Why not? The "product" is a licence, that is, a contract. You agree to give the seller a certain amount of money and abide a certain number of rules, which regulate what you can do with a bunch of bits. In exchange for that you get a copy of said bunch. Copyright law says that you need permission from the owner of the copyright for those bits, and that allows that owner to set the terms.
Why should such a licence not be enforceable? Why should you not be liable for breaking the contract?
If you don't like the terms, don't enter into the agreement. If you believe that you should be able to do whatever you want with those bits, then you should buy or otherwise obtain products that give you those rights. That is, get some free software, or buy a non-DRM CD.
It's the laws that need to be changed, not the technology enforcing them. And for that we need awareness. And widespread DRM would help a lot with that.
Actually, that may not be so bad. The reason that policy issues like extending copyright or introducing DMCA/EUCD-like laws are so hard to decide in 'our' favour is that nobody cares. And the reason for that is that these laws aren't enforced all that much.
If Microsoft really cracked down on Windows piracy, many more people would consider an alternative. GNU/Linux can compete with Windows on price and freedom to help your neighbour, but only if people actually are forced to pay for Windows, and kept from sharing proprietary software.
Indie music that is sold on reasonable terms (unencumbered CDs or DVDs, non-DRMmed Ogg Vorbis or MP3) or distributed under a Creative Commons licence that allows redistribution can compete with RIAA music on ease of use (i.e. pay once, listen anywhere), but only if the RIAA's restrictions are enforced.
I say let them DRM the hell out of everything. Hundreds of millions of people and the whole open counterculture that's come into being in the last decade versus the powerful media conglomerates. I think we'll win.
What if you buy a DVD in the USA or the EU? I've got a DVD, which I bought in the DVD shop. I also have a DVD drive in my computer, which I bought in the computer shop. I have a DVD player and an operating system which are distributed under the GPL, and thus I could legally make a copy for myself.
Now I take my own DVD, put it in my own DVD drive, and run my own copy of the DVD player software on my own copy of the OS, and I break the DMCA/EUCD...
Some time ago Chuck Moore proposed the 25x , a single chip holding a 5x5 array of simple processors. That's what this reminded me of when I first read about it. As Mr. Moore said in that Slashdot interview, "[...] the 25x is a solution looking for a problem."
Cell theoretically has a lot of performance, and we're talking FLOPS not MIPS. It will certainly be useful or even revolutionary in televisions and game computers, as well as for scientific calculations. I don't see it making your desktop or server much faster though. Those don't need more FLOPS, they need more I/O bandwidth and faster peripherals, and perhaps more MIPS.
I can see Cell workstations, but in the same way as you have SPARC workstations and laptops now: as development tools for the "real" hardware.
That is one thing, but I also think there is something else more specific to software, and it's not a theoretical but a practical difference.
By far most software in use today is custom-made. People create websites, design databases, and implement business rules. Just check the size of the IT consulting business. The stuff that you see on the shelf is just the tip of the iceberg.
So, the incentive for innovation is not money, it's the simple fact that you're working on a project and your customer has requested feature X. So you figure out a way to implement it. Your development costs are paid directly by your customer, and even if you did not have patent protection and everyone else implemented the same feature in the software they're writing for their customers, you'd still get paid.
Hence, innovation would still occur if software patents did not exist. Software is a service, as they say, and if you work is protected by copyright, others must do the same work (implementing feature X) again.
The big problem with software patents as they exist in the USA today, is that it is these features (one-click shopping for example) that are patented. That just doesn't make sense. It essentially gives the patent holder the right to tax anyone who implements that particular feature, in exchange for what? Thinking up new features? I don't think we need incentives for that.
Well, assuming that you're declaring computer science superior over the pragmatic approach, I've started wondering about that recently.
Let me start off by saying that I'm firmly in the scientific camp, intending to start a PhD in CS this (northern) summer. It seems that an awful lot of popular things in IT are despised by computer scientists. Linux, as a monolithic kernel, is a famous example, as is C++, and I recently saw something about Perl being evil as well.
Now, these scientists have good reasons to call these things ugly, but people still use them. That means that either people are stupid, or the computer scientists are missing something. I think that it's mostly the latter.
In my software engineering course I was taught that the first and foremost thing you do in a project is gather requirements. It seems to me that computer scientists need to get out and ask people who work in IT what they actually expect from their kernels, languages, and development systems. Then they can try and create theories of how it all works or should work to fulfill those wishes, and use those theories to improve those real-world systems.
The alternative, sitting in your ivory tower inventing things that you think are pretty and everyone else thinks are useless, doesn't seem to be working too well.
Help is on the way. TechSource, which makes video cards for air traffic control and medical applications has started work on a desktop/workstation card that will be able to accelerate enough of X.org and OpenGL to be usable. It won't blow your socks off in gaming, but for many users that's not important anyway. More importantly, the specs will be fully open. More information on OpenGraphics.org.
One of the key points in your Windows versus Linux ads so far is total cost of ownership. You point out to prospective Linux customers that switching from Windows to Linux is often more expensive than upgrading to the next version of Windows.
One way to look at this is to say that Windows is more compatible with Windows than Linux, and therefore a better choice. Another way of looking at it is that Microsoft is exceedingly successful at locking in its customers, and that (as a customer) it is best to get out as soon as possible because it will only get worse.
Do you worry that people will take this second point of view rather than the first, and that the campaign might backfire?
Well, it is just like a Windows XP virus not working on Windows 98 I guess, not that special.
I'm wondering whether it would be a good solution to warn the user if a URL uses characters from different scripts, maybe only if it's isolated characters. That way, if you had a URL consisting of two words in different scripts, it would still work, but if you replaced a single letter to fool the user they'd get a nicely coloured navbar (or something similar).
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Why not? The "product" is a licence, that is, a contract. You agree to give the seller a certain amount of money and abide a certain number of rules, which regulate what you can do with a bunch of bits. In exchange for that you get a copy of said bunch. Copyright law says that you need permission from the owner of the copyright for those bits, and that allows that owner to set the terms.
Why should such a licence not be enforceable? Why should you not be liable for breaking the contract?
If you don't like the terms, don't enter into the agreement. If you believe that you should be able to do whatever you want with those bits, then you should buy or otherwise obtain products that give you those rights. That is, get some free software, or buy a non-DRM CD.
It's the laws that need to be changed, not the technology enforcing them. And for that we need awareness. And widespread DRM would help a lot with that.
Actually, that may not be so bad. The reason that policy issues like extending copyright or introducing DMCA/EUCD-like laws are so hard to decide in 'our' favour is that nobody cares. And the reason for that is that these laws aren't enforced all that much.
If Microsoft really cracked down on Windows piracy, many more people would consider an alternative. GNU/Linux can compete with Windows on price and freedom to help your neighbour, but only if people actually are forced to pay for Windows, and kept from sharing proprietary software.
Indie music that is sold on reasonable terms (unencumbered CDs or DVDs, non-DRMmed Ogg Vorbis or MP3) or distributed under a Creative Commons licence that allows redistribution can compete with RIAA music on ease of use (i.e. pay once, listen anywhere), but only if the RIAA's restrictions are enforced.
I say let them DRM the hell out of everything. Hundreds of millions of people and the whole open counterculture that's come into being in the last decade versus the powerful media conglomerates. I think we'll win.
What if you buy a DVD in the USA or the EU? I've got a DVD, which I bought in the DVD shop. I also have a DVD drive in my computer, which I bought in the computer shop. I have a DVD player and an operating system which are distributed under the GPL, and thus I could legally make a copy for myself.
Now I take my own DVD, put it in my own DVD drive, and run my own copy of the DVD player software on my own copy of the OS, and I break the DMCA/EUCD...
Some time ago Chuck Moore proposed the 25x , a single chip holding a 5x5 array of simple processors. That's what this reminded me of when I first read about it. As Mr. Moore said in that Slashdot interview, "[...] the 25x is a solution looking for a problem." Cell theoretically has a lot of performance, and we're talking FLOPS not MIPS. It will certainly be useful or even revolutionary in televisions and game computers, as well as for scientific calculations. I don't see it making your desktop or server much faster though. Those don't need more FLOPS, they need more I/O bandwidth and faster peripherals, and perhaps more MIPS. I can see Cell workstations, but in the same way as you have SPARC workstations and laptops now: as development tools for the "real" hardware.
That is one thing, but I also think there is something else more specific to software, and it's not a theoretical but a practical difference.
By far most software in use today is custom-made. People create websites, design databases, and implement business rules. Just check the size of the IT consulting business. The stuff that you see on the shelf is just the tip of the iceberg.
So, the incentive for innovation is not money, it's the simple fact that you're working on a project and your customer has requested feature X. So you figure out a way to implement it. Your development costs are paid directly by your customer, and even if you did not have patent protection and everyone else implemented the same feature in the software they're writing for their customers, you'd still get paid.
Hence, innovation would still occur if software patents did not exist. Software is a service, as they say, and if you work is protected by copyright, others must do the same work (implementing feature X) again.
The big problem with software patents as they exist in the USA today, is that it is these features (one-click shopping for example) that are patented. That just doesn't make sense. It essentially gives the patent holder the right to tax anyone who implements that particular feature, in exchange for what? Thinking up new features? I don't think we need incentives for that.
Well, assuming that you're declaring computer science superior over the pragmatic approach, I've started wondering about that recently.
Let me start off by saying that I'm firmly in the scientific camp, intending to start a PhD in CS this (northern) summer. It seems that an awful lot of popular things in IT are despised by computer scientists. Linux, as a monolithic kernel, is a famous example, as is C++, and I recently saw something about Perl being evil as well.
Now, these scientists have good reasons to call these things ugly, but people still use them. That means that either people are stupid, or the computer scientists are missing something. I think that it's mostly the latter.
In my software engineering course I was taught that the first and foremost thing you do in a project is gather requirements. It seems to me that computer scientists need to get out and ask people who work in IT what they actually expect from their kernels, languages, and development systems. Then they can try and create theories of how it all works or should work to fulfill those wishes, and use those theories to improve those real-world systems.
The alternative, sitting in your ivory tower inventing things that you think are pretty and everyone else thinks are useless, doesn't seem to be working too well.
Help is on the way. TechSource, which makes video cards for air traffic control and medical applications has started work on a desktop/workstation card that will be able to accelerate enough of X.org and OpenGL to be usable. It won't blow your socks off in gaming, but for many users that's not important anyway. More importantly, the specs will be fully open. More information on OpenGraphics.org.
Oh and yes, it's been mentioned on Slashdot before.
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I think he is a quantum physicist...
One of the key points in your Windows versus Linux ads so far is total cost of ownership. You point out to prospective Linux customers that switching from Windows to Linux is often more expensive than upgrading to the next version of Windows.
One way to look at this is to say that Windows is more compatible with Windows than Linux, and therefore a better choice. Another way of looking at it is that Microsoft is exceedingly successful at locking in its customers, and that (as a customer) it is best to get out as soon as possible because it will only get worse.
Do you worry that people will take this second point of view rather than the first, and that the campaign might backfire?
Because the real thing doesn't fit in my attic...
Well, it is just like a Windows XP virus not working on Windows 98 I guess, not that special.
I'm wondering whether it would be a good solution to warn the user if a URL uses characters from different scripts, maybe only if it's isolated characters. That way, if you had a URL consisting of two words in different scripts, it would still work, but if you replaced a single letter to fool the user they'd get a nicely coloured navbar (or something similar).