"Drillers say they would like to keep the exact formula of the chemicals they use secret because it represents a competitive advantage."
Too fracking bad.
Besides, there's no need for secret competitive advantage when it comes to energy. They all rake in billions regardless. It's a natural resource and it's up to us to monitor how it's used. If you don't want to be in the lucrative energy business because you dislike the transparency that needs to accompany it, then you need to find another business to be in.
Code review is purposefully a politically loaded process which enables management to divide and conquer and keep wages down.
Such processes can get hung up on stupid details when coder A's readability is better than coder B and C's, but unfortunately for A, is also not "standard" and s/he gets slammed for it and told to conform even if it makes for slightly less readable code just because it satisfies some corporate "this is how we do it and you don't question it".
I think code reviews would be much more valuable if they were totally blind an anonymous as a means for each coder to gain insight into what others think of his/her code without knowing who is doing the critiquing, and without management ever knowing about any aspect of it.
For that matter how can it distinguish between any compliant device and one that isn't due to jailbreaking or any other user modifications (including the aforementioned tape)? The fact is that once companies trust the system to work, it will be trivial for someone to bypass it simply by presenting what appears to be a compliant device and entering the premises and using it to take pictures to their hearts content. Not to mention you could buy a secret lapel or pen camera easily.
The bottom line is that organizations, like courts, offices, concerts, etc, that would be best served by this technology would only find it valuable if it were guaranteed to work, and very hard to bypass and easy to catch when being bypassed, none of which this tech solves. Worse, it can give a false sense of security and open an organization up to worse vulnerabilities.
At the end of the day, banning devices from entering is the only solution they can reasonably try to implement, and they'd end up having to use both the technology as well as the ban anyway. So what's the point?
Only thing a camera jammer is good for is killing the rights and liberties of common folk.
Simple is good. However, allowing the inventor to sell a patent and just moving the production requirement to the buyer limits the potential benefit to society too much. You're in essence arguing that a patent should be good solely for granting a monopoly to one producer and prohibiting any one else from also producing the invention.
Licensing technology is a great way to increase standards adoption. Many companies are happy to pay a small fee to an inventor to avoid reinventing the wheel. Our system should allow that.
I believe it's better to simply make it so that a patents protection expires the moment the patent is sold without an execution/production component. Therefore, only the original inventor is allowed to license without ever having a production component.
I also think patents should expire after one year. Renewal should be allowed annually for 20 years. Each year it should cost twice as much as the previous year, and the "original" baseline cost used to calculate the renewal fee should be $100, $1,000 or $10,000 depending on the size and scope of the entity renewing the patent ($100 for an individual, $1,000 for a single-state corporation of 10 or fewer employees, $10,000 for a corporation that does business across state lines or has more than 10 employees).
This will encourage entities to actually generate money from their patents or else stop renewing them.
If you're a serial inventor, you can choose to license all of your patents to other entities, or you execute on one or more of them (or both). At some point after the first successful patent, you would likely have enough money to run a full-blown corporation. From that point on, you could just file all your subsequent patents under your corporation (but the ones you originally came up with would still be in your name). A special exceptional patent process could exist for inventors wishing to consolidate all their patents under a single corporation for which that they hold a majority sake.
If you're a serial inventor, you could be your own patent troll just by patenting a lot of stuff and licensing it out. So patent trolling wouldn't go away, it would just become non-transferrable and benefit the original inventor only.
Obvious patents are a huge deal too. You're right I'm not addressing that, because it is far more complicated. But I'd like to see that reformed.
As for a black market. If you're willing to take the risk of holding on to an idea and not patenting it, then what's wrong with that? The "ready for registration" would be too little too late in most cases because by the time people see value in a patent, it's because it's already being executed on in the market, and you can no longer patent it.
Or are you saying that a serial inventor could come up with a whole portfolio of ideas over a 5 year period, never patent a single one, but then approach a patent troll company and sell them all the ideas for them to patent? That possibility certainly exists and is definitely a good counterpoint to my position. On the other hand, an un-patented idea is worth far less than a patented idea and it's very risky to hold and to purchase and requires a whole lot of NDA and non-compete contracts. I think that would serve to mitigate the potential trouble significantly. Regardless, designing incentives to do away with this aspect, though a murky prospect, is worth thinking about.
At the end of the day, the gist of my position is ideas are a dime a dozen. People are constantly saying "someone should do X...." Anyone can (and does) have an idea. The trick is having the conviction to follow through. We need to reward raw ideas far less than reward those inventors who have the wherewithal to actually follow through.
If an idea is worth patenting, then even if you can't execute on it, it should be well worth your while to buy a godaddy domain, publicize it and license it. For what it's worth, that will be a drop in the bucket compared to the expense of obtaining a patent.
To clarify my poorly worded previous post: when I said "not allowed" I didn't mean it should be against the law, I meant it should just be that any patent should be worthless to another entity if it doesn't include the fabrication/production half. Being worthless, no one would ever offer an inventor money for just a patent.
If someone wanted to buy Apple, for example, then only patents that Apple had already successfully commercialized would be worth anything. The rest of the patents Apple has filed over the years would immediately become unenforceable even if the buyer ended up executing on them.
If the patent is worthwhile, the engineer will have no trouble securing funding for a new company dedicated to producing the solar cell.
Alternatively, the engineer can sit on his hands and just publicize his new invention and set up licensing fees to others that wish to fabricate the invention.
However, the engineer should never be allowed to just shrug and sell off the patent. Buying a patent should be effectively worthless unless you are buying it as part of a package deal that includes production.
Being in the business of owning patent portfolios and not doing anything with them should be 100% non-viable.
or do you think that inventors shouldn't be allowed to sell patents?
BINGO.
If you set out to patent an invention, you should only be able to profit from patent protection if you actually execute on the patented invention, or if you are waiting to figure out how to execute (waiting on investors, waiting on cheaper technology, etc) and someone else comes along and commercially releases an invention that trespasses on it.
Selling a patent should be worthless unless you are selling it as part of a business that is actively involved in commercially executing / production on that very patent. In which case the entire patent + production bundle exchange hands.
The way it should be: If you are unable to execute on a patented invention then you are SOL unless someone else decides to trespass on it. If you invent something and patent, your only hopes of getting paid are either executing or suing someone who violates your patent before you are able to execute.
In short, inventing something with no known means of executing on it, including the inability to raise investment capital to execute on it should be a worthless enterprise and unworthy of your time and money to patent. Let someone else patent it who can execute on it or who at least thinks they can and is willing to go unpaid on their patent.
Wanting to launch a nuclear attack and being able to pull it off are two vastly different things. Obtaining the stuff and handling it properly and knowing how to use it and smuggling it all require lots of money, organization, training, etc.
Also, my key word was "imminent" meaning any time in not too distant future. If he was actually cozy with Pakistan, it may have been as soon as the upcoming 10 year anniversary. He would have certainly wanted to do something like that.
His being gone simply buys us more time before someone else can fill that same ability.
And it's not like his followers are any better off or more capable or hating us any more because we killed him. That's an absurd argument.
There are a ton of small businesses and independent contractors making a living off of OSS. OSS has created an ecosystem for them to thrive, as well being a critical component of bigger for-profit companies (look at Apple and even Google for example).
The accusation that OSS makes people no money and is therefore not worth investing in is patently false. It has proven a huge boon to our modern economy. As a web developer, my livelihood would be severely crippled if all I could rely on were Microsoft or Adobe technologies.
Red Hat is but one example of someone who had a brilliant means of parlaying an OSS living into a significantly large enterprise. There are other examples out there that have sprouted decent sized corporate entities but having had varying success, such as JBOSS (ironically now part of RH), MySQL, Ruby on Rails...
That there is no collection of mega-corporations with the exact same business model as Red Hat doesn't invalidate the business model. It certainly doesn't make the OP's case that everyone part of the for-profit OSS industry is going out of business.
For the most part, marketshare is only a meaningful metric to shareholders and a competitive mindset.
If your employees are well paid and the company is alive and well, it doesn't matter if you're first or last in market share. If your product is crap and you lose marketshare and go out of business, well the problem was the product, not the marketshare; perilously declining marketshare was only a symptom of a problem. But declining marketshare itself, like due to population growth or sprouting competition amidst the growth of an emerging market does not mean your business is dying. You could be doing better year over year and still lose marketshare.
The mentality that "if you're not growing you're dying" is nothing more than simplistic and short-sighted sloganeering.
For what it's worth, even if it were true, dying is not necessarily a bad thing if the alternative is unbridled growth for the sole benefit of shareholders and diminishing returns (or loss) to society.
growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.
We're getting off topic, but I want to engage this point anyway.
First, I'm 100% in agreement with you.
However, I see this as something of a cancerous relationship. On average, shareholders don't care an iota about what value or detriment the company brings to society, or whether the value or detriment comes now or in the future, or whether the value or detriment comes at the expense or benefit of a limited set of certain members of society. Shareholders only want to put their money in a company and get a fast return so they can dump it before it starts to flatten out or decline, as they move on to the next company. CEOs are beholden to shareholders and not their company's employees or customers. Decisions are made to maximize shareholder returns, not to maximize value. Or worse, decisions are made to avoid punishment from shareholders, not to sustain a healthy company. The modern practice of day trading has made this all even worse.
I'm not saying making boatloads of money or giving your shareholders massive returns year after year is bad. I'm just saying that being fixated on this being the Raison d'être for most (non small business) companies in the US is ultimately detrimental to our society, our economy, and the very capitalists and entrepreneurs who play the game.
The edict that a corporation's only purpose is to increase shareholder value is the problem.
But entrepreneurs and inventors often have a different purpose. They aim to solve a problem or make life better for others and get compensated commensurately for doing so. The fact that public investment helps fuel innovation and this kind of positive growth is certainly a good thing. But the fact that it almost always ends up getting corrupted into behemoth conglomerates seeking to make a fast buck for their shareholders and vastly overpaid CEO sock puppets while the original mission and vision of the founders atrophies and dies shows that our method has a dark side that seems completely unavoidable unless we can find a way to change the method in some fundamental way.
Really... so what? Red Hat is stable and exists as it does perfectly fine. This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.
Red Hat and Apple can exist at the same time regardless of size or popularity. All that matters for Red Hat is that they make enough money to support keeping it's employees working and the business around to keep offering what makes its customers happy year in and year out. Suggesting that they are somehow less valid because they are not as big as Apple or Microsoft is a non-sequitor in the context of the preceding discussion.
What is relevant to the preceding discussion is the question of whether making a living by being in the "OSS industry" can be a viable practice. The answer is clearly "yes."
Actually, I think that if the switch to Standard Time occurred at 2am on a Monday, and then the switch to DST occurred at 4pm on a Friday, everyone would be happy.
It basically gives you an hour longer to sleep in on a Monday in the fall, and lets you off work an hour early on a Friday in the spring, giving you the weekend to start re-adjusting. Everyone gets what they want with the least amount of stress.
I've always believed that some forms of future data storage / backup could take the shape of continuing broadcast of bits into space, to some satellite or space craft that beams it back to us. And back and forth.
The effect from WWII was less related to the war itself and more related to the a sudden groupthink that gave the population a sense of purpose, strength, and will. Yes, this was because the war created propaganda/groupthink. But the war itself dealt lots of damage that was counter-productive to the world economy and we suffered a huge loss of productivity that could have theoretically been achieved if we had performed the same research and manufacturing push without a war, but on a greater global scale that didn't involve people dying or spending all their time fighting instead of being productive.
But, we had been attacked and great injustices were going down oversees, we were instilled with the rah rah sense of purpose to make everything right again and the steadfast belief in our own ability to achieve this and our own greatness. Lots of investment flowed, and lots of people were happy to get working on anything to help our efforts out.
So in that unique moment, we needed the war to light a fire under our butts. But don't think for a minute the war was as economically efficient as having done it all in a non-descrutive way.
If nothing else, war seems to be the only thing that inspires a certain half of this country to spend tax dollars on science, research, and manufacturing. Were that half willing to make the same efforts in peacetime, think of how much better off everyone would be. But since we're stuck with half the population thinking like that, maybe it's true that war is the only way to stimulate our economy. And then that certain half comes out and actually uses that fact as "evidence" that defense spending is good for the economy.
The more profit the company keeps, the better valued and compensated the executives are. Also, this increases the value of the stock, which increases the net worth and credit worthiness of the executives.
The richer the company, the more lavish the perks the employees, and particularly the executives enjoy. For example, a country club membership so they can make sales.... a yacht to entertain business partners with... first class travel around the world, including paying for the spouse to accompany... all considered as a business expenses. Industry parties... the list goes on.
Look, I think it's a good idea not to tax businesses at all, because they provide employment. However, I do think it's wrong wrong wrong, to allow businesses to write off expenses and assets that only (and disproportionately) favor the executives while rank and file employees get shafted.
I think a company's executive leadership should be forced to make a choice: either disburse funds throughout all employees in such a way as to avoid taxation penalties, or... get taxed exponentially up the ass relative to the discrepancy in executive NET WORTH (not pay) vs lowest rank pay factoring in things like cash balance and stock worth of the company. This would make it less attractive to throw parties and more attractive to spend money on the employees so as to avoid paying more taxes yourself, as an executive. Alternatively, if you don't want to compensate your employees more, because you feel the company needs to save money for future projects, then you would either have to reduce your salary, or pay substantially more taxes (which would benefit society if not your employees).
I think the problem is that we have conflated the need for compression algorithms with the ability to share files with each other.
I think for the good of humanity, by law, all files should be able to be open and viewed "free of charge." -- as in a software or hardware producer need not pay licensing fees ever for the privledge of opening a file using any other technology.
Similarly, all tools used to compress files can be paid for by the software producer (like Final Cut or what have you) and passed on to the creative business consumer in the price of the software and hardware needed to perform the encoding and other things. Once paid, however, no author of creative content should be required to ever pay license fees for use of those tools, whether their content is free or not.
This simplifies the whole process and makes everything free and open, while still allowing enterprising folk to come up with better and better compression algorithms and get paid for doing so if they charge a fair market rate. It also means no one ever need fear getting locked into any particular format since all formats are free to decode.
Slashdot Mirror
Trees wear rubber-soled shoes?
How much you want to bet this is a set up to enable Growl to become purchased by Apple for eventual inclusion into the OS
=) no mod points, but one of the more amusing posts I've read on here in some time
"Drillers say they would like to keep the exact formula of the chemicals they use secret because it represents a competitive advantage."
Too fracking bad.
Besides, there's no need for secret competitive advantage when it comes to energy. They all rake in billions regardless. It's a natural resource and it's up to us to monitor how it's used. If you don't want to be in the lucrative energy business because you dislike the transparency that needs to accompany it, then you need to find another business to be in.
Get off my damn lawn!
Code review is purposefully a politically loaded process which enables management to divide and conquer and keep wages down.
Such processes can get hung up on stupid details when coder A's readability is better than coder B and C's, but unfortunately for A, is also not "standard" and s/he gets slammed for it and told to conform even if it makes for slightly less readable code just because it satisfies some corporate "this is how we do it and you don't question it".
I think code reviews would be much more valuable if they were totally blind an anonymous as a means for each coder to gain insight into what others think of his/her code without knowing who is doing the critiquing, and without management ever knowing about any aspect of it.
For that matter how can it distinguish between any compliant device and one that isn't due to jailbreaking or any other user modifications (including the aforementioned tape)? The fact is that once companies trust the system to work, it will be trivial for someone to bypass it simply by presenting what appears to be a compliant device and entering the premises and using it to take pictures to their hearts content. Not to mention you could buy a secret lapel or pen camera easily.
The bottom line is that organizations, like courts, offices, concerts, etc, that would be best served by this technology would only find it valuable if it were guaranteed to work, and very hard to bypass and easy to catch when being bypassed, none of which this tech solves. Worse, it can give a false sense of security and open an organization up to worse vulnerabilities.
At the end of the day, banning devices from entering is the only solution they can reasonably try to implement, and they'd end up having to use both the technology as well as the ban anyway. So what's the point?
Only thing a camera jammer is good for is killing the rights and liberties of common folk.
Simple is good. However, allowing the inventor to sell a patent and just moving the production requirement to the buyer limits the potential benefit to society too much. You're in essence arguing that a patent should be good solely for granting a monopoly to one producer and prohibiting any one else from also producing the invention.
Licensing technology is a great way to increase standards adoption. Many companies are happy to pay a small fee to an inventor to avoid reinventing the wheel. Our system should allow that.
I believe it's better to simply make it so that a patents protection expires the moment the patent is sold without an execution/production component. Therefore, only the original inventor is allowed to license without ever having a production component.
I also think patents should expire after one year. Renewal should be allowed annually for 20 years. Each year it should cost twice as much as the previous year, and the "original" baseline cost used to calculate the renewal fee should be $100, $1,000 or $10,000 depending on the size and scope of the entity renewing the patent ($100 for an individual, $1,000 for a single-state corporation of 10 or fewer employees, $10,000 for a corporation that does business across state lines or has more than 10 employees).
This will encourage entities to actually generate money from their patents or else stop renewing them.
Then you shouldn't patent it.
Under my proposal:
If you're a serial inventor, you can choose to license all of your patents to other entities, or you execute on one or more of them (or both). At some point after the first successful patent, you would likely have enough money to run a full-blown corporation. From that point on, you could just file all your subsequent patents under your corporation (but the ones you originally came up with would still be in your name). A special exceptional patent process could exist for inventors wishing to consolidate all their patents under a single corporation for which that they hold a majority sake.
If you're a serial inventor, you could be your own patent troll just by patenting a lot of stuff and licensing it out. So patent trolling wouldn't go away, it would just become non-transferrable and benefit the original inventor only.
Obvious patents are a huge deal too. You're right I'm not addressing that, because it is far more complicated. But I'd like to see that reformed.
As for a black market. If you're willing to take the risk of holding on to an idea and not patenting it, then what's wrong with that? The "ready for registration" would be too little too late in most cases because by the time people see value in a patent, it's because it's already being executed on in the market, and you can no longer patent it.
Or are you saying that a serial inventor could come up with a whole portfolio of ideas over a 5 year period, never patent a single one, but then approach a patent troll company and sell them all the ideas for them to patent? That possibility certainly exists and is definitely a good counterpoint to my position. On the other hand, an un-patented idea is worth far less than a patented idea and it's very risky to hold and to purchase and requires a whole lot of NDA and non-compete contracts. I think that would serve to mitigate the potential trouble significantly. Regardless, designing incentives to do away with this aspect, though a murky prospect, is worth thinking about.
At the end of the day, the gist of my position is ideas are a dime a dozen. People are constantly saying "someone should do X...." Anyone can (and does) have an idea. The trick is having the conviction to follow through. We need to reward raw ideas far less than reward those inventors who have the wherewithal to actually follow through.
If an idea is worth patenting, then even if you can't execute on it, it should be well worth your while to buy a godaddy domain, publicize it and license it. For what it's worth, that will be a drop in the bucket compared to the expense of obtaining a patent.
To clarify my poorly worded previous post: when I said "not allowed" I didn't mean it should be against the law, I meant it should just be that any patent should be worthless to another entity if it doesn't include the fabrication/production half. Being worthless, no one would ever offer an inventor money for just a patent.
If someone wanted to buy Apple, for example, then only patents that Apple had already successfully commercialized would be worth anything. The rest of the patents Apple has filed over the years would immediately become unenforceable even if the buyer ended up executing on them.
If the patent is worthwhile, the engineer will have no trouble securing funding for a new company dedicated to producing the solar cell.
Alternatively, the engineer can sit on his hands and just publicize his new invention and set up licensing fees to others that wish to fabricate the invention.
However, the engineer should never be allowed to just shrug and sell off the patent. Buying a patent should be effectively worthless unless you are buying it as part of a package deal that includes production.
Being in the business of owning patent portfolios and not doing anything with them should be 100% non-viable.
or do you think that inventors shouldn't be allowed to sell patents?
BINGO.
If you set out to patent an invention, you should only be able to profit from patent protection if you actually execute on the patented invention, or if you are waiting to figure out how to execute (waiting on investors, waiting on cheaper technology, etc) and someone else comes along and commercially releases an invention that trespasses on it.
Selling a patent should be worthless unless you are selling it as part of a business that is actively involved in commercially executing / production on that very patent. In which case the entire patent + production bundle exchange hands.
The way it should be: If you are unable to execute on a patented invention then you are SOL unless someone else decides to trespass on it. If you invent something and patent, your only hopes of getting paid are either executing or suing someone who violates your patent before you are able to execute.
In short, inventing something with no known means of executing on it, including the inability to raise investment capital to execute on it should be a worthless enterprise and unworthy of your time and money to patent. Let someone else patent it who can execute on it or who at least thinks they can and is willing to go unpaid on their patent.
Wanting to launch a nuclear attack and being able to pull it off are two vastly different things. Obtaining the stuff and handling it properly and knowing how to use it and smuggling it all require lots of money, organization, training, etc.
Also, my key word was "imminent" meaning any time in not too distant future. If he was actually cozy with Pakistan, it may have been as soon as the upcoming 10 year anniversary. He would have certainly wanted to do something like that.
His being gone simply buys us more time before someone else can fill that same ability.
And it's not like his followers are any better off or more capable or hating us any more because we killed him. That's an absurd argument.
We got buttloads of intel from his personal documents and computers.
It's a huge morale boost for the country and the troops. And the inverse for his ilk.
We got rid of the most likely foundation for an imminent nuclear attack.
We've proven that Pakistan is playing us like a fiddle.
We've taken out one more terrorist, and a pretty thorny one at that.
That was the point of my comment.
There are a ton of small businesses and independent contractors making a living off of OSS. OSS has created an ecosystem for them to thrive, as well being a critical component of bigger for-profit companies (look at Apple and even Google for example).
The accusation that OSS makes people no money and is therefore not worth investing in is patently false. It has proven a huge boon to our modern economy. As a web developer, my livelihood would be severely crippled if all I could rely on were Microsoft or Adobe technologies.
Red Hat is but one example of someone who had a brilliant means of parlaying an OSS living into a significantly large enterprise. There are other examples out there that have sprouted decent sized corporate entities but having had varying success, such as JBOSS (ironically now part of RH), MySQL, Ruby on Rails...
That there is no collection of mega-corporations with the exact same business model as Red Hat doesn't invalidate the business model. It certainly doesn't make the OP's case that everyone part of the for-profit OSS industry is going out of business.
For the most part, marketshare is only a meaningful metric to shareholders and a competitive mindset.
If your employees are well paid and the company is alive and well, it doesn't matter if you're first or last in market share. If your product is crap and you lose marketshare and go out of business, well the problem was the product, not the marketshare; perilously declining marketshare was only a symptom of a problem. But declining marketshare itself, like due to population growth or sprouting competition amidst the growth of an emerging market does not mean your business is dying. You could be doing better year over year and still lose marketshare.
The mentality that "if you're not growing you're dying" is nothing more than simplistic and short-sighted sloganeering.
For what it's worth, even if it were true, dying is not necessarily a bad thing if the alternative is unbridled growth for the sole benefit of shareholders and diminishing returns (or loss) to society.
growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.
We're getting off topic, but I want to engage this point anyway.
First, I'm 100% in agreement with you.
However, I see this as something of a cancerous relationship. On average, shareholders don't care an iota about what value or detriment the company brings to society, or whether the value or detriment comes now or in the future, or whether the value or detriment comes at the expense or benefit of a limited set of certain members of society. Shareholders only want to put their money in a company and get a fast return so they can dump it before it starts to flatten out or decline, as they move on to the next company. CEOs are beholden to shareholders and not their company's employees or customers. Decisions are made to maximize shareholder returns, not to maximize value. Or worse, decisions are made to avoid punishment from shareholders, not to sustain a healthy company. The modern practice of day trading has made this all even worse.
I'm not saying making boatloads of money or giving your shareholders massive returns year after year is bad. I'm just saying that being fixated on this being the Raison d'être for most (non small business) companies in the US is ultimately detrimental to our society, our economy, and the very capitalists and entrepreneurs who play the game.
The edict that a corporation's only purpose is to increase shareholder value is the problem.
But entrepreneurs and inventors often have a different purpose. They aim to solve a problem or make life better for others and get compensated commensurately for doing so. The fact that public investment helps fuel innovation and this kind of positive growth is certainly a good thing. But the fact that it almost always ends up getting corrupted into behemoth conglomerates seeking to make a fast buck for their shareholders and vastly overpaid CEO sock puppets while the original mission and vision of the founders atrophies and dies shows that our method has a dark side that seems completely unavoidable unless we can find a way to change the method in some fundamental way.
Growth for the sake of growth is a problem.
So what?
Really... so what? Red Hat is stable and exists as it does perfectly fine. This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.
Red Hat and Apple can exist at the same time regardless of size or popularity. All that matters for Red Hat is that they make enough money to support keeping it's employees working and the business around to keep offering what makes its customers happy year in and year out. Suggesting that they are somehow less valid because they are not as big as Apple or Microsoft is a non-sequitor in the context of the preceding discussion.
What is relevant to the preceding discussion is the question of whether making a living by being in the "OSS industry" can be a viable practice. The answer is clearly "yes."
Actually, I think that if the switch to Standard Time occurred at 2am on a Monday, and then the switch to DST occurred at 4pm on a Friday, everyone would be happy.
It basically gives you an hour longer to sleep in on a Monday in the fall, and lets you off work an hour early on a Friday in the spring, giving you the weekend to start re-adjusting. Everyone gets what they want with the least amount of stress.
What are these "mouse-clicks" you speak of? ;)
I use Apple Mail and it's Command-Shift-R to reply all, or Command-R to just reply.
Never ever have made a mistake in which I actually wanted.
I've always believed that some forms of future data storage / backup could take the shape of continuing broadcast of bits into space, to some satellite or space craft that beams it back to us. And back and forth.
Broken window fallacy shows how this is true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
The effect from WWII was less related to the war itself and more related to the a sudden groupthink that gave the population a sense of purpose, strength, and will. Yes, this was because the war created propaganda/groupthink. But the war itself dealt lots of damage that was counter-productive to the world economy and we suffered a huge loss of productivity that could have theoretically been achieved if we had performed the same research and manufacturing push without a war, but on a greater global scale that didn't involve people dying or spending all their time fighting instead of being productive.
But, we had been attacked and great injustices were going down oversees, we were instilled with the rah rah sense of purpose to make everything right again and the steadfast belief in our own ability to achieve this and our own greatness. Lots of investment flowed, and lots of people were happy to get working on anything to help our efforts out.
So in that unique moment, we needed the war to light a fire under our butts. But don't think for a minute the war was as economically efficient as having done it all in a non-descrutive way.
If nothing else, war seems to be the only thing that inspires a certain half of this country to spend tax dollars on science, research, and manufacturing. Were that half willing to make the same efforts in peacetime, think of how much better off everyone would be. But since we're stuck with half the population thinking like that, maybe it's true that war is the only way to stimulate our economy. And then that certain half comes out and actually uses that fact as "evidence" that defense spending is good for the economy.
How sad and backward it all is.
That's true at face value, however:
The more profit the company keeps, the better valued and compensated the executives are. Also, this increases the value of the stock, which increases the net worth and credit worthiness of the executives.
The richer the company, the more lavish the perks the employees, and particularly the executives enjoy. For example, a country club membership so they can make sales.... a yacht to entertain business partners with... first class travel around the world, including paying for the spouse to accompany... all considered as a business expenses. Industry parties... the list goes on.
Look, I think it's a good idea not to tax businesses at all, because they provide employment. However, I do think it's wrong wrong wrong, to allow businesses to write off expenses and assets that only (and disproportionately) favor the executives while rank and file employees get shafted.
I think a company's executive leadership should be forced to make a choice: either disburse funds throughout all employees in such a way as to avoid taxation penalties, or... get taxed exponentially up the ass relative to the discrepancy in executive NET WORTH (not pay) vs lowest rank pay factoring in things like cash balance and stock worth of the company. This would make it less attractive to throw parties and more attractive to spend money on the employees so as to avoid paying more taxes yourself, as an executive. Alternatively, if you don't want to compensate your employees more, because you feel the company needs to save money for future projects, then you would either have to reduce your salary, or pay substantially more taxes (which would benefit society if not your employees).
I think the problem is that we have conflated the need for compression algorithms with the ability to share files with each other.
I think for the good of humanity, by law, all files should be able to be open and viewed "free of charge." -- as in a software or hardware producer need not pay licensing fees ever for the privledge of opening a file using any other technology.
Similarly, all tools used to compress files can be paid for by the software producer (like Final Cut or what have you) and passed on to the creative business consumer in the price of the software and hardware needed to perform the encoding and other things. Once paid, however, no author of creative content should be required to ever pay license fees for use of those tools, whether their content is free or not.
This simplifies the whole process and makes everything free and open, while still allowing enterprising folk to come up with better and better compression algorithms and get paid for doing so if they charge a fair market rate. It also means no one ever need fear getting locked into any particular format since all formats are free to decode.