fit together in a single package that Just Works, Right Out Of The Box.
IBM is in the same business in enterprise space, and it's done pretty well for them. For that matter, Red Hat also sells vertical integration, it just services a shorter stack.. only OS, middleware and userland.
Yes, Apple makes most of its profits from the hardware, just like Red Hat makes most of its profits from circles of plastic. That doesn't make Apple exclusively a 'hardware' company, though. It does, however, mean that Apple wants to protect the part of its integration stack that brings in the bulk of the money, and supports development across the rest of the stack.
And there's a difference between contracts, which lay down the rules by which two parties agree to exchange things of value called 'consideration', and licenses, which are unilateral statements on the part of whoever owns the copyright.
(and just for reference, 'EULA' stands for 'End User License Agreement')
Both parties have to sign a contract, but only the copyright holder has to sign a license. Outside the terms defined in that license, you have no right to use the protected work at all. Therefore, using a piece of protected work in a way not allowed by its license isn't a contract violation, it's a violation of the law of the land.
- I do some consultation for your bank which gives me access to all your financial records.
- I sign an NDA that says I'll keep that information confidential.
- I steal your financial info (in violation of my NDA) and sell it to Bob Smith.
By your theory, Bob Smith doesn't do anything wrong when he clears out your savings account, since *he* never signed an NDA. He can claim to have bought the information "in good faith." In other words, once the NDA has been broken, you lose all right to protect that information, or file suit to learn who stole it in the first place.Call me Mister Silly, but I see some problems with that..
The article from the Reg shows that this is probably a non-issue. AppleInsider makes all sorts of grand claims in its own article, but doesn't supply the facts to back them up.
What's actually happening seems to be a fairly normal, even boring, patent registration process for a couple of ideas that look vaguely similar if you want to write a click-whoring article about them. It hardly counts as putting the iPod interface in 'jeopardy'.
There's another path leading out from roadmap item #1:
Apple becomes the company that creates markets for all the Really Cool Stuff that will make its way into the commodity PC market two or three years later, once sufficient consumer demand exists. Apple gets first-mover advantage on all that tech, which means:
2a. Apple's branding of the technology goes into the cultural mindset. Face it, the term 'podcasting' is a kick in the balls for the marketing department of any other portable-audio-device vendor.
3a. Apple sticks to the "limited, 'overpriced' hardware" model, but becomes known as the platform to own if you really want to be on the cutting edge. Apple's market share grows 'modestly' to cover the 20% of the market that generates 80% of the profit.
4a. Apple gets a tasty new line of hardware design, middleware, and brand licensing once Microsoft, Dell, et al decide enough of a market exists to warrant adopting the new technologies.
5a. Apple develops a good relationship with Intel's R&D group, meaning some of Intel's resources get devoted to creating Apple's Next Big Thing, which can then be turned around and licensed to the PC market once sufficient consumer demand exists.
It isn't unreasonable to think that Apple could get $15-25 in technology and brand licensing for every Windows box sold, without ever having to license OS X itself. And the direct revenue from Apple's own version of the technologies, the tighter integration with Intel's R&D wing, the massive branding potential, and the increased market share wouldn't hurt either.
We geeks need to realize that an OS isn't a single, monolithic product. It's a whole package of things, and Apple can make a whole ton of money licensing individual items from the package without ever licensing the whole 'OS' package itself.
Excellent point anout content-specific logic. Kudos for insightful though.
WRT Konfabulator's maturity, disruptive technologies have a habit of starting off too puny to be taken seriously. Early hydraulic systems were pathetically weak compared to the cable systems they replaced. Micro-mills originally had just about enough capacity to produce rebar, and had no hope of producing the tight-tolerance materials used in cars like the huge, sprawling foundries did. Honda entered the US motorcycle market selling mopeds.
Thing is, once you give those pathetic little technologies a market, they mature. Then they start looking for bigger and more interesting challenges.
The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen lays out the whole process is wonderful detail, with play-by-play summaries of how disruptive technologies have taken over several different markets.
One, 99% of the people who use computers don't compile their own software, and don't want to. If you think they should, feel free to take it up with them individually.
Two, making software work consistently across multiple platforms is a lot harder than you seem to think. There are a lot of Linux RPMs out there that won't even compile on the various *BSDs, to say nothing of the various Mac and Windows OSes.
Three, Konfabulator and Dashboard supply all the GUI code for their widgets. That isn't a small contribution. It's huge. Use the framework and you get display primitives, an event model, cut-and-paste, drag-and-drop, etc, etc, etc, for free, and working according to the native standards of every platform. Roll your own, and you end up in Mozilla-we've-created-our-own-...-hell.