What is there to save? You insulted someone you don't know and their work which you have never heard of, in a most gratuitous way. That's obviously a butthurt counter-trolling attempt.
No, a home barber machine would replace a barber. A copy of your software does not replace you.
I'm not a barber, dumbass, I'm the engineer who made the barber machine that replaces the barber.
I'm suggesting that thousands of people pool their funds to pay for it.
Fool, get the fuck out of your basement and get a clue of how things really work. No one's gonna give $300 to a company for them to eventually build them a program and two years later perhaps deliver. That's just a retarded thing to suggest. I mean seriously, how the fuck am I supposed to have a serious discussion with some dumbass who suggests some dumb crap like that that not even a fool would do.
Entrepreneurs know how to innovate. You're no entrepreneur, you're just another businessman who's so stuck in the past that he doesn't even know what his "product" really is.
What the hell are you babbling about, what I did is pure innovation. That's so innovative, I measure my performance by minds blown an hour. It's just a case of not doing things your way being the wrong way. Time to put up or shut up : my program is an innovative kind of program worth $40 that is quite technical but very unique and powerful in what it does. All the revenue made from it comes from letting people try a demo version of the program then buy a license to get the full version. What "innovative" "entrepreneurial" steps do you suggest for me to maximise my profits?
You're not getting away with a bullshit answer, either you tell me what's wrong with what I do and what I should do in a concrete way instead in order to maximise profits, or I'll see myself forced to accept your apology.
If there were sufficient demand for your program, it would be on the warez sites. Relying on your program's unpopularity is an interesting and probably effective approach, but it's not for everyone.
Well, I've had over 300 sales. That's not much, but so far it still didn't pirated, so even if I had one leak every 300 sales that probably wouldn't be any big deal.
No, it isn't. Losing money is not the same as not-gaining money.
It is when you're in business. Think about it.
It's not hard to understand, it's just naive and unrealistic. That may be what an unenforceable law says, or what your hubris has led you to believe your DRM system is capable of, but it's not how the world works.
That's how it effectively works for me, sorry if it goes against your wishful thinking. You couldn't get a free copy of my program if your life depended on it. The facts are on my side.
You yourself conflated copyright infringement with Communism, and now you say it's barely an issue?
No, that's just wishful reading, I never said that copyright infringement was like Communism, I said that demanding that everything (in digital works) should be available for free is communism. As in, some people out here believe that both Adobe and I should give the products of our labour for free and not make any money of that "artificial scarcity" which is not giving everything we do away.
And yet, we are told that breaking copyright laws is exactly that: "theft".
You tell me, I'm not telling you that.
If breaking copyright laws is no greater crime than spitting on the sidewalk
Again, learn to read what's actually written, I talked about moral threshold for people who might consider committing that, nowhere did I mention any consideration for the actual consequences of either of those things. I'm just explaining how it works for people on all sides of the issue, I'm not talking of morals, ethics, principles, ideologies (although I did compare the FOSS zealot ideology with communism, which is to give a perspective on actually what some of the people involved want), I'm just trying to explain you dumbasses why your ideology of "give us everything for free" cannot work as it's rarely a viable business model when you're in the business of making software, which most of you seem to want to ignore.
I was pointed out that Blender was originally a commercial program, so that weakens my comparison I guess.
And yeah, no open source alternative comes close to threatening Adobe Photoshop, no matter how free they are, but that won't stop any FOSS zealot here from arguing that everything should be free to make the world a better place in every aspect.
Yes, which is why I pay a barber to cut my hair instead of demanding that he do it for free. But of course, I only pay the barber when I get my hair cut, not every time I comb it!
When you buy my software it's more like you get a home barber machine.
Programmers can use the very same model. Writing code is a service. Give a programmer money, he'll write code, and then you can both move on until you need another program written. There's absolutely nothing about software development that requires you to pay for a copy of a program instead of paying for the act of writing it.
That's the stupidest fucking suggestion I've heard in this entire thread. That's as if you told musicians, don't get paid for your albums, get paid to make your albums in the first place. You know, like Mozart got paid for pieces, and that's how he was always broke besides being a fucking genius? I don't even know how that's supposed to work for software, are you really suggesting that someone with deep pockets pays for Adobe to develop Photoshop from scratch? That's stupid as fuck.
But my business model doesn't depend (directly or indirectly) on controlling the number of copies. My living comes from writing code, not making copies.
Yeah, because you have the convenience of having a boss (or a client who commissioned your work, which is the same thing as a boss except with less direct management) who writes your cheques whose concern it is to find a way to make money out of what you do. I'm the boss, I'm the one who's striving to maximise profits out of my market. And giving my product away for free isn't exactly the way to do it, but you wouldn't know, I'm the entrepreneur here, you're just a code monkey with no need for any sort of business sense.
Well, no, they don't. They can get the full version much cheaper from anyone who already has a copy (or a crack/keygen, depending on what protection measures you've used).
No, what would make you think that? No one would share their copy because then I'd deactivate their license, but also because most people are honest and don't try to screw me and know that if I don't get my money I'll stop working on the damn thing. Again, that's wishful thinking from you that you could get my program for free. Lots of niche programs are nowhere to be found on warez sites. So you see, I still don't rely on government enforcement, mostly when dealing with people from countries in which there's no such enforcement, I only rely on technological measures and social mechanics.
The danger in spreading around passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. comes from what those numbers can be used for. If I could be guaranteed that no one else would use my CC# to make fraudulent charges, I'd have no reason to care who had that number.
Exactly, and if you make software then people distributing binaries or serials impacts you in that you'll make less money, so in the same way it'll cost you money. Don't you see how this is the same thing?
The danger that someone might feed it into their own computer and run the program, or feed it into their own MP3 player and hear the song?
No, you fucking dumbass, cause you're on the criminal side, so obviously the downsides aren't on your side.
To put it bluntly, it's none of your business what numbers someone else feeds into their own equipment.
Well if you want to feed my numbers into your equipment you're gonna have to put some numbers preceded with a dollar sign into my bank account. What's hard to understand about that?
Good point! That means you wouldn't even have Blender if it wasn't for commercial software!!
There are other ways to finance software development other than artificial scarcity. If you were truly a part of the field you'd know it already, as most of the world's software doesn't rely on it.
Oh no, you hit me with a "you don't agree with my view so you're not a real real developer". And as for your "artificial scarcity" thing, that's a stupid point, because once again you're focusing on what doesn't matter, the nearly costless distribution, and not on what costs money, developer work. In other words, people don't pay for the copy, people pay for the service of me developing it. I know it must be hard to get that to replace your dumbass view that "hurr durr copying is the only part that gives something value".
And government-granted monopolies are socialism.
What god damn monopoly? Do you even know what a monopoly is? No ones granting me any monopoly, so what the fuck are you babbling about?
Funny, you sound like a broke ass basement dweller who wants to get paid by every one of his farts cause he has no money, and who'd never do honest work so its easy for you to whine and demand that everyone pay tributes to you for the priviledge of looking upon the crap you did years ago.
Oh noes, you trolled me by comparing my hard low-paying work to farts! And no, I live in Europe, we don't live in basements here. Yeah, nice try.
Mustn't be a very good living, otherwise you wouldn't be trolling off here, would you?
FYP. There's little funnier to do on Slashdot than trolling suckers like you into trying to explain why everything should be free. Which is where you disappoint me, nowhere in your post are you arguing for why you think things should be the way you'd like them to be, two thirds of it is personal insults on me and my work which you know nothing about in a pathetic effort to counter-troll me, the rest is in essence quoting random bits I said and saying "no ur wrong".
get a real job, learn how the world truly works, then come back here and repeat your little rant if you can.
Try starting your own software company with no funds, find out for yourself how much it takes to make even a modest living out of it, see how well the sales keep up when you stop working on the program and stop promoting it (hint: nothing sells itself), then come back here and repeat your trolling attempts once you have a clue what you're talking about.
Like I said in countless other posts, free software is only better when the appeal is so broad you have thousands of people who'd want to work on the project. Doesn't work so well on more niche sectors.
Obviously the moral threshold for "committing copyright infringement" is countless orders of magnitude lower than for robbing other people. You could have figured that out on your own if you weren't such a dumbass.
There's obviously something at work here besides "money doesn't grow on trees".
Besides in your wishes? Nope, just a money-saving "crime" that ranks much lower in amorality than spitting your gum on the curb. No one gives a crap about copyright laws besides a handful of basement armchair revolutionaries like you. If you think most people who pirate even ever gave as much as a half-assed thought about the whole issue of copyright and the morality of infringement you're giving them way too much credit.
Yeah, right, but what comes closer to replacing Photoshop than GIMP? Nothing? So, if it wasn't for Photoshop you'd still be stuck with crap like GIMP that's useless for "print work and painting". Thanks for helping me prove my point.
Your business has changed. So has publishing, and media creation, and others. I feel for you, but I'm not going to support your efforts to fix your current business model in place.
My business only exists thanks to the Internet and the distribution it makes possible, not despite it. And despite your wishful thinking my business model works perfectly well. You guys like to pretend like things aren't the way they are with hypothetical bullshit. But back in the real world there's no such problems.
Your question about "house piracy" is flawed in that what costs money in a house isn't the plans but actually building one, whereas in software making a copy is nothing, it's the design that needs being paid for. So a open source house could be free, but if you get an architect to make you a design well you gotta pay him.
The cost of any person from making a copy is effectively $0. How can you fight that? With laws (i.e. government enforcement), or....?
False premise, you can't make a copy of my program, because you have nowhere to get it from except by paying me.
The big number thing...if you don't own that, what exactly do you own?
Geez, here's a fucking hint : everytime I release a new version, that I change a single file in the ZIP or even that I change the compression settings, the "big number" changes. So guess what, the binary content is completely irrelevant. If you want to go somewhere towards relevancy, I own the source code, plus the website, plus my name's all over the fucking place. Babbling about "big numbers" I own is like saying that a bakery owns the donuts it sells you.
See, exactly, and there's your problem.
No, not really, I don't have a problem, because you can't copy my program. Even if you did, you wouldn't get all you get if you bought it, which is a link to download updates.
Are you really saying that the GIMP and Photoshop cannot be compared? They're none(sic)-equivalent? lol... so why's everybody touting it as the alternative to Photoshop? Dumbass.
And what comes closer in FOSS to comparing with 3DS Max but Blender? Nothing, it's as close as it gets? Just what I thought. Moron.
I applaud your tact at discrediting Opensource.
And I applaud your tact (lol?) at using words which meaning you don't seem to know quite well.
For niche developers, they often cannot hope to ever compete against any bigger products because no matter how good you make it, how close you make it to some larger proprietary suite, it will prove to be extremely difficult to generate any interest in your product.. Why?
If you're considering getting into something and don't see how you're going to have any sort of competitive edge then you're a dumbass and should leave entrepreneuring to people who have a clue what they're doing.
But you're right that piracy devaluates the market.
We're talking about why people who should know better (the company that's breaking copyright laws) is so willing to ignore the law. And further, why a large number of otherwise law-abiding people are willfully breaking those copyright laws.
Oh, oh, I know why, because money doesn't grow on trees and people think twice before spending money when they don't have to? All the moral and ethical bullshit and the legal consideration is just a smoke screen to hide that fact. Can't blame people for masquerading greed (which I'm not condemning) into something morally justified.
As I just said in another post, free software gets only as good as how many people want the program in question and how many people are willing to work on it. That's why we have great free web browsers, servers and compilers, good free operating systems, passable 3D editors and not so great highly specific things that few people use.
Without software copyrights the only ones who would really suffer are the ones who make the programs with a lot of seeds on BitTorrent. It would make things worse for them because "piracy" wouldn't be fought as arduously. But for niche developers like me, it wouldn't impact us too much because we control access to our product more easily, that is, if you want my program you need to pay me, there's no other way you can get it, and copyright law or not if ever I caught anyone distributing his copy I'd deactivate his license.
It only works for things with a very wide appeal, like web browsers, word processors or web servers. But if you want something that less than a million people would have a use for or that less than 10,000 would be willing to work for free for, then you're out of luck, if you need something that does the job you need to pay for it.
Or you could come up with a business plan that works, and doesn't rely on government enforcement.
Actually it doesn't, it relies on my software just not being out there for everybody to use for free. If you want access to the full version of my program, you need to chuck $40 my way. What's "broken" about such a business model? There's nothing broken about a business model that makes all the money it should.
It's not that they're easy to put together a certain way; but ownership of what amounts to one big number is hard to support.
That's a bullshit question, because it deprives that "big number" of a context. See, it's like the number 42. In itself it's an utterly worthless number, but if you know what question it answers to then it's very worthy indeed. What if my program coincidentally shares the exact same binary sequence as a Britney Spears song? Then who owns that big number? It doesn't matter, because the fact that both would be made of the same thing is irrelevant. In other words, your "big number" is worthless if you don't know what it is for, if you don't know what file extension to give it. It's like that hexadecimal sequence from some DVD player that the creators claimed ownership to. It's silly to claim to own the number, but it's not silly to not want it disclosed, because when you know what this number is for it stops being a useless number like all the others. They don't want you to spread it around just like you don't want anyone to spread around your passwords or credit card number and codes, or SSID, which are all just numbers, and not even such big ones as that. 3025 is just a number like all the others, but if you know what door it opens or what credit card it is the code to then it stops being just a number. I personally find it silly to focus entirely on the technical nature of things and derive principles from them rather than focus on practical aspects.
Well, the "service" business model doesn't work for everything, for example it wouldn't work with my program for which no support is needed. And as for the "sitting back and getting money for the rest of your life" argument, well so what, it's not the only case where that happens. People get lots of money from doing much less. Are you actually asking for how long are you entitled to receive money from the work you did after you stopped doing anything to it? Sounds like what you're pondering to me! Is it fair to reap the fruits from something you did 20 years ago? What's fair?
The elephant in the room here is that you all want to copy those immaterial works for free, and because of this you come up with bullshit moral justifications to get as much as you can for free. I pirate everything too, but I'm not an hypocrite, I don't try to disguise my not wanting to pay for things I can have for free as a moral war against injustice. You might think it conflicts with me selling software, but to me it doesn't, because there's no morals involved anywhere on either side of the equation. I pirate anything I want cause I need it/want it and I don't have the money for it and even if I did I'd rather not pay for what I can have for free, and on the other hand I need to make money, selling software is one way, and if my sales went down too low for a reason or another I'd look for job (which I'm actually in the process of doing, software sales are too irregular and make me just enough for a very modest living).
Moral aspects? Who fucking cares! Seriously. All that matters is what you call the "utilitarian aspect". I fail to see how anything else matters. Maybe it matters to you, but I don't care about what's fair or what's deserved, cause that's very arbitrary and subjective and it doesn't matter much anyway, I only care about the actual consequences. Actually, I even pirate software. Is it wrong? Who cares!! See?
Ah and if you want to torrent my program you'll have to buy it first and seed it because I checked and it's nowhere to be found. Which would be welcome given that my sales are low these days and I'm running out of money.
Yeah, that's nice, but that's off-topic. No one talked about Walt Disney making money off Mickey Mouse for a thousand years, right now we're talking about piracy and whether or not everything binary should be free. Whether or not my descendants will be able to make money off what I do now doesn't even begin to matter.
There's a reason why things are like this, and that's because no one would bother writing professional-quality software if they didn't get paid enough for it. Think all you want about how immaterial things should be free, but if all information somehow had to be free then you wouldn't have anymore professional software around, you'd be stuck with crap like GIMP or Blender and would never again see anything like Photoshop or 3DS Max. There's thousands of man-hours of work that go into each such commercial program, man-hours from highly qualified and well-paid people. Someone has to pay for that work, cause if no one does then these people won't touch that ever again and look for a real job that pays.
It's ludicrous to say that you own a particular configuration of 1s and 0s
That's the stupidest fucking argument on the topic I've ever heard. If everything comes down to just a bunch of 1s and 0s, then why don't you just create them as you need them? Oh, what's that? Creating what you want is non-trivial and the only way to create that is to do it the way it's currently done, which costs money? By the way, not believing in private property is communism. It's like, someone painstakingly creates something and then some wanker like you comes up and goes "this is now property of the people, thank you".
TL;DR you sound like a broke ass basement dweller who wants all his porn, games, movies and music for free cause has no money, and who'd never create anything worth a dime, so it's easy for you to whine and demand that everything is offered to you for free. I'm a self employed software developer and make a living off a program I created all on my own, I create value with my work, you wouldn't know what that means.
Why isn't it modded off-topic? So we don't know everything for sure about how a fly's brain works, but it doesn't matter, because we're looking at them for inspiration for the algorithms actually implemented, which we actually understand. No one's stupid enough to not understand their own algorithms, at least not at that level.
Slashdot Mirror
What is there to save? You insulted someone you don't know and their work which you have never heard of, in a most gratuitous way. That's obviously a butthurt counter-trolling attempt.
No, a home barber machine would replace a barber. A copy of your software does not replace you.
I'm not a barber, dumbass, I'm the engineer who made the barber machine that replaces the barber.
I'm suggesting that thousands of people pool their funds to pay for it.
Fool, get the fuck out of your basement and get a clue of how things really work. No one's gonna give $300 to a company for them to eventually build them a program and two years later perhaps deliver. That's just a retarded thing to suggest. I mean seriously, how the fuck am I supposed to have a serious discussion with some dumbass who suggests some dumb crap like that that not even a fool would do.
Entrepreneurs know how to innovate. You're no entrepreneur, you're just another businessman who's so stuck in the past that he doesn't even know what his "product" really is.
What the hell are you babbling about, what I did is pure innovation. That's so innovative, I measure my performance by minds blown an hour. It's just a case of not doing things your way being the wrong way. Time to put up or shut up : my program is an innovative kind of program worth $40 that is quite technical but very unique and powerful in what it does. All the revenue made from it comes from letting people try a demo version of the program then buy a license to get the full version. What "innovative" "entrepreneurial" steps do you suggest for me to maximise my profits?
You're not getting away with a bullshit answer, either you tell me what's wrong with what I do and what I should do in a concrete way instead in order to maximise profits, or I'll see myself forced to accept your apology.
If there were sufficient demand for your program, it would be on the warez sites. Relying on your program's unpopularity is an interesting and probably effective approach, but it's not for everyone.
Well, I've had over 300 sales. That's not much, but so far it still didn't pirated, so even if I had one leak every 300 sales that probably wouldn't be any big deal.
No, it isn't. Losing money is not the same as not-gaining money.
It is when you're in business. Think about it.
It's not hard to understand, it's just naive and unrealistic. That may be what an unenforceable law says, or what your hubris has led you to believe your DRM system is capable of, but it's not how the world works.
That's how it effectively works for me, sorry if it goes against your wishful thinking. You couldn't get a free copy of my program if your life depended on it. The facts are on my side.
You yourself conflated copyright infringement with Communism, and now you say it's barely an issue?
No, that's just wishful reading, I never said that copyright infringement was like Communism, I said that demanding that everything (in digital works) should be available for free is communism. As in, some people out here believe that both Adobe and I should give the products of our labour for free and not make any money of that "artificial scarcity" which is not giving everything we do away.
And yet, we are told that breaking copyright laws is exactly that: "theft".
You tell me, I'm not telling you that.
If breaking copyright laws is no greater crime than spitting on the sidewalk
Again, learn to read what's actually written, I talked about moral threshold for people who might consider committing that, nowhere did I mention any consideration for the actual consequences of either of those things. I'm just explaining how it works for people on all sides of the issue, I'm not talking of morals, ethics, principles, ideologies (although I did compare the FOSS zealot ideology with communism, which is to give a perspective on actually what some of the people involved want), I'm just trying to explain you dumbasses why your ideology of "give us everything for free" cannot work as it's rarely a viable business model when you're in the business of making software, which most of you seem to want to ignore.
I was pointed out that Blender was originally a commercial program, so that weakens my comparison I guess.
And yeah, no open source alternative comes close to threatening Adobe Photoshop, no matter how free they are, but that won't stop any FOSS zealot here from arguing that everything should be free to make the world a better place in every aspect.
Yes, which is why I pay a barber to cut my hair instead of demanding that he do it for free. But of course, I only pay the barber when I get my hair cut, not every time I comb it!
When you buy my software it's more like you get a home barber machine.
Programmers can use the very same model. Writing code is a service. Give a programmer money, he'll write code, and then you can both move on until you need another program written. There's absolutely nothing about software development that requires you to pay for a copy of a program instead of paying for the act of writing it.
That's the stupidest fucking suggestion I've heard in this entire thread. That's as if you told musicians, don't get paid for your albums, get paid to make your albums in the first place. You know, like Mozart got paid for pieces, and that's how he was always broke besides being a fucking genius? I don't even know how that's supposed to work for software, are you really suggesting that someone with deep pockets pays for Adobe to develop Photoshop from scratch? That's stupid as fuck.
But my business model doesn't depend (directly or indirectly) on controlling the number of copies. My living comes from writing code, not making copies.
Yeah, because you have the convenience of having a boss (or a client who commissioned your work, which is the same thing as a boss except with less direct management) who writes your cheques whose concern it is to find a way to make money out of what you do. I'm the boss, I'm the one who's striving to maximise profits out of my market. And giving my product away for free isn't exactly the way to do it, but you wouldn't know, I'm the entrepreneur here, you're just a code monkey with no need for any sort of business sense.
Well, no, they don't. They can get the full version much cheaper from anyone who already has a copy (or a crack/keygen, depending on what protection measures you've used).
No, what would make you think that? No one would share their copy because then I'd deactivate their license, but also because most people are honest and don't try to screw me and know that if I don't get my money I'll stop working on the damn thing. Again, that's wishful thinking from you that you could get my program for free. Lots of niche programs are nowhere to be found on warez sites. So you see, I still don't rely on government enforcement, mostly when dealing with people from countries in which there's no such enforcement, I only rely on technological measures and social mechanics.
The danger in spreading around passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. comes from what those numbers can be used for. If I could be guaranteed that no one else would use my CC# to make fraudulent charges, I'd have no reason to care who had that number.
Exactly, and if you make software then people distributing binaries or serials impacts you in that you'll make less money, so in the same way it'll cost you money. Don't you see how this is the same thing?
The danger that someone might feed it into their own computer and run the program, or feed it into their own MP3 player and hear the song?
No, you fucking dumbass, cause you're on the criminal side, so obviously the downsides aren't on your side.
To put it bluntly, it's none of your business what numbers someone else feeds into their own equipment.
Well if you want to feed my numbers into your equipment you're gonna have to put some numbers preceded with a dollar sign into my bank account. What's hard to understand about that?
Mmmh, misquoted the first one, it's supposed to quote the thing about GIMP starting off as a commercial program. Clipboard usage fail.
you "deserve" money
Good point! That means you wouldn't even have Blender if it wasn't for commercial software!!
There are other ways to finance software development other than artificial scarcity. If you were truly a part of the field you'd know it already, as most of the world's software doesn't rely on it.
Oh no, you hit me with a "you don't agree with my view so you're not a real real developer". And as for your "artificial scarcity" thing, that's a stupid point, because once again you're focusing on what doesn't matter, the nearly costless distribution, and not on what costs money, developer work. In other words, people don't pay for the copy, people pay for the service of me developing it. I know it must be hard to get that to replace your dumbass view that "hurr durr copying is the only part that gives something value".
And government-granted monopolies are socialism.
What god damn monopoly? Do you even know what a monopoly is? No ones granting me any monopoly, so what the fuck are you babbling about?
Funny, you sound like a broke ass basement dweller who wants to get paid by every one of his farts cause he has no money, and who'd never do honest work so its easy for you to whine and demand that everyone pay tributes to you for the priviledge of looking upon the crap you did years ago.
Oh noes, you trolled me by comparing my hard low-paying work to farts! And no, I live in Europe, we don't live in basements here. Yeah, nice try.
Mustn't be a very good living, otherwise you wouldn't be trolling off here, would you?
FYP. There's little funnier to do on Slashdot than trolling suckers like you into trying to explain why everything should be free. Which is where you disappoint me, nowhere in your post are you arguing for why you think things should be the way you'd like them to be, two thirds of it is personal insults on me and my work which you know nothing about in a pathetic effort to counter-troll me, the rest is in essence quoting random bits I said and saying "no ur wrong".
get a real job, learn how the world truly works, then come back here and repeat your little rant if you can.
Try starting your own software company with no funds, find out for yourself how much it takes to make even a modest living out of it, see how well the sales keep up when you stop working on the program and stop promoting it (hint: nothing sells itself), then come back here and repeat your trolling attempts once you have a clue what you're talking about.
Like I said in countless other posts, free software is only better when the appeal is so broad you have thousands of people who'd want to work on the project. Doesn't work so well on more niche sectors.
self-righteous indignity |...] hypocrite [...] your shit software [...] irrelevant
I smell butthurt. Did somebody get.. troll'd?
Obviously the moral threshold for "committing copyright infringement" is countless orders of magnitude lower than for robbing other people. You could have figured that out on your own if you weren't such a dumbass.
There's obviously something at work here besides "money doesn't grow on trees".
Besides in your wishes? Nope, just a money-saving "crime" that ranks much lower in amorality than spitting your gum on the curb. No one gives a crap about copyright laws besides a handful of basement armchair revolutionaries like you. If you think most people who pirate even ever gave as much as a half-assed thought about the whole issue of copyright and the morality of infringement you're giving them way too much credit.
Yeah, right, but what comes closer to replacing Photoshop than GIMP? Nothing? So, if it wasn't for Photoshop you'd still be stuck with crap like GIMP that's useless for "print work and painting". Thanks for helping me prove my point.
Your business has changed. So has publishing, and media creation, and others. I feel for you, but I'm not going to support your efforts to fix your current business model in place.
My business only exists thanks to the Internet and the distribution it makes possible, not despite it. And despite your wishful thinking my business model works perfectly well. You guys like to pretend like things aren't the way they are with hypothetical bullshit. But back in the real world there's no such problems.
Your question about "house piracy" is flawed in that what costs money in a house isn't the plans but actually building one, whereas in software making a copy is nothing, it's the design that needs being paid for. So a open source house could be free, but if you get an architect to make you a design well you gotta pay him.
The cost of any person from making a copy is effectively $0. How can you fight that? With laws (i.e. government enforcement), or....?
False premise, you can't make a copy of my program, because you have nowhere to get it from except by paying me.
The big number thing...if you don't own that, what exactly do you own?
Geez, here's a fucking hint : everytime I release a new version, that I change a single file in the ZIP or even that I change the compression settings, the "big number" changes. So guess what, the binary content is completely irrelevant. If you want to go somewhere towards relevancy, I own the source code, plus the website, plus my name's all over the fucking place. Babbling about "big numbers" I own is like saying that a bakery owns the donuts it sells you.
See, exactly, and there's your problem.
No, not really, I don't have a problem, because you can't copy my program. Even if you did, you wouldn't get all you get if you bought it, which is a link to download updates.
Are you really saying that the GIMP and Photoshop cannot be compared? They're none(sic)-equivalent? lol... so why's everybody touting it as the alternative to Photoshop? Dumbass.
And what comes closer in FOSS to comparing with 3DS Max but Blender? Nothing, it's as close as it gets? Just what I thought. Moron.
I applaud your tact at discrediting Opensource.
And I applaud your tact (lol?) at using words which meaning you don't seem to know quite well.
For niche developers, they often cannot hope to ever compete against any bigger products because no matter how good you make it, how close you make it to some larger proprietary suite, it will prove to be extremely difficult to generate any interest in your product.. Why?
If you're considering getting into something and don't see how you're going to have any sort of competitive edge then you're a dumbass and should leave entrepreneuring to people who have a clue what they're doing.
But you're right that piracy devaluates the market.
We're talking about why people who should know better (the company that's breaking copyright laws) is so willing to ignore the law. And further, why a large number of otherwise law-abiding people are willfully breaking those copyright laws.
Oh, oh, I know why, because money doesn't grow on trees and people think twice before spending money when they don't have to? All the moral and ethical bullshit and the legal consideration is just a smoke screen to hide that fact. Can't blame people for masquerading greed (which I'm not condemning) into something morally justified.
As I just said in another post, free software gets only as good as how many people want the program in question and how many people are willing to work on it. That's why we have great free web browsers, servers and compilers, good free operating systems, passable 3D editors and not so great highly specific things that few people use.
Without software copyrights the only ones who would really suffer are the ones who make the programs with a lot of seeds on BitTorrent. It would make things worse for them because "piracy" wouldn't be fought as arduously. But for niche developers like me, it wouldn't impact us too much because we control access to our product more easily, that is, if you want my program you need to pay me, there's no other way you can get it, and copyright law or not if ever I caught anyone distributing his copy I'd deactivate his license.
It only works for things with a very wide appeal, like web browsers, word processors or web servers. But if you want something that less than a million people would have a use for or that less than 10,000 would be willing to work for free for, then you're out of luck, if you need something that does the job you need to pay for it.
Or you could come up with a business plan that works, and doesn't rely on government enforcement.
Actually it doesn't, it relies on my software just not being out there for everybody to use for free. If you want access to the full version of my program, you need to chuck $40 my way. What's "broken" about such a business model? There's nothing broken about a business model that makes all the money it should.
It's not that they're easy to put together a certain way; but ownership of what amounts to one big number is hard to support.
That's a bullshit question, because it deprives that "big number" of a context. See, it's like the number 42. In itself it's an utterly worthless number, but if you know what question it answers to then it's very worthy indeed. What if my program coincidentally shares the exact same binary sequence as a Britney Spears song? Then who owns that big number? It doesn't matter, because the fact that both would be made of the same thing is irrelevant. In other words, your "big number" is worthless if you don't know what it is for, if you don't know what file extension to give it. It's like that hexadecimal sequence from some DVD player that the creators claimed ownership to. It's silly to claim to own the number, but it's not silly to not want it disclosed, because when you know what this number is for it stops being a useless number like all the others. They don't want you to spread it around just like you don't want anyone to spread around your passwords or credit card number and codes, or SSID, which are all just numbers, and not even such big ones as that. 3025 is just a number like all the others, but if you know what door it opens or what credit card it is the code to then it stops being just a number. I personally find it silly to focus entirely on the technical nature of things and derive principles from them rather than focus on practical aspects.
Well, the "service" business model doesn't work for everything, for example it wouldn't work with my program for which no support is needed. And as for the "sitting back and getting money for the rest of your life" argument, well so what, it's not the only case where that happens. People get lots of money from doing much less. Are you actually asking for how long are you entitled to receive money from the work you did after you stopped doing anything to it? Sounds like what you're pondering to me! Is it fair to reap the fruits from something you did 20 years ago? What's fair?
The elephant in the room here is that you all want to copy those immaterial works for free, and because of this you come up with bullshit moral justifications to get as much as you can for free. I pirate everything too, but I'm not an hypocrite, I don't try to disguise my not wanting to pay for things I can have for free as a moral war against injustice. You might think it conflicts with me selling software, but to me it doesn't, because there's no morals involved anywhere on either side of the equation. I pirate anything I want cause I need it/want it and I don't have the money for it and even if I did I'd rather not pay for what I can have for free, and on the other hand I need to make money, selling software is one way, and if my sales went down too low for a reason or another I'd look for job (which I'm actually in the process of doing, software sales are too irregular and make me just enough for a very modest living).
Moral aspects? Who fucking cares! Seriously. All that matters is what you call the "utilitarian aspect". I fail to see how anything else matters. Maybe it matters to you, but I don't care about what's fair or what's deserved, cause that's very arbitrary and subjective and it doesn't matter much anyway, I only care about the actual consequences. Actually, I even pirate software. Is it wrong? Who cares!! See?
Ah and if you want to torrent my program you'll have to buy it first and seed it because I checked and it's nowhere to be found. Which would be welcome given that my sales are low these days and I'm running out of money.
Yeah, that's nice, but that's off-topic. No one talked about Walt Disney making money off Mickey Mouse for a thousand years, right now we're talking about piracy and whether or not everything binary should be free. Whether or not my descendants will be able to make money off what I do now doesn't even begin to matter.
There's a reason why things are like this, and that's because no one would bother writing professional-quality software if they didn't get paid enough for it. Think all you want about how immaterial things should be free, but if all information somehow had to be free then you wouldn't have anymore professional software around, you'd be stuck with crap like GIMP or Blender and would never again see anything like Photoshop or 3DS Max. There's thousands of man-hours of work that go into each such commercial program, man-hours from highly qualified and well-paid people. Someone has to pay for that work, cause if no one does then these people won't touch that ever again and look for a real job that pays.
It's ludicrous to say that you own a particular configuration of 1s and 0s
That's the stupidest fucking argument on the topic I've ever heard. If everything comes down to just a bunch of 1s and 0s, then why don't you just create them as you need them? Oh, what's that? Creating what you want is non-trivial and the only way to create that is to do it the way it's currently done, which costs money? By the way, not believing in private property is communism. It's like, someone painstakingly creates something and then some wanker like you comes up and goes "this is now property of the people, thank you".
TL;DR you sound like a broke ass basement dweller who wants all his porn, games, movies and music for free cause has no money, and who'd never create anything worth a dime, so it's easy for you to whine and demand that everything is offered to you for free. I'm a self employed software developer and make a living off a program I created all on my own, I create value with my work, you wouldn't know what that means.
Why isn't it modded off-topic? So we don't know everything for sure about how a fly's brain works, but it doesn't matter, because we're looking at them for inspiration for the algorithms actually implemented, which we actually understand. No one's stupid enough to not understand their own algorithms, at least not at that level.