I've heard a CEO say exactly this in response to questions from an employee about bonuses and stock compensation.
He should realise that money isn't what motivates a developer to do good work. But money is what motivates a good developer to work for _his_ company and not the competitor.
Interestingly, it does suggest a strategy to deter litigation if you are ever caught up in one of these cases or to crumble the plaintiff's whole scheme if the defendants could all coordinate.
The defendants can't coordinate, because they are all John Does. Nobody knows who the defendants actually are. Including the defendants. If _you_ are a defendant, then you can increase the cost of suing you by insisting that you are not part of a group.
If you read the actual story, one out of 100 John Doe's in 5 cases complained to the court that they wanted a separate trial. The plaintiff then dismissed the case against that person with prejudice (in other words, gave up any chance to ever sue them again) to avoid the separate trial. Didn't work. The judge took it on himself to look at the complaint, even though John Doe wasn't part of the case anymore, applied it to all five cases not just the one that included John Doe, and now there are five cases against five John Does, and the plaintiff would have to open another 94 cases if they want to proceed. Which means paying about 20 more money for lawyers etc. Suddenly it's not a way to make money anymore.
When I say limits, I mean on what machine or OS they can run it, their ability to fix bugs or make it do what they want it to do, their ability to share their modifications that they made with others, etc.
Users can't fix bug. Users can't make software do what they want it to do. There's a tiny percentage of users who happen to be software developers and who could, but it's not worth their time.
I know of parents that don't give peanuts to their kids since babies, just in case they have allergies. So the kid does not develop protection. They give them allergies out of paranoia
The problem is not that the kid doesn't develop protection. The kid develops a very strong protection mechanism against peanuts, so strong that it can kill. Because peanuts are unknown they are assumed to be a threat.
But you're right; it is a case where trying to protect the children is the worst you can do.
Or maybe, Android could deny approval of applications that try to seek location data for applications that have no location based function. Data mongering fuckers.
Didn't think there was any approval process in Android. So you install an app, it may tell you that it wants your location data, and if you say "no" it won't work. Your choice of giving up your location or not using the app. Minor case of blackmail. That's where the "walled garden" approach comes handy. If your app needs location data for no good reason then it doesn't get on the store. If it refuses to perform functions that don't need location data, when the user refuses to allow access to location, it doesn't get on the store. In any case, the user will be asked the first time location data is used, and can remove permission at any time in "Settings".
- Their business is advertisement but they dont assault you with intrusive ads and they dont try to stop programs like AdBlock which completely undermines their business model. Hell, they even make it easy to install in Chrome's app store.
They have been convicted or are in court in multiple places for deliberatily going around users' privacy settings in Safari and Internet Explorer.
True, RMS is not against for-profit software, per se. And a GPL license on software does not preclude *also* licensing it under some other license in order to profit from it. So thanks for the opportunity for me to clarify.
Stallman is probably one of the people making the most money from GPL code. And if you look at him, he looks like something that my wife wouldn't allow into our home because she'd have to disinfect everything after he left.
Apple's management (notably Steve Jobs) and some people who work for Apple used to work at NeXT. When NeXT needed a compiler, they chose to base their work on GCC. NeXT got caught distributing the GCC Objective-C frontend in violation of the GPL [gnu.org] in what Brad Kuhn (longtime FSF employee and GPL violations enforcer) called a "calculated" infringement [faif.us]. It's reasonable to consider that when Jobs and company lost that fight they decided to get away from GPL'd software because they had experience with a copyright holder who defended their license. Sadly, Apple is building quite a record of copyright infringement. Apple got caught distributing VLC [fsf.org] and GNU Go [fsf.org] in violation of the GPL. Apple also got caught commercially infringing upon some writers' copyright [zdnet.com]. So perhaps Apple's switch from GCC toward a non-copylefted free compiler has at least as much to do with control over the user as any technical issues. After Apple's other illegal and unethical behavior [counterpunch.org], maybe Apple is just getting tired of the bad press.
There are some quite deliberate misrepresentations here. If someone from FSF calls something that Apple does a "calculated infringement", that doesn't make it true. It is a purely political statement. Apple didn't "get caught" distributing VLC and GNU Go. App developers created derivative works of VLC and GNU Go and published then on the app store. One of the copyright holders then decided that in order to protect users' freedom to create and publish derivative works, they had to prevent the publication of these derivative works and sent on of those evil DMCA notices to Apple. Apple respected the wishes of these copyright holders and removed the apps. Whether there was any copyright infringement is undecided and in my opinion unlikely.
You also provide a link to a case in China. Yes, there were criminals in China who took the works of authors, claimed that they had the rights to publish them, and published them on Apple's eBook store. Unlike the USA, where the author could send a DMCA notice and the book would be removed, in China Apple was found guilty for the actions of others and fined.
The App store TOS prohibits releasing software that is GPL. You can find your favorite source if you google "app store gpl".
No, the GPL prohibits releasing software on the App Store. Apple are just going along with the wishes of the authors of the GPL-licensed code there.
The first quote refers to an FSF website. Seriously, we know that Stallman hates Apple, as proven with his vile comments when Steve Jobs died, so don't expect anything objective there. But let's look at facts:
When you publish an app on Apple's App Store, you have to agree that people legally downloading the app have certain rights - which are quite different from the rights that GPL gives. The App Store also allows you to use your own license - which means you give users any rights _you_ want to give them, but you agree that they also have the default App Store rights. So if your app is GPL licensed, your lucky users get both sets of rights.
The only problem is that you cannot charge money for GPL licensed software. The App Store says that any payment is _for the license_ to use the software. GPL says that you cannot charge _for the license_ to use the software. So the software must cost $0.
For the second quote: Whether the GPL license forbids putting your software on the App Store or not is possibly an open question (and I think it doesn't). However, if the copyright holder tells Apple that they don't want their copyrighted code on the App Store, then Apple removes that code. (No app developer has then sued the copyright holder, so we don't know the legal situation). If the author of the app is the copyright holder, then the point is moot, and GPL licensed code can appear on the app store just fine. And with the way MacOS X and iOS apps are built, it is actually quite easy to include the source code in the shipped application.
RMS doesn't do "Open Source Software" he does "Free Software" instead. The whole Free Software thing kicked off because he got a new OS, and his printer wouldn't work with it. He needed the driver source, and found another coder who had the same hardware and driver source, but they were required to sign a "business friendly" NDA such that that they could not pass on the code they received.
Many people know the story. And today, that argument is a lot of bullshit. I bought a colour laser printer for a bit over £100. Lucky enough, the printer driver works. If it didn't, and I had the source code and all the needed development tools, I might be able to fix problems. That puts me probably into 0.1% of the population. However, it would be absolutely idiotic if I did that. It would be such a waste of my very limited free time. I'd rather pay another £100 for a new printer than fix that printer driver.
Users have absolutely no need or desire for source code. Developers have.
Isn't a "race to the bottom" just a natural consequence of a competitive market working properly?
Not at all. Quite the opposite, actually. "Race to the bottom" happens in a product category where the buyer cannot easily determine which value is worth more. Let's say a $1,000 laptop and a $1,100 laptop that has a better battery, longer lasting keyboard and some other advantages that you only figure out after using it for two years. Since the customer can't see a difference, they buy then one for $1,000 even if they would prefer the $1,100 one if they had known the advantages.
So what happens? The company making the $1,100 laptop doesn't sell any, replaces the good parts with less good parts, and sells their laptop for $900. People buy it, so the parts in the $1,000 laptop get replaced with parts that aren't good at all. And so on and so on. In the end, everyone sells cheap rubbish. That's "race to the bottom".
In the computer market, Apple managed quite nicely to stay out of the "race to the bottom". And ultrabooks are everyone else's attempt to climb away from the bottom. And obviously I'd rather pay $400 for a laptop than $1,000, but on the other hand I know that $400 for rubbish is wasted money while $1,000 for quality isn't. So "race to the bottom" means that everyone suffers. Manufacturers who don't make money, and customers who get crap for their money.
So in a well-working competitive market, I would have a choice between expensive quality products, and cheap rubbish products. My choice. "Race to the bottom" means there is only cheap rubbish.
Well, there are numerous parties we can blame here. Certainly the NSA, but what about the advertising companies? They build leaky software, and they make their money by harvesting information you don't know you're sending or don't wish to be sending to them anyway.
People think that the NSA would have to hack into something. But they could open a little office with a few programmers that offers their services writing advertising software. Lots of companies don't create that software in-house. And I bet a small company owned by the NSA can offer really competitive prices. No hacking involved.
A while ago there was news of a new jailbreak for iOS. Again, what better opportunity for the NSA than to actually take over the people creating the jailbreak and modifying it, and get users to actually install the software that hacks their phone themselves?
Consider the latter cases, where the shopper has still facilitated a crime, which they were unaware of until after the fact, despite the goods themselves not being stolen goods.
The crime is knowingly receiving stolen goods. Bizarrely, buying goods that you _think_ are stolen even though they are not (for example if I told you that all the TVs in the pawn shop are cheap because they are stolen and you believe me) is an attempted crime in the USA and illegal as well. Just difficult to prove.
"Knowingly" doesn't mean that you have 100% proof, it means that a reasonable person would suspect that theft was involved. And whether you know it or not, the stolen goods don't become your property so the real owner can take them back without paying you any compensation. On the other hand, this only applies to stolen goods. And that means it must be the same goods that were actually stolen. If I steal $10,000 and use it to buy a car, the car isn't "stolen goods". Actually, the $10,000 isn't stolen goods because cash is not an identifiable good. So if I sell you my car for $10,000 that I know you have stolen, I don't think that selling the car to you is illegal. Not reporting a crime may be illegal, but selling the car isn't.
They're keeping patent law alive. Not content with being sued by Apple, they will now be sued by microsoft - presumably as their 'tiles' are 'too square'.
Samsung has done plenty of suing themselves - not with much success. The worst failure of course in the EU, where Samsung has been threatened with a fine up to 13 billion dollars if they continue to try using Samsung patents in an anti-competitive way.
I'm curious about the legal situation with respect to bugfixes in the EU: EU warranty law requires the vendor to warrant that a product is free of manufacturing defects, and there is no time limit to this warranty. It could be argued that any bug in software is a "manufacturing defect", and therefore the vendor needs to provide bugfixes forever more.
1. It's EU directives, which need to be turned into law in individual countries.
2. There is most definitely a time limit, which is "defect free for a reasonable amount of time". And for example in the UK, there are general limits.
3. This is all "Consumer Protection Law". If you are a company buying from another company, a contract is a contract.
Next you need to argue that a software bug is a manufacturing defect. That will be very hard to argue indeed. Sure, if the binary you received is different from the one that I received because your DVD is defective, that's a manufacturing defect. A bug that keeps the software from doing what it is intended to do is a manufacturing defect. But a bug in some rarely used functionality that is not explicitly advertised is not a manufacturing defect. Unless Oracle was stupid enough to claim its software is bug free. "Defect" is measured against what is advertised. If your shoes fall apart after swimming in the sea or your watch stops working, that's not a manufacturing defect because it's not what the seller promised.
Being one of the top hardware vendors doesn't magically enable you to write good software.
It might make you code at producing gazillions of ROMs, or flash drives, or DVDs, containing the good software, because that's what hardware is about, but it doesn't make you good at writing good software.
I definitely should have said this in my other post. I laugh and laugh at the Mac's chiclet crap. They're horrible to use for touch typing, just one step above a membrane keyboard. Yet everyone "loves" them because Steve Jobs told them to.
The keyboards on the MacBooks are just fine. Actually very nice, because the amount of finger action needed to type is minimal. Returning your compliment, it's clear that you have been brainwashed by Google and Samsung to make such a statement.
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As an idiot and jackass, please let me be the first to thank you for your constant yielding.
I pay a lot less insurance every year than you do :-)
Most great developers I know would work for free if their modest needs were provided for and they could do what they love to do.
You don't know any great married developers?
I've heard a CEO say exactly this in response to questions from an employee about bonuses and stock compensation.
He should realise that money isn't what motivates a developer to do good work. But money is what motivates a good developer to work for _his_ company and not the competitor.
Interestingly, it does suggest a strategy to deter litigation if you are ever caught up in one of these cases or to crumble the plaintiff's whole scheme if the defendants could all coordinate.
The defendants can't coordinate, because they are all John Does. Nobody knows who the defendants actually are. Including the defendants. If _you_ are a defendant, then you can increase the cost of suing you by insisting that you are not part of a group.
then surely there is good reason that this should be regulated.
If you read the actual story, one out of 100 John Doe's in 5 cases complained to the court that they wanted a separate trial. The plaintiff then dismissed the case against that person with prejudice (in other words, gave up any chance to ever sue them again) to avoid the separate trial. Didn't work. The judge took it on himself to look at the complaint, even though John Doe wasn't part of the case anymore, applied it to all five cases not just the one that included John Doe, and now there are five cases against five John Does, and the plaintiff would have to open another 94 cases if they want to proceed. Which means paying about 20 more money for lawyers etc. Suddenly it's not a way to make money anymore.
When I say limits, I mean on what machine or OS they can run it, their ability to fix bugs or make it do what they want it to do, their ability to share their modifications that they made with others, etc.
Users can't fix bug. Users can't make software do what they want it to do. There's a tiny percentage of users who happen to be software developers and who could, but it's not worth their time.
I know of parents that don't give peanuts to their kids since babies, just in case they have allergies. So the kid does not develop protection. They give them allergies out of paranoia
The problem is not that the kid doesn't develop protection. The kid develops a very strong protection mechanism against peanuts, so strong that it can kill. Because peanuts are unknown they are assumed to be a threat.
But you're right; it is a case where trying to protect the children is the worst you can do.
Or maybe, Android could deny approval of applications that try to seek location data for applications that have no location based function. Data mongering fuckers.
Didn't think there was any approval process in Android. So you install an app, it may tell you that it wants your location data, and if you say "no" it won't work. Your choice of giving up your location or not using the app. Minor case of blackmail. That's where the "walled garden" approach comes handy. If your app needs location data for no good reason then it doesn't get on the store. If it refuses to perform functions that don't need location data, when the user refuses to allow access to location, it doesn't get on the store. In any case, the user will be asked the first time location data is used, and can remove permission at any time in "Settings".
136 bucks to potentially get some special attention from the US government, sponsored by Microsoft and Apple? No thanks.
Please explain why Microsoft and Apple would do anything to harass Linus Torvalds?
Seven million extra doctors' visits are hardly inconsequential, especially considering that only about 1 in 175 would actually be suicidal.
An interesting attitude. Compare this to Foxconn, which reduced the suicide rate among its workforce from 1 in 60,000 to 1 in 400,000 in three years.
- Their business is advertisement but they dont assault you with intrusive ads and they dont try to stop programs like AdBlock which completely undermines their business model. Hell, they even make it easy to install in Chrome's app store.
They have been convicted or are in court in multiple places for deliberatily going around users' privacy settings in Safari and Internet Explorer.
True, RMS is not against for-profit software, per se. And a GPL license on software does not preclude *also* licensing it under some other license in order to profit from it. So thanks for the opportunity for me to clarify.
Stallman is probably one of the people making the most money from GPL code. And if you look at him, he looks like something that my wife wouldn't allow into our home because she'd have to disinfect everything after he left.
Apple's management (notably Steve Jobs) and some people who work for Apple used to work at NeXT. When NeXT needed a compiler, they chose to base their work on GCC. NeXT got caught distributing the GCC Objective-C frontend in violation of the GPL [gnu.org] in what Brad Kuhn (longtime FSF employee and GPL violations enforcer) called a "calculated" infringement [faif.us]. It's reasonable to consider that when Jobs and company lost that fight they decided to get away from GPL'd software because they had experience with a copyright holder who defended their license. Sadly, Apple is building quite a record of copyright infringement. Apple got caught distributing VLC [fsf.org] and GNU Go [fsf.org] in violation of the GPL. Apple also got caught commercially infringing upon some writers' copyright [zdnet.com]. So perhaps Apple's switch from GCC toward a non-copylefted free compiler has at least as much to do with control over the user as any technical issues. After Apple's other illegal and unethical behavior [counterpunch.org], maybe Apple is just getting tired of the bad press.
There are some quite deliberate misrepresentations here. If someone from FSF calls something that Apple does a "calculated infringement", that doesn't make it true. It is a purely political statement. Apple didn't "get caught" distributing VLC and GNU Go. App developers created derivative works of VLC and GNU Go and published then on the app store. One of the copyright holders then decided that in order to protect users' freedom to create and publish derivative works, they had to prevent the publication of these derivative works and sent on of those evil DMCA notices to Apple. Apple respected the wishes of these copyright holders and removed the apps. Whether there was any copyright infringement is undecided and in my opinion unlikely.
You also provide a link to a case in China. Yes, there were criminals in China who took the works of authors, claimed that they had the rights to publish them, and published them on Apple's eBook store. Unlike the USA, where the author could send a DMCA notice and the book would be removed, in China Apple was found guilty for the actions of others and fined.
But it isn't "better than GCC". It is targeted pretty much exclusively at x86 ...
I wonder what compiler people use for iOS (ARM) development...
The App store TOS prohibits releasing software that is GPL. You can find your favorite source if you google "app store gpl".
No, the GPL prohibits releasing software on the App Store. Apple are just going along with the wishes of the authors of the GPL-licensed code there.
The first quote refers to an FSF website. Seriously, we know that Stallman hates Apple, as proven with his vile comments when Steve Jobs died, so don't expect anything objective there. But let's look at facts:
When you publish an app on Apple's App Store, you have to agree that people legally downloading the app have certain rights - which are quite different from the rights that GPL gives. The App Store also allows you to use your own license - which means you give users any rights _you_ want to give them, but you agree that they also have the default App Store rights. So if your app is GPL licensed, your lucky users get both sets of rights.
The only problem is that you cannot charge money for GPL licensed software. The App Store says that any payment is _for the license_ to use the software. GPL says that you cannot charge _for the license_ to use the software. So the software must cost $0.
For the second quote: Whether the GPL license forbids putting your software on the App Store or not is possibly an open question (and I think it doesn't). However, if the copyright holder tells Apple that they don't want their copyrighted code on the App Store, then Apple removes that code. (No app developer has then sued the copyright holder, so we don't know the legal situation). If the author of the app is the copyright holder, then the point is moot, and GPL licensed code can appear on the app store just fine. And with the way MacOS X and iOS apps are built, it is actually quite easy to include the source code in the shipped application.
RMS doesn't do "Open Source Software" he does "Free Software" instead. The whole Free Software thing kicked off because he got a new OS, and his printer wouldn't work with it. He needed the driver source, and found another coder who had the same hardware and driver source, but they were required to sign a "business friendly" NDA such that that they could not pass on the code they received.
Many people know the story. And today, that argument is a lot of bullshit. I bought a colour laser printer for a bit over £100. Lucky enough, the printer driver works. If it didn't, and I had the source code and all the needed development tools, I might be able to fix problems. That puts me probably into 0.1% of the population. However, it would be absolutely idiotic if I did that. It would be such a waste of my very limited free time. I'd rather pay another £100 for a new printer than fix that printer driver.
Users have absolutely no need or desire for source code. Developers have.
Isn't a "race to the bottom" just a natural consequence of a competitive market working properly?
Not at all. Quite the opposite, actually. "Race to the bottom" happens in a product category where the buyer cannot easily determine which value is worth more. Let's say a $1,000 laptop and a $1,100 laptop that has a better battery, longer lasting keyboard and some other advantages that you only figure out after using it for two years. Since the customer can't see a difference, they buy then one for $1,000 even if they would prefer the $1,100 one if they had known the advantages.
So what happens? The company making the $1,100 laptop doesn't sell any, replaces the good parts with less good parts, and sells their laptop for $900. People buy it, so the parts in the $1,000 laptop get replaced with parts that aren't good at all. And so on and so on. In the end, everyone sells cheap rubbish. That's "race to the bottom".
In the computer market, Apple managed quite nicely to stay out of the "race to the bottom". And ultrabooks are everyone else's attempt to climb away from the bottom. And obviously I'd rather pay $400 for a laptop than $1,000, but on the other hand I know that $400 for rubbish is wasted money while $1,000 for quality isn't. So "race to the bottom" means that everyone suffers. Manufacturers who don't make money, and customers who get crap for their money.
So in a well-working competitive market, I would have a choice between expensive quality products, and cheap rubbish products. My choice. "Race to the bottom" means there is only cheap rubbish.
Well, there are numerous parties we can blame here. Certainly the NSA, but what about the advertising companies? They build leaky software, and they make their money by harvesting information you don't know you're sending or don't wish to be sending to them anyway.
People think that the NSA would have to hack into something. But they could open a little office with a few programmers that offers their services writing advertising software. Lots of companies don't create that software in-house. And I bet a small company owned by the NSA can offer really competitive prices. No hacking involved.
A while ago there was news of a new jailbreak for iOS. Again, what better opportunity for the NSA than to actually take over the people creating the jailbreak and modifying it, and get users to actually install the software that hacks their phone themselves?
Consider the latter cases, where the shopper has still facilitated a crime, which they were unaware of until after the fact, despite the goods themselves not being stolen goods.
The crime is knowingly receiving stolen goods. Bizarrely, buying goods that you _think_ are stolen even though they are not (for example if I told you that all the TVs in the pawn shop are cheap because they are stolen and you believe me) is an attempted crime in the USA and illegal as well. Just difficult to prove.
"Knowingly" doesn't mean that you have 100% proof, it means that a reasonable person would suspect that theft was involved. And whether you know it or not, the stolen goods don't become your property so the real owner can take them back without paying you any compensation. On the other hand, this only applies to stolen goods. And that means it must be the same goods that were actually stolen. If I steal $10,000 and use it to buy a car, the car isn't "stolen goods". Actually, the $10,000 isn't stolen goods because cash is not an identifiable good. So if I sell you my car for $10,000 that I know you have stolen, I don't think that selling the car to you is illegal. Not reporting a crime may be illegal, but selling the car isn't.
They're keeping patent law alive. Not content with being sued by Apple, they will now be sued by microsoft - presumably as their 'tiles' are 'too square'.
Samsung has done plenty of suing themselves - not with much success. The worst failure of course in the EU, where Samsung has been threatened with a fine up to 13 billion dollars if they continue to try using Samsung patents in an anti-competitive way.
I'm curious about the legal situation with respect to bugfixes in the EU: EU warranty law requires the vendor to warrant that a product is free of manufacturing defects, and there is no time limit to this warranty. It could be argued that any bug in software is a "manufacturing defect", and therefore the vendor needs to provide bugfixes forever more.
1. It's EU directives, which need to be turned into law in individual countries.
2. There is most definitely a time limit, which is "defect free for a reasonable amount of time". And for example in the UK, there are general limits.
3. This is all "Consumer Protection Law". If you are a company buying from another company, a contract is a contract.
Next you need to argue that a software bug is a manufacturing defect. That will be very hard to argue indeed. Sure, if the binary you received is different from the one that I received because your DVD is defective, that's a manufacturing defect. A bug that keeps the software from doing what it is intended to do is a manufacturing defect. But a bug in some rarely used functionality that is not explicitly advertised is not a manufacturing defect. Unless Oracle was stupid enough to claim its software is bug free. "Defect" is measured against what is advertised. If your shoes fall apart after swimming in the sea or your watch stops working, that's not a manufacturing defect because it's not what the seller promised.
Being one of the top hardware vendors doesn't magically enable you to write good software.
It might make you code at producing gazillions of ROMs, or flash drives, or DVDs, containing the good software, because that's what hardware is about, but it doesn't make you good at writing good software.
Keep the number of requests below 1000.
Vastly expand the scope of each request.
Apple was the first with updated reporting. 0 to 249 requests, affecting 0 to 249 accounts.
I definitely should have said this in my other post. I laugh and laugh at the Mac's chiclet crap. They're horrible to use for touch typing, just one step above a membrane keyboard. Yet everyone "loves" them because Steve Jobs told them to.
The keyboards on the MacBooks are just fine. Actually very nice, because the amount of finger action needed to type is minimal. Returning your compliment, it's clear that you have been brainwashed by Google and Samsung to make such a statement.