J.K. Rowling can't sell you a Harry Potter novel and then tell you it's a "license"
Huh?
Copyright is a licence that describes how you can use something you purchases. You most definitely have a licence with every book, CD, DVD and even car you buy. There are things you will be sued for, and you will lose.
Your example of reading it on Tuesdays is fun and clearly not a restriction anyone would support, but what about the restriction of "not photocopying it and selling the copies for $5"?
Ford can't sell you a Focus and then tell you it's a "license" and that you can only drive it on Tuesdays
Most drivers have a licence that tells them how they are allowed to use the car, and how they must not use it. Ford produces cars to allow drivers to use them in accordance with those licences.
Again, there is an existing licence to cover how to use something you purchased.
Your right to use something you purchased ends when it conflicts other people's rights. You have no right to use a knife howsoever you like, even though it's your own knife. Hell, even if you make it yourself, there are things you must not do with it, or you'll end up in jail or worse.
You have no right to use your stuff in any way you please. You never had that right, and never will. In all things, you are constrained by the society in which you live. This is the trade-off we make to have a stable world (as opposed to utter anarchy).
They design very little of their hardware (except the outside/case). They leave most of that to other companies.
No, that's not true. You're confusing the outsourced manufacturing process with the in-house design process. I hear this a lot, but if you actually look at an Apple motherboard, you'll soon see that the design is all Apple.
Aplpe designs the whole widget, using commodity chips. Every circuit board is their own design, regardless who actually manufactures it.
No, that's not a sensible way to define a monopoly.
Under your definition, all companies hold a monopoly on their own products. The logical conclusion must be that your definition of "monopoly" is flawed, as it has no use whatsoever. It fails to distinguish between one company and any other.
You go on to say that "OS X has no reasonable substitute" but surely since I can install Windows or Linux on a Mac, it does. I can substitute OS X quite easily.
Yes, that's not what you meant. How about the idea that I can compile well-written OS X code and run it on Linux? Some apps transfer between OSs with a recompile, after all. I've done this several times (before the novelty wore off and I became bored).
Maybe that's not what you meant either. How about this then - under your definition, all OSs have no reasonable substitutes because I can't take a binary and run it on any OS I choose to, even when the hardware is the same. I can install all three OSs onto a Mac, but I can't run (say) FarCry natively on any but Windows. Again, your use of the term makes no meaningful distinction between one OS and another, leading me to think your definition is incorrect.
To sum up - I see that you want Apple to sell you a copy of OS X with no strings attached, however your justifications do not support your case.
Really? You believe that a company be forced to support its product on hardware it was never intended to run on?
It might be some nerd's wet dream, but it's legal nonsense. Remember, you're calling for a legal judgement here, and I reckon that the law sees an "Apple branded computer" as different from a PC. That's the first hurdle to overcome, and then comes the biggie - forcing a company to modify its product to install on competing hardware.
Any company is perfectly within its rights to write a product that only functions on some machines and not others. Just like any customer has the right to *not* buy or use that product.
I will accept that I may be wrong on this, provided you can show a precedent. I would be frankly amazed to see it.
Your post is full of assumptions that would not be suffered in any business case.
You *think* Apple would increase marketshare by opening OS X up to everyone. You don't know that and you provide no data (well, I didn't expect any, but you know how these things go). That 5% covers the world, remember, so how much do people in non-Western nations pay many times their monthly earnings? How many of the general populace upgrade their OS? The potential customers keep dropping.
You *think* $2B is enough to run a business. Well, they currently run a nearly $7.5B turnover (recent 10Q filing). So, what happens to the other $5.5B? It gets written off, most likely taking the stock price with it and then the entire company.
Have you ever seen a high-profile company survive a 74% drop in revenue? That's your plan after all.
Apple is not a Linux distro, and definitely not a software company. Anyone calling for it to drop hardware needs to put up a rock solid 'bet the business' case if they want to be taken seriously.
My wife and I, when we combined our CD collection, realised that we had over 300 CDs, with only a handful of duplicates. Our DVD collection is perhaps only 100 or so.
We easily have > 500GB (depending on encoding quality) of media, and I can point to physical discs we've encoded from.
Now maybe it did cost $6000, although I'd say it was far less, but over 20 years of collecting music and stuff, I'd be surprised if by age 35 anyone buying an iPod could *not* fill it with their own stuff. Before we combined I had 30GB of music from my CD collection.
Don't buy into Steve Ballmer's line about iPods being full of pirated material.
Better watch out for the architect though. I've heard of a number of cases in recent years of architects suing for copyright violation when people just duplicate the plans and take them to a cheap builder.
Because the programmer is demanding money today for work he did in the past, from people who never asked him to do that work or agreed to pay him for it.
Surely the people who "never asked" or "agreed to pay" are also people who don't want the product? If someone has a need for some product, isn't the act of looking very similar to asking someone to do work?
I don't think you can equate the statement "I need a programme to do foo" with "Well, I never asked for it to be written, therefore I do not need to pay."
As a professional developer, I certainly believe programmers should be paid for their work -- but not like this. Instead, they should avoid doing that work in the first place until someone (or a large group of someones pooling their money) has agreed to pay them an acceptable price for it. That's what I've been doing for years.
Good for you. Of course, this cannot possibly work in the gaming world, but it's nice that it does in some industries.
Why can't it work for games? When a AAA title costs $20M to make, you won't find the required 1M users out there willing to pay up front for a game that's 2-3 years from delivery.
I've still never seen this resolved in a way that looks like it will stand half a chance of working and doesn't completely screw the developers.
people want to find the golden egg and sit on it forever
Who said forever? You're introducing something new here. In the case of game developers, I suspect they'd be happy with a three to five years. By the end of that time, any money from sales will have been booked and technology will have made the game long since obsolete.
Maybe you need a history lesson, all states and all peoples took for free, land and resources that was not really there's to begin with. Property is a social construct to help us solve problems and dominate other peoples and groups for the dominant ideology of the age in history one lives.
It appears that your argument in support of piracy also provides an argument in support of the settlers who took native people's land. Interesting.
The whole "property is a social construct" line is true, but adds nothing useful to the debate. Property is a social construct that is (in most countries) enforced by political, economic and military means. You can't just say "all this land is mine" any longer, because anarchy would quickly result. We create an entire legal construct to control people's behaviours to avoid this. Property is a social construct, as are justice, rights and economics.
You technically really never "own" anything, in the ultimate sense, we just pretend to do so because it's pragmatic. Whenever you "create" something, you're just re-arranging pre-existent matter and energy, so I don't think that entitles one to eternal ownership, ownership yes, eternally, no.
Okay, now we're way outside any useful framework for debate. If you introduce concepts like that, then others can introduce concepts like "You have no intrinsic rights anyway, the state gives you those" (show the an atom of "rights") and "You're just a collection of pre-existing matter anyway, so what does it matter what we do to you?" Suddenly we can countenance all sorts of behaviour, because it's so easy to justify when you reduce things in this minimalist manner.
You have to argue in terms of the world we live in. If you disagree with the fundamentals, you're always free to try for political change or create your own independent nation somewhere. Just don't come into a debate with "First we need to change the entire way the Human race thinks about property, and then we need to get rid of the concept of 'ownership.'" The steps needed are outside the piracy debate.
Yes, intellectual property laws need some work. I don't believe anyone will ever consider them perfect. Leaving that aside, is pirating a game a moral right? I'd argue that it's not, especially when we see that game software has no add-on services, no support and all the money is in the up-front product - there's no way for the devs to give the game away for free and still pay for their food and rent. Hell, that applies to most application software as well.
None of what you say is true for OS X development. The whole "commissar" bit is great emotive writing, but flawed because it's simply untrue.
iPhone development definitely has some issues when it comes to developing apps that you want to sell at Apple's online store, but you just can't extend that to OS X development and go on a tirade with any honesty.
Come on, if it was your government collecting this information people would be getting extremely concerned. Private companies like Google are far less transparent about what they do and why. And they don't have to be, provided that they give the right assurances.
Mods - you know Google represent a possible, massive privacy issue. All search engines do, but Google goes a lot further. We all hope that they live up to their motto, but the parent post is a worthwhile caution.
I find it hard to believe that you would know what they have installed, and how they have changed their own machines.
There are times when you ask people how to do something, or they ask you. As a Mac user of over two decades, people ask me and I help when I can. I don't ever point them towards third-party add-ons because there's almost no need for them except for cosmetic stuff.
And I support people. The sort of support that involves me using their Macs and running Software Update or showing them why Macs are different from PCs. While I'm there I check about. So far, no weird add-ons. Maybe the whole Unsanity APE thing from 10.5 poisoned the well, I don't know. All I know is what I see.
Please, call bullshit when I generalise to say that no Mac users ever run add-ons. Don't start when I talk about the people I personally know. I don't yet know them all. I keep missing those every-third-Tuesday meetings where they decide what "all Mac users" think.
In contrast, most people buying a Mac end up having to fiddle around for hours choosing and installing the applications they need. And many people end up buying and installing one little Macintosh hack after another to work around the limitations and annoyances of the Mac interface.
Not in my experience, or in the experience of any other Mac user I know.
Hey! We're duelling with anecdotes! I bet neither of us has anything to back up our point, except some personal experience. Hell, I get a strong feeling you're trolling and haven't even got the personal experience behind your point.
That's not free, when you consider the bigger picture. There's energy used getting the water up to the starting point (heat, etc), the difference is that we're not paying for it directly.
In a more-or-less closed system, like a solar system, you don't get free energy from gravity.
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?
I ask because I actually don't know. I'd like to see truly free formats, but I'm not sure if they are, or if people just think they are.
You've got the model backwards. *You* (and I) are the products Google is selling to advertisers. The freebies are just fluff to keep the product happy.
It's a fair model, and I sound more cynical than I actually am, but it's worth remembering in any dealings with companies like Google.
At some point, you have to draw the line and say "this is what we're offering; if you want something else, find someone else to make it". Chances are, a lot of them will accept your offer.
And I think they won't. In fact I'm certain of it, based on what I know of Human nature.
Neither of us has empirical evidence, so we cancel each other out.
They want to work hard once, and be paid for it forever.
Don't extend the argument beyond anything related to my point. Copyright might be a secure future for some, but I reckon games developers aren't in that group. With hardware changes, OS changes and the moving average of the 'good game' it's hard to believe these people want to write a game once and be paid for life.
I think it's fair enough to write a game once and be paid for a little while, should people play it and enjoy it.
This talk you introduce of being paid forever is a red herring, confusing the issue.
Easy statement to make. An easier one that's far more accurate is "All extremes of economic theories are morally wrong."
Capitalism is far, far, far from perfect, but it's what we've got to work with today. It fits what most people want as well - if a person works more, they can earn more. If they work less, they will generally earn less.
Scratch the surface and you'll find issues, but don't justify piracy through economic theory. Pirates just want other people to work for nothing. They never want to apply that to their own lives.
Yes, I'm generalising, but when someone demands others produce stuff for free I want to hear their justification as to why they should be allowed an income.
So when we invent a technology that's impossible to even theorise accurately about at the moment, and assuming that the costs of running such technology aren't prohibitively expensive for ordinary people, property will become worthless and we'll all be happy.
In the intervening thousand years or so, we'll just have to go with the maxim "Information just wants to be free. Except for my personal identifying information. And my bank details. And stuff I just don't want other people to know about. But except for all that, information wants to be free!"
Q: But who's going to pay someone to create a product they can't sell?
A: Mostly, the people who want a product they can play.
Have you ever gathered requirements on a blue-sky project? The more stakeholders you canvass, the broader the scope gets. Eventually you have to dump the project.
Well, that's a worst-case scenario with a PM who can't manage expectations, but when people are being asked for money they'll demand their pet feature or else they'll drop the whole thing.
So, how do you propose dealing with 200,000 gamers who each have their own ideal FPS/MMORPG/RTS/RPG in mind and will just move on if they don't get their way?
Remember, every player who drops out reduces that funding pool, and you've got to hit your budget before you start. The pressure is on to listen to the players.
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J.K. Rowling can't sell you a Harry Potter novel and then tell you it's a "license"
Huh?
Copyright is a licence that describes how you can use something you purchases. You most definitely have a licence with every book, CD, DVD and even car you buy. There are things you will be sued for, and you will lose.
Your example of reading it on Tuesdays is fun and clearly not a restriction anyone would support, but what about the restriction of "not photocopying it and selling the copies for $5"?
Ford can't sell you a Focus and then tell you it's a "license" and that you can only drive it on Tuesdays
Most drivers have a licence that tells them how they are allowed to use the car, and how they must not use it. Ford produces cars to allow drivers to use them in accordance with those licences.
Again, there is an existing licence to cover how to use something you purchased.
Your right to use something you purchased ends when it conflicts other people's rights. You have no right to use a knife howsoever you like, even though it's your own knife. Hell, even if you make it yourself, there are things you must not do with it, or you'll end up in jail or worse.
You have no right to use your stuff in any way you please. You never had that right, and never will. In all things, you are constrained by the society in which you live. This is the trade-off we make to have a stable world (as opposed to utter anarchy).
They design very little of their hardware (except the outside/case). They leave most of that to other companies.
No, that's not true. You're confusing the outsourced manufacturing process with the in-house design process. I hear this a lot, but if you actually look at an Apple motherboard, you'll soon see that the design is all Apple.
Aplpe designs the whole widget, using commodity chips. Every circuit board is their own design, regardless who actually manufactures it.
No, that's not a sensible way to define a monopoly.
Under your definition, all companies hold a monopoly on their own products. The logical conclusion must be that your definition of "monopoly" is flawed, as it has no use whatsoever. It fails to distinguish between one company and any other.
You go on to say that "OS X has no reasonable substitute" but surely since I can install Windows or Linux on a Mac, it does. I can substitute OS X quite easily.
Yes, that's not what you meant. How about the idea that I can compile well-written OS X code and run it on Linux? Some apps transfer between OSs with a recompile, after all. I've done this several times (before the novelty wore off and I became bored).
Maybe that's not what you meant either. How about this then - under your definition, all OSs have no reasonable substitutes because I can't take a binary and run it on any OS I choose to, even when the hardware is the same. I can install all three OSs onto a Mac, but I can't run (say) FarCry natively on any but Windows. Again, your use of the term makes no meaningful distinction between one OS and another, leading me to think your definition is incorrect.
To sum up - I see that you want Apple to sell you a copy of OS X with no strings attached, however your justifications do not support your case.
Really? You believe that a company be forced to support its product on hardware it was never intended to run on?
It might be some nerd's wet dream, but it's legal nonsense. Remember, you're calling for a legal judgement here, and I reckon that the law sees an "Apple branded computer" as different from a PC. That's the first hurdle to overcome, and then comes the biggie - forcing a company to modify its product to install on competing hardware.
Any company is perfectly within its rights to write a product that only functions on some machines and not others. Just like any customer has the right to *not* buy or use that product.
I will accept that I may be wrong on this, provided you can show a precedent. I would be frankly amazed to see it.
Your post is full of assumptions that would not be suffered in any business case.
You *think* Apple would increase marketshare by opening OS X up to everyone. You don't know that and you provide no data (well, I didn't expect any, but you know how these things go). That 5% covers the world, remember, so how much do people in non-Western nations pay many times their monthly earnings? How many of the general populace upgrade their OS? The potential customers keep dropping.
You *think* $2B is enough to run a business. Well, they currently run a nearly $7.5B turnover (recent 10Q filing). So, what happens to the other $5.5B? It gets written off, most likely taking the stock price with it and then the entire company.
Have you ever seen a high-profile company survive a 74% drop in revenue? That's your plan after all.
Apple is not a Linux distro, and definitely not a software company. Anyone calling for it to drop hardware needs to put up a rock solid 'bet the business' case if they want to be taken seriously.
My wife and I, when we combined our CD collection, realised that we had over 300 CDs, with only a handful of duplicates. Our DVD collection is perhaps only 100 or so.
We easily have > 500GB (depending on encoding quality) of media, and I can point to physical discs we've encoded from.
Now maybe it did cost $6000, although I'd say it was far less, but over 20 years of collecting music and stuff, I'd be surprised if by age 35 anyone buying an iPod could *not* fill it with their own stuff. Before we combined I had 30GB of music from my CD collection.
Don't buy into Steve Ballmer's line about iPods being full of pirated material.
Game company: "We're dropping PCs and going for consoles."
OSS Dev: "Okay, let's create our own AAA titles. So... who's got $20M to spare?"
Crickets: "Chirp chirp!"
Better watch out for the architect though. I've heard of a number of cases in recent years of architects suing for copyright violation when people just duplicate the plans and take them to a cheap builder.
Woah! Wait a minute. You said:
Because the programmer is demanding money today for work he did in the past, from people who never asked him to do that work or agreed to pay him for it.
Surely the people who "never asked" or "agreed to pay" are also people who don't want the product? If someone has a need for some product, isn't the act of looking very similar to asking someone to do work?
I don't think you can equate the statement "I need a programme to do foo" with "Well, I never asked for it to be written, therefore I do not need to pay."
As a professional developer, I certainly believe programmers should be paid for their work -- but not like this. Instead, they should avoid doing that work in the first place until someone (or a large group of someones pooling their money) has agreed to pay them an acceptable price for it. That's what I've been doing for years.
Good for you. Of course, this cannot possibly work in the gaming world, but it's nice that it does in some industries.
Why can't it work for games? When a AAA title costs $20M to make, you won't find the required 1M users out there willing to pay up front for a game that's 2-3 years from delivery.
I've still never seen this resolved in a way that looks like it will stand half a chance of working and doesn't completely screw the developers.
people want to find the golden egg and sit on it forever
Who said forever? You're introducing something new here. In the case of game developers, I suspect they'd be happy with a three to five years. By the end of that time, any money from sales will have been booked and technology will have made the game long since obsolete.
Maybe you need a history lesson, all states and all peoples took for free, land and resources that was not really there's to begin with. Property is a social construct to help us solve problems and dominate other peoples and groups for the dominant ideology of the age in history one lives.
It appears that your argument in support of piracy also provides an argument in support of the settlers who took native people's land. Interesting.
The whole "property is a social construct" line is true, but adds nothing useful to the debate. Property is a social construct that is (in most countries) enforced by political, economic and military means. You can't just say "all this land is mine" any longer, because anarchy would quickly result. We create an entire legal construct to control people's behaviours to avoid this. Property is a social construct, as are justice, rights and economics.
You technically really never "own" anything, in the ultimate sense, we just pretend to do so because it's pragmatic. Whenever you "create" something, you're just re-arranging pre-existent matter and energy, so I don't think that entitles one to eternal ownership, ownership yes, eternally, no.
Okay, now we're way outside any useful framework for debate. If you introduce concepts like that, then others can introduce concepts like "You have no intrinsic rights anyway, the state gives you those" (show the an atom of "rights") and "You're just a collection of pre-existing matter anyway, so what does it matter what we do to you?" Suddenly we can countenance all sorts of behaviour, because it's so easy to justify when you reduce things in this minimalist manner.
You have to argue in terms of the world we live in. If you disagree with the fundamentals, you're always free to try for political change or create your own independent nation somewhere. Just don't come into a debate with "First we need to change the entire way the Human race thinks about property, and then we need to get rid of the concept of 'ownership.'" The steps needed are outside the piracy debate.
Yes, intellectual property laws need some work. I don't believe anyone will ever consider them perfect. Leaving that aside, is pirating a game a moral right? I'd argue that it's not, especially when we see that game software has no add-on services, no support and all the money is in the up-front product - there's no way for the devs to give the game away for free and still pay for their food and rent. Hell, that applies to most application software as well.
None of what you say is true for OS X development. The whole "commissar" bit is great emotive writing, but flawed because it's simply untrue.
iPhone development definitely has some issues when it comes to developing apps that you want to sell at Apple's online store, but you just can't extend that to OS X development and go on a tirade with any honesty.
What two wars are we fighting? I don't see any declared hostility with any nation.
Ah, so you believe the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are illegal then.
Fair enough, you're entitled to the opinion and many would agree with you.
Come on, if it was your government collecting this information people would be getting extremely concerned. Private companies like Google are far less transparent about what they do and why. And they don't have to be, provided that they give the right assurances.
Mods - you know Google represent a possible, massive privacy issue. All search engines do, but Google goes a lot further. We all hope that they live up to their motto, but the parent post is a worthwhile caution.
I find it hard to believe that you would know what they have installed, and how they have changed their own machines.
There are times when you ask people how to do something, or they ask you. As a Mac user of over two decades, people ask me and I help when I can. I don't ever point them towards third-party add-ons because there's almost no need for them except for cosmetic stuff.
And I support people. The sort of support that involves me using their Macs and running Software Update or showing them why Macs are different from PCs. While I'm there I check about. So far, no weird add-ons. Maybe the whole Unsanity APE thing from 10.5 poisoned the well, I don't know. All I know is what I see.
Please, call bullshit when I generalise to say that no Mac users ever run add-ons. Don't start when I talk about the people I personally know. I don't yet know them all. I keep missing those every-third-Tuesday meetings where they decide what "all Mac users" think.
In contrast, most people buying a Mac end up having to fiddle around for hours choosing and installing the applications they need. And many people end up buying and installing one little Macintosh hack after another to work around the limitations and annoyances of the Mac interface.
Not in my experience, or in the experience of any other Mac user I know.
Hey! We're duelling with anecdotes! I bet neither of us has anything to back up our point, except some personal experience. Hell, I get a strong feeling you're trolling and haven't even got the personal experience behind your point.
That's not free, when you consider the bigger picture. There's energy used getting the water up to the starting point (heat, etc), the difference is that we're not paying for it directly.
In a more-or-less closed system, like a solar system, you don't get free energy from gravity.
The Ogg/Vorbis format is often touted as completely free and unencumbered by patents, but is it? Is Dirac?
Have any free formats ever been taken to court and won, proving their status as truly free? Or are they 'under the radar' at the moment, not worth testing in court because they've not reached critical mass yet?
I ask because I actually don't know. I'd like to see truly free formats, but I'm not sure if they are, or if people just think they are.
Google provides services for free?
You've got the model backwards. *You* (and I) are the products Google is selling to advertisers. The freebies are just fluff to keep the product happy.
It's a fair model, and I sound more cynical than I actually am, but it's worth remembering in any dealings with companies like Google.
Better keep that cat healthy. I've got a nasty feeling that if He dies He'll take the Universe with Him.
All hail the cat, hallowed be Sidney. His catnip come, His meow done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
I reckon that first one will cause some friction. People who ask that one could end up... well, with their head on a pole!
And what about "Why are you here?"
At some point, you have to draw the line and say "this is what we're offering; if you want something else, find someone else to make it". Chances are, a lot of them will accept your offer.
And I think they won't. In fact I'm certain of it, based on what I know of Human nature.
Neither of us has empirical evidence, so we cancel each other out.
Curses!
They want to work hard once, and be paid for it forever.
Don't extend the argument beyond anything related to my point. Copyright might be a secure future for some, but I reckon games developers aren't in that group. With hardware changes, OS changes and the moving average of the 'good game' it's hard to believe these people want to write a game once and be paid for life.
I think it's fair enough to write a game once and be paid for a little while, should people play it and enjoy it.
This talk you introduce of being paid forever is a red herring, confusing the issue.
Capitalism is morally wrong.
Easy statement to make. An easier one that's far more accurate is "All extremes of economic theories are morally wrong."
Capitalism is far, far, far from perfect, but it's what we've got to work with today. It fits what most people want as well - if a person works more, they can earn more. If they work less, they will generally earn less.
Scratch the surface and you'll find issues, but don't justify piracy through economic theory. Pirates just want other people to work for nothing. They never want to apply that to their own lives.
Yes, I'm generalising, but when someone demands others produce stuff for free I want to hear their justification as to why they should be allowed an income.
So when we invent a technology that's impossible to even theorise accurately about at the moment, and assuming that the costs of running such technology aren't prohibitively expensive for ordinary people, property will become worthless and we'll all be happy.
In the intervening thousand years or so, we'll just have to go with the maxim "Information just wants to be free. Except for my personal identifying information. And my bank details. And stuff I just don't want other people to know about. But except for all that, information wants to be free!"
Q: But who's going to pay someone to create a product they can't sell?
A: Mostly, the people who want a product they can play.
Have you ever gathered requirements on a blue-sky project? The more stakeholders you canvass, the broader the scope gets. Eventually you have to dump the project.
Well, that's a worst-case scenario with a PM who can't manage expectations, but when people are being asked for money they'll demand their pet feature or else they'll drop the whole thing.
So, how do you propose dealing with 200,000 gamers who each have their own ideal FPS/MMORPG/RTS/RPG in mind and will just move on if they don't get their way?
Remember, every player who drops out reduces that funding pool, and you've got to hit your budget before you start. The pressure is on to listen to the players.