Frankly, if nobody pays to see movies, no movies will get made - or at least, only cheap movies where the person making them can afford to eat the cost. No more magical Hollywood special effects. You're not going to see Lord of the Rings get produced under a Creative Commons license. First, effects are getting cheaper all the time.
Second, the people making the movies wouldn't have to "eat the cost", they'd just have to be smarter about financing. Instead of making movies for free and then hoping to extract money from them later, they'd have to just sell their movie-making services to whatever entity or community was willing to pay them.
If you can bring in $100 million by selling tickets, then you can bring in $100 million by getting movie fans, exhibitors, movie player manufacturers, and anyone else who benefits from the movies' existence to fund their production. The demand doesn't just disappear.
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced. Is it? Or is it a vote for a world where that work is produced under a more sensible business model, or produced more efficiently and sold at a lower price? It's a fallacy to suppose that the only options are "music/movies are made on speculation and sold for $15 per copy" or "music/movies are never made at all".
That's a load of childish wank, but I know people like you have to parrot your ideologies even when they are totally outmoded, so go ahead and knock yourself out. Outmoded?
1 : not being in style 2 : no longer acceptable, current, or usable <outmoded customs>
If either of our ideologies is outmoded, it's yours. The idea that information should be made artificially scarce and treated like physical property is on its last legs. It's an artifact of an era when making copies was impractical for average folks but not for those with the capital to invest in mass production; that era had a beginning and a middle, and now we're seeing its end.
Of course, you knew that already, which is why you posted a lame insult instead of actually responding to what I wrote.
If you HAVE heard of the artist and DO like their work then your copy has the same effect on the artist's finances as if you had just taken the legitimate price out of their wallet. Well, no, that would mean they had less money after the copy was made.
I see what you're doing, though: you're comparing their actual finances, here in the real world, to their hypothetical finances in a fantasy world where information can't be copied. But if you're going to do that, why not compare to a fantasy world where the album got better reviews and more people were willing to pay for it? Or a fantasy world where there were no DVDs and video games released that year, so people had to spend their entertainment money on music?
That is, you could just as easily claim that reviewers and competing forms of entertainment are "depriving" the artist of money, because if not for them, the artist would sell more copies. Of course, that'd be just as silly as claiming that copying takes money away from them.
However, if you have tracks that you listen to regularly that you did not pay for then you're in a completely different boat and are simply insisting that someone works to entertain you for free. Because, like, you're some sort of royalty or something. Completely wrong.
No one is insisting that anyone work for free. The work has already been done by the time anyone has a chance to make copies! File sharing programs don't magically reach back through time and force anyone to do any extra work.
If they chose to work for free in the past, gambling on the chance that they might be able to sell copies in the future to make up for it, then they have to face the possibility that, like any gamble, they might lose. All the more reason not to work for free.
Copying a number in this case CAN (not "does", which is the other side's over-simplification) harm someone by depriving them of payment for their work. Making the copy doesn't deprive anyone of anything. If you make a copy without paying for it, you have exactly the same effect on the artist's finances as if you'd never even heard of the work: no effect at all.
Pirating is simply an excuse to have laws made that invade your privacy to discovery your piracy. It is not a morally appropiate option to disagreeing with a method of sale. Sounds like you've bought into the *AA's spin. Pirating may be illegal but it isn't immoral. Making a copy of a number -- which is what it boils down to -- doesn't harm anyone.
the specific DRM system Apple uses is not licensed to others; rumors abound about why this is, with probably the most sensible explanation being that Apple -- which is theoretically on the hook to the record labels if/when somebody cracks the DRM scheme -- doesn't trust anyone else to implement it. That's the most charitable explanation. Perhaps a more sensible explanation, in light of the fact that Apple is a for-profit company and has a history of using platform lock-in to enhance their bottom line (see: OS X and non-Apple hardware), is that they make more money when their own store is the only one that can sell encrypted music for the iPod.
With normal games, you can put them away for safekeeping. If a power surge blows up your console, your game discs won't be affected.
With VC games, however, their fate is tied to the fate of your console. And unlike other digital purchases, you can't get around that by making a backup.
$1000 is still way more than most consumers spent on the TVs they already have. The "tipping point" will be when you can get a living-room-sized HD set (which, for 16:9, is 32 inches or larger) for around $300.
And even then, it might be a hard sell unless scaling has gotten better or basic cable channels have upgraded to HD. People still watch channels like Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, etc., and those channels look like blocky, blurry crap on a lot of HD sets.
And that "other OS X component" uses the Darwin kernel to access the hardware, right? You're suggesting that the kernel should be hacked to fool the rest of the OS? Hell, why stop there? May as well just hack your motherboard to report that your system is full of Apple hardware.
If you had bothered to follow the link in my previous post, you would have seen the "system DLLs", the init program, the "GNU tools" and all the other stuff that compiles into an actual operating system. That still doesn't add up to OS X. Go ahead: install the kernel, init, and the GNU tools, and then try to install Photoshop. Or Firefox. Now watch in amazement as those programs fail to run because they're missing vital OS X components. Shock! Horror! How can it be? Apple gave you everything you needed, didn't they?
You must be trolling, because I can't believe you're actually this stupid.
But just in case you are, my offer still stands. I'll trade you a PC with Darwin installed for your Mac; since you believe there's no difference between them, I don't know why you're so unwilling to take me up on it. I'll even throw in a shiny quarter, which you can use to buy a delicious gumball, or put it in your piggy bank and save it for a rainy day!
Trust me on this - iTunes, Minesweeper and Notepad are not a part of any operating system. You seem to be confused by all of the stuff that is bundled with the OS. That stuff is just a courtesy of the vendor. And you, sir, seem to be insisting on a definition of "operating system" that is different from the way everyone else in the modern world, including OS vendors, uses the term. You buy OS X, you get those programs. Darwin doesn't include those programs, nor does it even include enough system functionality to run those programs.
Your original claim that I responded to was: [...] Look again - I'm not the one who posted that. But what the heck...
The fact that Apple has given you full controll of your underlying software (i.e. kernel) invalidates your ludicrous claims. You can run your application 10 years after your mac breaks by replacing the original kernel with a modified open-source variant. How hard is this to fathom? You tell me, because you don't seem to fathom it yourself! The Darwin kernel isn't what checks for Apple branded hardware. That's done by another OS X component.
So you are essentially arguing that X11 is what makes e.g. Linux or Solaris an Operating System? This is what makes Darwin a full OS. Not Quartz, iTunes and a browser. What I said is that Darwin is not the same as OS X, and the truth of that claim is obvious to anyone who isn't desperately spinning to save face.
If you bought a box that was labeled "Mac OS X", and all you got was the Darwin kernel -- with none of the familiar, advertised features that make the Mac what it is -- you would've been scammed.
Similarly, if you bought a copy of Windows, and all you got was the NT kernel -- no Explorer, no system DLLs, no Minesweeper or Notepad -- you'd return it immediately. It'd be completely useless. [Insert joke about Windows being useless anyway.] An operating system is more than just a kernel.
The situation is a little cloudier when you're talking about Linux, because the term "Linux" properly only refers to the kernel itself. That's why some people insist on calling it GNU/Linux instead, because what most people think of as "Linux" actually includes a bunch of GNU tools that Mr. Torvalds had nothing to do with.
But hey, since you're still so insistent, let me remind you of that trading offer. Since you believe Darwin is a full OS, indistinguishable from OS X, why not trade me your Mac for a box that I'll install Darwin on? There won't be any difference, right?
Now that XCode/ObjC has garbage collection, there's really no good reason a Java developer couldn't move over to Objective C if they really want to develop something for the platform. Er.. other than having to learn a new language with a new object model (ObjC's OOP doesn't exactly map to Java or C++) and a whole new set of libraries, you mean?
After all that, frankly, garbage collection is only a minor concern. If you're learning a whole new development platform, you may as well learn how to free your own memory when you're done with it.
Sure, they could go through all that, but a barber could learn to be a mechanic too. Even moving from Java to C# is no trivial task, and C#/.NET is fundamentally little more than a Java clone. Don't underestimate the value of letting developers work on the platform they're used to.
The right of the creator to control their creation is -- correctly -- understood as a human right. There is no (or there should be no) distinction between tangible, material property and the non-tangible intellectual kind. What a ridiculous statement. You're either so misguided it isn't funny, or a shill for the recording industry.
Consider, for a moment, the purpose of ownership. Why does property have an owner?
The answer is simple: because it can only be in one place at a time. That is the fundamental nature of property. If I'm driving my car to New York, you can't be driving it to Los Angeles at the same time. If I'm building a shed in my back yard, you can't build a parking lot there at the same time.
Therefore we need some way of deciding how a piece of property is going to be used at any given moment. Otherwise, we'll all spend half the day fighting over who gets to drive the car, who gets to sleep in the bed, and so on; and everything will eventually end up in the hands of whoever has the most muscles or weapons.
There are a few conceivable ways to decide how property is to be used, but all the practical ways boil down to picking a person and declaring that he's in charge of that property. He will be the one to decide how it's used, and we'll call him the "owner". This restricts freedom -- if I want to drive a car, I have to buy or rent one instead of just using yours -- but it provides the real, tangible benefit of avoiding the chaos that would result as everyone struggled for control of unowned property.
Ideas and information, on the other hand, are completely different from property. The fundamental nature of information is that it can be everywhere simultaneously, and it's impossible for one person's use to interfere with anyone else's. I can use the speed of light to calculate how far away a star is, while at the same time, you can be using it to calculate how much energy is in a donut. I can listen to a song at the same time as you're putting it in a movie soundtrack. Unlike property, information is not scarce.
What that means is information doesn't need an owner. Adding the concept of ownership to information simply restricts everyone's freedom for no real purpose. (And yes, there is no real purpose: everything accomplished by copyright can be accomplished simply by paying people to work, the way it's done in every other industry.)
Ownership has nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with the fundamental nature of property. Physical objects need an owner in order to resolve conflicts, but information doesn't. Since freedom is generally a good thing, and since granting ownership of information restricts freedom without providing any tangible benefit, information should not be owned.
Darwin is the kernel used by OS X. Did you borrow someone else's Mac to run uname? Because I'm having a hard time believing that a Slashdotter who actually owns one wouldn't know the difference between the kernel and the full OS.
Sure, you can install Darwin on your PC, and when you boot it up you might get a nice command prompt. What you won't get is Aqua, Finder, QuickTime, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Dashboard, Spotlight, Time Machine, or anything else that makes Mac OS X visibly different from plain BSD. No folder icons, no trash can, no desktop. It'd be like installing Linux on a PC and claiming that your PC is now a TiVo because it runs the same kernel.
On the other hand... if you still believe that Darwin is the same as OS X, then I'll happily trade you a cheap PC with Darwin installed for your Mac. If it really is yours to trade, that is.
...is give you a ticket to replace the item they took from you with one you'll pick up at your destination.
So, if you leave a pocket knife with security in New York, you can have someone else's confiscated pocket knife when you arrive in Los Angeles. Or maybe a Zippo and a bottle of shampoo if there aren't any pocket knives left.
Right, but that doesn't discount the parent's point. The GP, who wrote "Only if you are the house. Otherwise you will loose eventually", was wrong: the fact that poker sites charge a rake doesn't mean you can't make money as a skilled player, just like brokerage fees don't prevent you from making money with wise investments, and sales tax doesn't prevent you from running a successful business. It just means you have to make a little bit more profit to balance it out.
But the scenario repeats, some other company who didn't pay the creator can acquire the product, recreate it, and sell discount as they didn't have to pay for the research costs. Sure, that's a possibility. You have to account for that when you're deciding whether the research will give you enough benefit to justify paying for it.
If the only benefit you'd get from the research is the ability to manufacture and sell the product, then you have to figure out what kind of advantage, if any, you'd have over your competitors. There are other ways to compete besides price: for example, maybe you have the biggest manufacturing operation, so you'll be able to meet demand while your competitors will struggle to keep up. Or maybe you have the distributor contacts needed to get the product into stores. Maybe you can offer better customer service, more variety of colors and accessories, etc.
Or maybe you can't offer any of that. In that case, you might decide to band together with all the other manufacturers and split the research costs, and hope that no new startups will be able to compete with all of you. But you're probably better off letting someone else pay for the research - someone who'll extract more benefit than simply being able to manufacture the product, like a group representing the people who will eventually use it.
No matter how you layer it the competitors can and will, if allowed, scalp your products. That's only a problem if you base your business model on the idea that you're the only one who can manufacture a certain product. As we can see from the real world, most companies aren't in that position.
So, [Apple] should have asked so much for their [MacOS] license, that third party system manufacturers would have had to ask 500$ extra. Yup, if $500 per system was what it would've taken for Apple to profitably sell MacOS licenses, then that's what they should've done. Since the clone makers were apparently able to sell hardware much cheaper than Apple could, that wouldn't have been a big problem for them.
Think about how it'd work today. The cheapest 15" notebook from Apple costs $2000, but you can get a 15" notebook from HP for $700 or so (assuming you don't need any of the extra features of the MacBook Pro). Even if you had to pay an extra $500 to get it loaded with MacOS, you're still getting a good deal. HP makes a sale, Apple sells a profitable license, and you save $800 on a 15" MacOS laptop: that's win-win-win.
I can already see how the Linux and open-source crowd would be screaming about having to pay royalties they never use, how software licenses artificially keep hardware prices high etc. Nonsense. If those people didn't want to run MacOS, why would they have bought a Mac clone and therefore paid for the license?
I see it with Windows here every day. I guess you don't understand the complaint people have about Windows licensing. Let me break it down for you: Microsoft required (requires?) system manufacturers to buy a Windows license for every computer they sold, whether it had Windows installed or not. The result was that every computer had Windows on it, since the manufacturer had paid for it anyway, and that the price of every computer included the Windows licensing fee.
Apple could easily avoid that by not pulling the same stunt: don't make manufacturers buy MacOS licenses for computers that don't have MacOS on them. If a customer wants a Mac clone, then he can pay for the OS; otherwise, he can get a different OS and pay for that one instead. And if a company decides to sell nothing but Mac clones, then customers who don't want a Mac clone can shop somewhere else.
It would've been that same story all over again. There is no way Apple could have please the Slashdot crowds. Actually, as I explained above, there's a very easy way.
Last time I checked the vast majority of OS in the market were absolutely tied to a certain hardware. Only because Intel with BIOS is the dominant hardware platform today doesn't mean it's not a restriction. You and I both know that's not the same as Apple making their OS refuse to run on fully compatible hardware just because it doesn't have a picture of an apple on it.
But couldn't one argue that the in the absence of Apple's model of researching how to build an iPod, the iPod itself wouldn't exist? Well, one can argue anything, but in this case, one would be wrong. Let me point out the flaw in your scenario...
Let's assume that your view on patents, copyright and trademarks are the mainstream view and that laws against your view do not exist. Suppose I see a market for a product and decide to design one. Designing a product is not child's play, so this may take some time, during which I cannot actually earn on the product. And there it is. Since you know designing a product takes a long time, why would you be willing to do it if you're not getting paid for it?
Because you're gambling that maybe you'll be able to sell a bunch of copies of this product later, at an artificially high price (i.e. more than your competitors would be able to charge for the same manufacturing work)? That's exactly the flawed business model that we're trying to get away from.
Instead, you should've realized that the research is valuable in itself. That means people will be willing to pay you for it: some of them might be the end users, others might be companies involved in making accessories or selling support, etc. Your job is to find those people and convince them to pay you to design the product.
Well Sparky, since you're so friggin' bright, perhaps you can tell us how an author would make the money to reimburse him or her for the time and effort spent in writing that novel. Sure thing, pal. It's the same way a barber makes the money to reimburse himself for the time and effort spent cutting hair.
The same way a civil engineer makes the money to reimburse himself for the time and effort spent designing bridges.
The same way a pilot makes the money to reimburse himself for the time and effort spent flying planes.
See where I'm going with this? Writing is a job like any other. You find someone to pay you to do it, then you do it, then you collect the money that they already agreed to give you.
Barbers don't go around cutting hair for free and then asking for money later. Pilots don't just fly any old plane they come across and hope someone will pay them for having done it. They find a paying customer first and do the work afterward.
As far as clones, perhaps you don't understand the concept. It's taking something and duplicating it, not creating a product which simply performs the same functions. Of course. What else did you think I was referring to?
Apple manufactures a product called the iPod, which consists of certain parts arranged in a certain way. If someone else can arrange the same parts in the same way to produce the same product, but do it in a more efficient way that allows them to sell the product for less, then that's good for customers. That's competition.
And here you demonstrate your utter lack of understanding of the world. How the hell would Apple pay their researchers? From the generous donations of people such as yourself, who altruistically want the world to progress? What I've demonstrated is your closed-mindedness. Research is a service, and it'll be paid for by the people who benefit. Think about that: who benefits from the existence of the iPod? Everyone in the chain, from manufacturers to musicians to listeners, has an incentive to pay for that research.
You know, most people don't call it a "donation" when they pay for something that benefits them. They call it a "purchase". In this case, they'd be purchasing a service (researching new products), but that's nothing unusual; people purchase services all the time.
At least be honest so you don't have to conjure up lame rationale. You just want the cheapest version of something and are willing to support rip-off scumbags to get it. No, that's just a strawman that copyright apologists like to put in their opponents' mouths. You're hardly the first person to realize that it's easier to argue against a caricature than to address what I'm actually saying.
Not if they don't rip it off. What part of creating your own product do you have such a hard time with? Look, if I buy a bunch of components and put them together to form a product, that's "my own product" in every important sense, even if they're the same components in the same arrangement that make an iPod. You can't own an arrangement of components. That's as silly as owning a number, or a color, or a size. It's an attribute of a product, not a product in itself.
It's kind of scarry to see this attitude (IP = imaginary) coming from american students. [...] Sure, there will always be some level of 'physical' work needed - but it has dwindled, and our economy exists now primarily based on the concent of intellectual property - because it's the main thing we produce in this country. That may be true, but it's a mistake to conclude that we need copyright to survive. People can still sell their intellectual labor even without "intellectual property" laws - and the labor is where the value comes from. Copyright puts the cart before the horse anyway; moving away from it means moving closer to a sensible economic model.
I'm talking about exact iPod clones made by the same plants making them for Apple, if you're truely throwing out IP let's even put the apple brand on them and the Apple phone support number while we're at it - it's not "real" property, right? Yes and no. What you just described is fraud more than anything else: the clone factory is lying to everyone who buys one of these iPod clones. The logo and phone number say it was made by Apple, but in fact it wasn't. That's fraud, and you don't need copyright laws to prosecute fraud. Personally, I don't mind trademark laws in principle, even though I'm completely opposed to copyright, because trademarks are about nothing more than preventing fraud (at least when they're enforced properly).
Now, if some Chinese factory wants to make cloned iPods, put their own name on them, and sell them back to us, good for them! If they can sell the same product at a lower price than Apple, they deserve that income. It's called competition.
You might respond that Apple has to charge more because they have to pay for the research that went into designing the iPod, and I wouldn't disagree. But it's not my fault, or any other potential iPod owner's fault, that Apple chose to structure their business that way: paying the researchers out of money that might materialize down the road someday.
They're in the same boat as a musician who records a song for free and then hopes to get paid later by selling copies. It's a flawed business model, trading actual money today for imaginary potential money next year (when you may not be in a position to compete with others who are selling the same thing), and anyone who gambles like that has to be prepared to lose.
It still runs down to the fact that this restriction ultimately benefits OS X and thus also the average OS X user, because: - it makes QA easier, providing a more solid OS experience So I guess Linux must be really unstable, right? After all, it runs on all kinds of hardware, from cheap to expensive, ancient to cutting edge. By that logic, Linux must be the buggiest operating system around.
We've seen what happens when Apple starts losing hardware sales to competition. They almost went belly up. Yes, but only because they were stupid about it: they were apparently licensing their OS at a price that was too low to be profitable. If they had used a little more sense, they would've been making enough money from software to offset whatever they weren't making from hardware.
Therefore it isn't crippled, because it's for the greater good of the OS as a whole and over time. How strange. You give a justification for crippling the OS -- not even a good one, by the way, since other OSes manage to be successful without being tied to a particular brand of hardware -- and then claim that because it's justified, it isn't really crippled at all? You're robbing the language of all meaning, sir.
Therefore it's not crippled, because there is nothing compareable that is not crippled (ie. there is no other OS X that is designed to run on commodity hardware). Sure there is. Remember the developer preview? OS X ran on commodity hardware just fine before Apple started crippling it.
Restriction by design is not crippling. Then again, this is a purely linguistic debate by now. Yes, you're splitting hairs. Call it "intentionally restricted" or whatever you want; the fact is that Apple went out of their way to tie OS X to their own hardware, such that it refuses to run on perfectly compatible hardware just because it's the wrong brand. Getting back to the original point, then, it's obvious that a MacBook's ability to run OS X while competing models cannot is not a strength of the MacBook, but a weakness of OS X.
I wouldn't call that "crippled". Restricted is more on the point and also less wrongfully negative. Is your car crippled, because you are not allowed to drive faster than the speed limit? Are you crippled, because you're not allowed to cross the street when the light is red? You certainly are not. If someone were to come over and break my legs in order to prevent me from crossing the street during a red light, because they received a benefit from having me stuck on one side of the street, then yes, I would be crippled - quite literally. That's more analogous to what Apple has done. They don't just tell you not to install OS X on a regular PC, they intentionally break the OS so that it refuses to run on non-Apple hardware setups that it's technically capable of running on; and they do it for their benefit, not mine or yours.
A restriction for the good of things is not crippling, it's a restriction, and nothing more or less. This isn't "a restriction for the good of things", it's a restriction for the good of Apple's profits. That's good for Apple shareholders, but it's bad for customers, who receive a less robust and more expensive product (considering the cost of the OS + minimal hardware to run it on) than they would if it weren't crippled.
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Second, the people making the movies wouldn't have to "eat the cost", they'd just have to be smarter about financing. Instead of making movies for free and then hoping to extract money from them later, they'd have to just sell their movie-making services to whatever entity or community was willing to pay them.
If you can bring in $100 million by selling tickets, then you can bring in $100 million by getting movie fans, exhibitors, movie player manufacturers, and anyone else who benefits from the movies' existence to fund their production. The demand doesn't just disappear. Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced. Is it? Or is it a vote for a world where that work is produced under a more sensible business model, or produced more efficiently and sold at a lower price? It's a fallacy to suppose that the only options are "music/movies are made on speculation and sold for $15 per copy" or "music/movies are never made at all".
1 : not being in style
2 : no longer acceptable, current, or usable <outmoded customs>
If either of our ideologies is outmoded, it's yours. The idea that information should be made artificially scarce and treated like physical property is on its last legs. It's an artifact of an era when making copies was impractical for average folks but not for those with the capital to invest in mass production; that era had a beginning and a middle, and now we're seeing its end.
Of course, you knew that already, which is why you posted a lame insult instead of actually responding to what I wrote.
I see what you're doing, though: you're comparing their actual finances, here in the real world, to their hypothetical finances in a fantasy world where information can't be copied. But if you're going to do that, why not compare to a fantasy world where the album got better reviews and more people were willing to pay for it? Or a fantasy world where there were no DVDs and video games released that year, so people had to spend their entertainment money on music?
That is, you could just as easily claim that reviewers and competing forms of entertainment are "depriving" the artist of money, because if not for them, the artist would sell more copies. Of course, that'd be just as silly as claiming that copying takes money away from them. However, if you have tracks that you listen to regularly that you did not pay for then you're in a completely different boat and are simply insisting that someone works to entertain you for free. Because, like, you're some sort of royalty or something. Completely wrong.
No one is insisting that anyone work for free. The work has already been done by the time anyone has a chance to make copies! File sharing programs don't magically reach back through time and force anyone to do any extra work.
If they chose to work for free in the past, gambling on the chance that they might be able to sell copies in the future to make up for it, then they have to face the possibility that, like any gamble, they might lose. All the more reason not to work for free.
With normal games, you can put them away for safekeeping. If a power surge blows up your console, your game discs won't be affected.
With VC games, however, their fate is tied to the fate of your console. And unlike other digital purchases, you can't get around that by making a backup.
$1000 is still way more than most consumers spent on the TVs they already have. The "tipping point" will be when you can get a living-room-sized HD set (which, for 16:9, is 32 inches or larger) for around $300.
And even then, it might be a hard sell unless scaling has gotten better or basic cable channels have upgraded to HD. People still watch channels like Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, etc., and those channels look like blocky, blurry crap on a lot of HD sets.
You must be trolling, because I can't believe you're actually this stupid.
But just in case you are, my offer still stands. I'll trade you a PC with Darwin installed for your Mac; since you believe there's no difference between them, I don't know why you're so unwilling to take me up on it. I'll even throw in a shiny quarter, which you can use to buy a delicious gumball, or put it in your piggy bank and save it for a rainy day! Trust me on this - iTunes, Minesweeper and Notepad are not a part of any operating system. You seem to be confused by all of the stuff that is bundled with the OS. That stuff is just a courtesy of the vendor. And you, sir, seem to be insisting on a definition of "operating system" that is different from the way everyone else in the modern world, including OS vendors, uses the term. You buy OS X, you get those programs. Darwin doesn't include those programs, nor does it even include enough system functionality to run those programs.
If you bought a box that was labeled "Mac OS X", and all you got was the Darwin kernel -- with none of the familiar, advertised features that make the Mac what it is -- you would've been scammed.
Similarly, if you bought a copy of Windows, and all you got was the NT kernel -- no Explorer, no system DLLs, no Minesweeper or Notepad -- you'd return it immediately. It'd be completely useless. [Insert joke about Windows being useless anyway.] An operating system is more than just a kernel.
The situation is a little cloudier when you're talking about Linux, because the term "Linux" properly only refers to the kernel itself. That's why some people insist on calling it GNU/Linux instead, because what most people think of as "Linux" actually includes a bunch of GNU tools that Mr. Torvalds had nothing to do with.
But hey, since you're still so insistent, let me remind you of that trading offer. Since you believe Darwin is a full OS, indistinguishable from OS X, why not trade me your Mac for a box that I'll install Darwin on? There won't be any difference, right?
After all that, frankly, garbage collection is only a minor concern. If you're learning a whole new development platform, you may as well learn how to free your own memory when you're done with it.
Sure, they could go through all that, but a barber could learn to be a mechanic too. Even moving from Java to C# is no trivial task, and C#/.NET is fundamentally little more than a Java clone. Don't underestimate the value of letting developers work on the platform they're used to.
Consider, for a moment, the purpose of ownership. Why does property have an owner?
The answer is simple: because it can only be in one place at a time. That is the fundamental nature of property. If I'm driving my car to New York, you can't be driving it to Los Angeles at the same time. If I'm building a shed in my back yard, you can't build a parking lot there at the same time.
Therefore we need some way of deciding how a piece of property is going to be used at any given moment. Otherwise, we'll all spend half the day fighting over who gets to drive the car, who gets to sleep in the bed, and so on; and everything will eventually end up in the hands of whoever has the most muscles or weapons.
There are a few conceivable ways to decide how property is to be used, but all the practical ways boil down to picking a person and declaring that he's in charge of that property. He will be the one to decide how it's used, and we'll call him the "owner". This restricts freedom -- if I want to drive a car, I have to buy or rent one instead of just using yours -- but it provides the real, tangible benefit of avoiding the chaos that would result as everyone struggled for control of unowned property.
Ideas and information, on the other hand, are completely different from property. The fundamental nature of information is that it can be everywhere simultaneously, and it's impossible for one person's use to interfere with anyone else's. I can use the speed of light to calculate how far away a star is, while at the same time, you can be using it to calculate how much energy is in a donut. I can listen to a song at the same time as you're putting it in a movie soundtrack. Unlike property, information is not scarce.
What that means is information doesn't need an owner. Adding the concept of ownership to information simply restricts everyone's freedom for no real purpose. (And yes, there is no real purpose: everything accomplished by copyright can be accomplished simply by paying people to work, the way it's done in every other industry.)
Ownership has nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with the fundamental nature of property. Physical objects need an owner in order to resolve conflicts, but information doesn't. Since freedom is generally a good thing, and since granting ownership of information restricts freedom without providing any tangible benefit, information should not be owned.
I'm not the clueless one here, pal.
Darwin is the kernel used by OS X. Did you borrow someone else's Mac to run uname? Because I'm having a hard time believing that a Slashdotter who actually owns one wouldn't know the difference between the kernel and the full OS.
Sure, you can install Darwin on your PC, and when you boot it up you might get a nice command prompt. What you won't get is Aqua, Finder, QuickTime, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Dashboard, Spotlight, Time Machine, or anything else that makes Mac OS X visibly different from plain BSD. No folder icons, no trash can, no desktop. It'd be like installing Linux on a PC and claiming that your PC is now a TiVo because it runs the same kernel.
On the other hand... if you still believe that Darwin is the same as OS X, then I'll happily trade you a cheap PC with Darwin installed for your Mac. If it really is yours to trade, that is.
...is give you a ticket to replace the item they took from you with one you'll pick up at your destination.
So, if you leave a pocket knife with security in New York, you can have someone else's confiscated pocket knife when you arrive in Los Angeles. Or maybe a Zippo and a bottle of shampoo if there aren't any pocket knives left.
Right, but that doesn't discount the parent's point. The GP, who wrote "Only if you are the house. Otherwise you will loose eventually", was wrong: the fact that poker sites charge a rake doesn't mean you can't make money as a skilled player, just like brokerage fees don't prevent you from making money with wise investments, and sales tax doesn't prevent you from running a successful business. It just means you have to make a little bit more profit to balance it out.
If the only benefit you'd get from the research is the ability to manufacture and sell the product, then you have to figure out what kind of advantage, if any, you'd have over your competitors. There are other ways to compete besides price: for example, maybe you have the biggest manufacturing operation, so you'll be able to meet demand while your competitors will struggle to keep up. Or maybe you have the distributor contacts needed to get the product into stores. Maybe you can offer better customer service, more variety of colors and accessories, etc.
Or maybe you can't offer any of that. In that case, you might decide to band together with all the other manufacturers and split the research costs, and hope that no new startups will be able to compete with all of you. But you're probably better off letting someone else pay for the research - someone who'll extract more benefit than simply being able to manufacture the product, like a group representing the people who will eventually use it. No matter how you layer it the competitors can and will, if allowed, scalp your products. That's only a problem if you base your business model on the idea that you're the only one who can manufacture a certain product. As we can see from the real world, most companies aren't in that position.
Think about how it'd work today. The cheapest 15" notebook from Apple costs $2000, but you can get a 15" notebook from HP for $700 or so (assuming you don't need any of the extra features of the MacBook Pro). Even if you had to pay an extra $500 to get it loaded with MacOS, you're still getting a good deal. HP makes a sale, Apple sells a profitable license, and you save $800 on a 15" MacOS laptop: that's win-win-win. I can already see how the Linux and open-source crowd would be screaming about having to pay royalties they never use, how software licenses artificially keep hardware prices high etc. Nonsense. If those people didn't want to run MacOS, why would they have bought a Mac clone and therefore paid for the license? I see it with Windows here every day. I guess you don't understand the complaint people have about Windows licensing. Let me break it down for you: Microsoft required (requires?) system manufacturers to buy a Windows license for every computer they sold, whether it had Windows installed or not. The result was that every computer had Windows on it, since the manufacturer had paid for it anyway, and that the price of every computer included the Windows licensing fee.
Apple could easily avoid that by not pulling the same stunt: don't make manufacturers buy MacOS licenses for computers that don't have MacOS on them. If a customer wants a Mac clone, then he can pay for the OS; otherwise, he can get a different OS and pay for that one instead. And if a company decides to sell nothing but Mac clones, then customers who don't want a Mac clone can shop somewhere else. It would've been that same story all over again. There is no way Apple could have please the Slashdot crowds. Actually, as I explained above, there's a very easy way. Last time I checked the vast majority of OS in the market were absolutely tied to a certain hardware. Only because Intel with BIOS is the dominant hardware platform today doesn't mean it's not a restriction. You and I both know that's not the same as Apple making their OS refuse to run on fully compatible hardware just because it doesn't have a picture of an apple on it.
Because you're gambling that maybe you'll be able to sell a bunch of copies of this product later, at an artificially high price (i.e. more than your competitors would be able to charge for the same manufacturing work)? That's exactly the flawed business model that we're trying to get away from.
Instead, you should've realized that the research is valuable in itself. That means people will be willing to pay you for it: some of them might be the end users, others might be companies involved in making accessories or selling support, etc. Your job is to find those people and convince them to pay you to design the product.
The same way a civil engineer makes the money to reimburse himself for the time and effort spent designing bridges.
The same way a pilot makes the money to reimburse himself for the time and effort spent flying planes.
See where I'm going with this? Writing is a job like any other. You find someone to pay you to do it, then you do it, then you collect the money that they already agreed to give you.
Barbers don't go around cutting hair for free and then asking for money later. Pilots don't just fly any old plane they come across and hope someone will pay them for having done it. They find a paying customer first and do the work afterward. As far as clones, perhaps you don't understand the concept. It's taking something and duplicating it, not creating a product which simply performs the same functions. Of course. What else did you think I was referring to?
Apple manufactures a product called the iPod, which consists of certain parts arranged in a certain way. If someone else can arrange the same parts in the same way to produce the same product, but do it in a more efficient way that allows them to sell the product for less, then that's good for customers. That's competition. And here you demonstrate your utter lack of understanding of the world. How the hell would Apple pay their researchers? From the generous donations of people such as yourself, who altruistically want the world to progress? What I've demonstrated is your closed-mindedness. Research is a service, and it'll be paid for by the people who benefit. Think about that: who benefits from the existence of the iPod? Everyone in the chain, from manufacturers to musicians to listeners, has an incentive to pay for that research.
You know, most people don't call it a "donation" when they pay for something that benefits them. They call it a "purchase". In this case, they'd be purchasing a service (researching new products), but that's nothing unusual; people purchase services all the time. At least be honest so you don't have to conjure up lame rationale. You just want the cheapest version of something and are willing to support rip-off scumbags to get it. No, that's just a strawman that copyright apologists like to put in their opponents' mouths. You're hardly the first person to realize that it's easier to argue against a caricature than to address what I'm actually saying. Not if they don't rip it off. What part of creating your own product do you have such a hard time with? Look, if I buy a bunch of components and put them together to form a product, that's "my own product" in every important sense, even if they're the same components in the same arrangement that make an iPod. You can't own an arrangement of components. That's as silly as owning a number, or a color, or a size. It's an attribute of a product, not a product in itself.
Now, if some Chinese factory wants to make cloned iPods, put their own name on them, and sell them back to us, good for them! If they can sell the same product at a lower price than Apple, they deserve that income. It's called competition.
You might respond that Apple has to charge more because they have to pay for the research that went into designing the iPod, and I wouldn't disagree. But it's not my fault, or any other potential iPod owner's fault, that Apple chose to structure their business that way: paying the researchers out of money that might materialize down the road someday.
They're in the same boat as a musician who records a song for free and then hopes to get paid later by selling copies. It's a flawed business model, trading actual money today for imaginary potential money next year (when you may not be in a position to compete with others who are selling the same thing), and anyone who gambles like that has to be prepared to lose.
Darwin is not the same as OS X. Nice try, though.