Ironically, the only Disco that died was the commercialized crap the record companies put out to suit their 3.5 minute radio format.
This stuff lacked much of the deep grooves and syncopated beats. It sucked so much, the word Disco was forever tainted.
There is a huge industry around House (and Jungle/Trip-Hop/Acid Jazz/etc,.) right now. It happens that most of the players in this industry are indie labels, at least the ones that know quality music.
MP3 is pretty entrenched right now because there is an abundant supply of free encoders and decoders, as well as artists that sell or give away music in this format, thus satisfying the free market forces of supply and demand.
Of course, the media companies feel like they have a God given right to be the middleman of every transaction. God forbid people do business among themselves!
Product vendors must sell features in order to avoid a major legal issue of making people pay again for a working version of what they already bought.
There is also the cost of issuing parallel maintenance releases for old code (of course, this is the right thing to do, I hate upgrading for bug fixes!).
Also, over-leveraged products end up only working for the least common denominator of customer, the sweet-spot in the marketing dept's product matrix. The customer only realizes that the product won't meet their needs when they try to deal with their non-common requirements, which they assume the vendor though of.
The mass market product paradigm is totally broken for custom solution providers, because there are very few customers who don't have needs outside the product matrix sweet-spot. Only open source code can allow custom solution providers to add and improve features where they are needed for customers.
The software isn't buggy, but the process and business model around the development of software is. Customers are getting shafted while vendors make billions. This is only tolerated because customers have not seen better quality. Customers have not seen better quality because good software companies get bought or predated before they can upset the status quo.
Upsetting the status quo will take many good open source developers building quality software and providing quality services that allow their informed customers to out-compete their rivals in both technology and non-technology markets. Those who succeed at this task must then make the very hard sacrifice of not accepting a wad of cash to stop the good work they're doing, once they realize the truth behind a buyout offer from a large software company. After that, they must be prepared to show off their successful projects in the face of massive negative P.R. Their customers must so satisfied that they reject the anticompetitive free services offer from the large software company.
I for one would rather go through the fight than get paid off. Hopefully there are others who feel the same way. It is up to us to make this a better place to work and live.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, the only Disco that died was the commercialized crap the record companies put out to suit their 3.5 minute radio format.
This stuff lacked much of the deep grooves and syncopated beats. It sucked so much, the word Disco was forever tainted.
There is a huge industry around House (and Jungle/Trip-Hop/Acid Jazz/etc,.) right now. It happens that most of the players in this industry are indie labels, at least the ones that know quality music.
MP3 is pretty entrenched right now because there is an abundant supply of free encoders and decoders, as well as artists that sell or give away music in this format, thus satisfying the free market forces of supply and demand.
Of course, the media companies feel like they have a God given right to be the middleman of every transaction. God forbid people do business among themselves!
Mike
Product vendors must sell features in order to avoid a major legal issue of making people pay again for a working version of what they already bought.
There is also the cost of issuing parallel maintenance releases for old code (of course, this is the right thing to do, I hate upgrading for bug fixes!).
Also, over-leveraged products end up only working for the least common denominator of customer, the sweet-spot in the marketing dept's product matrix.
The customer only realizes that the product won't meet their needs when they try to deal with their non-common requirements, which they assume the vendor though of.
The mass market product paradigm is totally broken for custom solution providers, because there are very few customers who don't have needs outside the product matrix sweet-spot. Only open source code can allow custom solution providers to add and improve features where they are needed for customers.
The software isn't buggy, but the process and business model around the development of software is. Customers are getting shafted while vendors make billions. This is only tolerated because customers have not seen better quality. Customers have not seen better quality because good software companies get bought or predated before they can upset the status quo.
Upsetting the status quo will take many good open source developers building quality software and providing quality services that allow their informed customers to out-compete their rivals in both technology and non-technology markets. Those who succeed at this task must then make the very hard sacrifice of not accepting a wad of cash to stop the good work they're doing, once they realize the truth behind a buyout offer from a large software company. After that, they must be prepared to show off their successful projects in the face of massive negative P.R. Their customers must so satisfied that they reject the anticompetitive free services offer from the large software company.
I for one would rather go through the fight than get paid off. Hopefully there are others who feel the same way. It is up to us to make this a better place to work and live.
Mike