Besides, in the case above (and I'd guess other cases as well), patches are sent upstream with a dual license.
Patches weren't sent upstream until someone pitched a fit about it because the guy who hacked on it under the GPL was a twat and said no. The hypocrisy remains.
Re:GPLv2 and GPLv3 have the same spirit
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Your right to "hack" with the source code has been abolished.
No it hasn't. You can do whatever you please with the source. Their hardware just has the right to not accept it. Surely you l33t GPL devs could go build an identical system that doesn't require verification, right?
Oh, wait. The FSF doesn't give a shit about free software. They just want to tell people what they can do with their hardware.
They can still incorporate the code into GPLed programs if they wish
And not give it back to the BSD devs. Woo!
While they're under no obligation to do so, you'd think that the GPL-using devs who feel so strongly about giving back their code would give back to the people they built their code upon.
Why isn't that a good idea? Because encouraging more monopolistic companies and cartels is not a good idea? Couple that with consumers who are none too bright about what they want and you have a recipe for complete and utter suck.
I also haven't even addressed the issue that your idea would entirely stifle innovation (why would a programmer come up with an idea for an awesome new product if he can't get paid for it?) and pretty much all products except for what consumers think they want. In recreation software in particular (which I keep coming back to because it's my own field), what they want is usually not what they like.
How do you propose to address the sudden death of all so-called "sleeper hits" coming out of left field? Or do you sacrifice innovation and creativity on the altar of stripping developers' freedoms? Or do you really think that there would be enough interested consumers for somebody to be able to sell that idea to them? At a living wage? Please.
You've obviously given it a lot of thought, and in an ideal world maybe it'd work, but you've given no incentive for content creators to want such a thing. It's just like the GPL: good for users, horrible for developers (if they're forced to use it; fortunately, they are not--it has its place and that place is well away from my open-source and closed-source code alike). And sorry if it sounds selfish, but there's absolutely no benefit to this idea to me or anyone who doesn't want to draw a paycheck from some multinational.
Copyright protects the little guy, not just the big faceless corporation.
We're obviously at an impasse. Fortunately, the law agrees with me. If you want to spend your money to commission software with loose copyright or even no copyright at all, more power to you. I will continue to use copyright to ensure that I can make a living from my work. (And no, unlike RMS's retarded assertion, I don't use "make a living" as a euphemism for "getting rich.")
Which has nonetheless nothing do with any subjective valuation of anything.
Wrong. Jobs are fungible, too.
Since an established conglomerate could offer lower prices for the same services, the free market would push out of the market smaller developers. That's not a good thing. The retail model of software development and dissemination ensures competition by flattening the market.
A barber has a nonfungible job; it can't move a hundred or a thousand miles away. Software development can. If you understood this, you would understand why your example is retarded.
The idea that the consumer is going to pull-aggregate ahead of time is nonsensical. Can you even point to one industry where this happens, where a huge group of consumers gets together and says "we will pay $X now for this widespread consumer product to be brought to market"?
It doesn't work that way. The reason people are willing to pay that much in aggregate is because they aren't taking a risk on it. They can buy it right then. It already exists. It's a product that they can pull right off the shelf or order off the Internet.
Of course they are. If they want software written, and the only way to get that done is to pay for it, what do you think they're going to do instead?
It won't be developed. You'll still have the little shit open source games (like I said before--all of the worthwhile open-source games are based off originally closed-source code), but it would be the death knell of the Half-Lifes and their ilk because the consumer won't offer money ahead of time for a product with as wide a variance as software. Even pre-orders happen when the game is essentially done.
You are attempting to use those who create physical objects as a blueprint for an industry that creates information instead. It does not fit the situation. Does copyright need fixing? Yes; the durations are far too long. Is abolition of copyright even remotely sensical? No.
Now, is there a reason you think retail is a better model than services for software development? Or are you just going to swear and insult me some more to distract from the lack of substance in your argument?
Retail: consumer-push system; the consumer sees a bunch of products, all priced fairly cheaply, and has his pick of which one he wants. Low cost to the user. Low risk to the user. High risk to the developer, but the process seems to succeed enough that developers stay in business.
Service-based: consumer-pull system; the consumer has to hope he can find a bunch of like-minded people willing to pay enough money to get software written (given how much software actually costs to get written, the likelihood of this is slim). If the end product delivered sucks, the group of users have wasted a huge chunk of money gambling on a developer. High cost to the user00if you think you're going to find enough users willing to pay money up front to cover costs to the point where software would cost anywhere near the same as a retail box, you're nuts. Very high risk to the user. Low risk to the developer, but if the developer can't drum up business, the developer's going to go under--and your system ensures that all but the big-name developers are going to tank. Bravo.
One of these systems puts the risk on a corporate entity and affords consumers choice--and if the consumer guesses wrong, oh well, it's $50. The other makes consumers shoot blind and the costs are far, far greater if they guess wrong.
More reasons why this is unsustainable, in addition to other posts downthread. And you have not given one single reason why your business model would work for consumable software (games, Microsoft Office in the home, whatever). Nobody is going to pay.
Your business model is simply unsustainable in most industries, as I stated above. It may work for service-based applications--it's much like the business model I use for website design, in fact--but for consumer applications? Impossible for small developers and impractical for large. Large developers would have to charge huge amounts of money up-front in order to cover expenses for work done, more than any of your magical aggregate "groups" will ever fork over. Small developers don't have name recognition, and so nobody will come to them to pay them to make software in their field (and their prices for the same software can't be brought low enough to make them a seriously attractive option over a larger company--it still takes roughly the same number of man-hours to complete a project).
It'd also entirely fuck over content creators like novelists--no publisher would ever be able to effectively sell books to the majority of readers, "special editions" aside, and the idea that an advance could be provided to an author under such a business model. So not only do you lose quantity, you lose quality due to a lack of professional writers! Brilliant!
Something tells me you don't understand how the current business model actually works, to be honest. Large companies can complain about piracy, but it doesn't really affect them. It does affect small companies, and brutally so. Those small companies are the same ones that would be unable to manage contracts in your business model due to a lack of name recognition--but they're able to sell Some Sleeper Hit Game without problem. A customer doesn't care how big and effective your organization is because the product's sitting right in front of him--the risk to the customer is minimal. A client does care, because he has to pay up front and the risk to him is huge.
There's simply no way for an entirely service-oriented economy to prosper. It doesn't scale and you push all the power into the hands of cartels and conglomerates. Horrible, horrible proposition, built on the terribly foolish idea that copyright is "bad." I suppose the idea makes sense if you don't subscribe to the notion that creators deserve rights over their creations, but from a practical standpoint it's simply infeasible in too many markets. Ideological failure, practical failure.
Right - in other words, the company he works for has chosen a copyright-based business model. They've decided to use their own money to pay their employees to write code, and then (hopefully) make it back later by selling individual copies of that code.
But they didn't need to choose that business model. Instead, they could've chosen a service-based model, where they offer to write software for a certain price, instead of selling copies of software that's already been written.
When it comes to software, front-loading the process--getting the customer to pay you ahead of time--doesn't work well in most cases; it works only in very specific industries.
Example. Take Joe Blow, an indie games developer. Just a one-man developer. Who the hell is going to come to him and pay him to make a computer game for them? What standing does he have? The answer is "absolutely nothing." So in your dream world, he can't get a handhold to move up. There's no effective way for him to do so. Sure, he could release a bunch of games for free, but the whole "needing to eat" thing breaks that down. Whereas under the current system, Joe Blow can go "hmm, that's a pretty cool idea, I'll make that!" and sell it. The back-loaded process has more risk, but actually has some chance of success (and a potentially very high reward)--whereas there is no chance of success in a front-loaded process.
Your argument falls on its face, unless all you want making software are established companies. Personally, as an independent game developer myself, I'd rather avoid that.
No, it'll just need to be paid for differently: by charging for the programmers' labor instead of charging for copies of the files they produce.
Oh, sure! Programmers are totally going to be able to make a livable wage off a product that isn't made first! Look at the fucking game market and see how realistic that is. Put down the bong first.
More like god damn the people who are too blind, or too attached to a broken business model, to realize that you don't need copyright to get paid for working. People in most other industries manage to get paid for their work without any special monopoly protections like copyright.
Because the people in other industries are producing physical objects. When your creation (and it is as manifest a creation as anything physical) is easily copied, the framework of copyright ensures that you as a creator get a fair shake.
But no, you quite plainly don't give a fuck about the rights of creators. You and your GNUtard friends (and keep in mind, I write open-source code) plainly don't give two shits about the rights of those who are actually making things.
(And you're utterly, factually wrong about businesses "doing the work once those customers have agreed to pay them for it." Never fucking heard of retail, dipshit? Software development's profit cycle is essentially retail, not service-based, because service-based doesn't work for mass-market software one fucking bit.)
While I dislike the **AA's tactics as much as the next guy...you wouldn't cut somebody slack for not realizing that, say, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is illegal, would you? Or that going 105 MPH in a 55 MPH zone was illegal?
Does water taste like fine wine in your little dream-world, too? Stallman's old, tired line that people will continue to produce high-quality projects "because they love it" is idiotic. That may fly for what are largely single-creator or small-group projects, so you [i]might[/i] see some projects emerge in the realm of music and novels. But anything large-scale that isn't infrastructural (meaning recreational software) is going to essentially die in your sick little fantasyland.
Take games for example. You say that it'll still be produced, except "maybe not at the same rate it is now"--are you really so dense as to think that you'll get games of the same quality as you do now? Do you seriously think that there's any way that something like Half-Life 2 would be produced among the open-source community? Look at the not-entirely-shitty F/OSS games out there--Nexuiz et al. are based on an originally closed-source engine. For an example of the "quality" of entirely open-source engines, go look at something like Cube. Decent-for-free, but shitty in comparison to something commercial. Or compare Civilization 4 to FreeCiv; if you say FreeCiv isn't lacking you're deluded.
How dare those people expect to make a living out of their work. It should all be free for you to use, and god [i]damn[/i] the whole "making enough money to eat" thing. Or is it just that now they've [i]already[/i] made the games, it's okay in your entitlement-based mind to say "oh, fuck you, we're going to take it and make it free for everyone, and too bad for you if you relied on it for income"?
Fucking GNUtards need to get a job in the real world.
Your premise is so idiotic that it needs no "debunking"; your postulates do not reflect the real world and so attempting to discuss anything with you is a waste of time.
You obviously don't understand what interfaces are for.
Yes, defining the interface means only specifying method prototypes. That's the point. I can use (I'm a C# programmer, not a Java programmer, but the principle is the same) IDisposable, an interface to ensure cleanup of resources, regardless of what kind of object it is. Or I can use ICollection in order to guarantee that a wide variety of different data structures implement the same functions, though the underlying implementation obviously must differ.
The entire intent of interfaces is to provide a contract that can be effectively implemented by disparate object types. Nothing else.
If you need to write functions that must be able to interact with a set of classes that are similar, not inheriting them from a shared parent class in which the interface is implemented is stupid. If you need to write functions that must be able to interact with a set of classes that are not similar, then obviously the individual implementation of the programming interface for each class will have to be done anyway, so why are you complaining?
Static typing has warts. This is not one of them and your categorization of them as such belies your ignorance.
The Hague? You can dislike Bush all you want, but he's done absolutely nothing that is an offense punishable by the ICC. Anyone who says "Bush is a war criminal" does not know nor understand international law.
VB.NET is the braindead version of C#; the two languages map almost directly onto each other, though VB.NET is gimped with trash like the My namespace. Pick up C# and get away from that VB nonsense and Java will come easily to you as well.
Because the GPL is manifestly less free than the CDDL and contributions licensed under the GPL could not be folded back into the CDDL version?
And don't try to say "well, they could stipulate that all submissions have to be dual-licensed"--you and I both know we'd see some stupid little gnuZFS the same day as ZFS was GPL'd, just to get around that.
Slashdot Mirror
The B&M Gates Foundation is chasing money? Funny, looks like they have enough of their own...
That's not what he's saying, you stupid gnulot. What he's saying is that they'd just buy something else and all arguments to the contrary are idiotic.
Which is...you know...true.
Besides, in the case above (and I'd guess other cases as well), patches are sent upstream with a dual license.
Patches weren't sent upstream until someone pitched a fit about it because the guy who hacked on it under the GPL was a twat and said no. The hypocrisy remains.
Your right to "hack" with the source code has been abolished.
No it hasn't. You can do whatever you please with the source. Their hardware just has the right to not accept it. Surely you l33t GPL devs could go build an identical system that doesn't require verification, right?
Oh, wait. The FSF doesn't give a shit about free software. They just want to tell people what they can do with their hardware.
They can still incorporate the code into GPLed programs if they wish
And not give it back to the BSD devs. Woo!
While they're under no obligation to do so, you'd think that the GPL-using devs who feel so strongly about giving back their code would give back to the people they built their code upon.
Why isn't that a good idea? Because encouraging more monopolistic companies and cartels is not a good idea? Couple that with consumers who are none too bright about what they want and you have a recipe for complete and utter suck.
I also haven't even addressed the issue that your idea would entirely stifle innovation (why would a programmer come up with an idea for an awesome new product if he can't get paid for it?) and pretty much all products except for what consumers think they want. In recreation software in particular (which I keep coming back to because it's my own field), what they want is usually not what they like.
How do you propose to address the sudden death of all so-called "sleeper hits" coming out of left field? Or do you sacrifice innovation and creativity on the altar of stripping developers' freedoms? Or do you really think that there would be enough interested consumers for somebody to be able to sell that idea to them? At a living wage? Please.
You've obviously given it a lot of thought, and in an ideal world maybe it'd work, but you've given no incentive for content creators to want such a thing. It's just like the GPL: good for users, horrible for developers (if they're forced to use it; fortunately, they are not--it has its place and that place is well away from my open-source and closed-source code alike). And sorry if it sounds selfish, but there's absolutely no benefit to this idea to me or anyone who doesn't want to draw a paycheck from some multinational.
Copyright protects the little guy, not just the big faceless corporation.
We're obviously at an impasse. Fortunately, the law agrees with me. If you want to spend your money to commission software with loose copyright or even no copyright at all, more power to you. I will continue to use copyright to ensure that I can make a living from my work. (And no, unlike RMS's retarded assertion, I don't use "make a living" as a euphemism for "getting rich.")
Which has nonetheless nothing do with any subjective valuation of anything.
Wrong. Jobs are fungible, too.
Since an established conglomerate could offer lower prices for the same services, the free market would push out of the market smaller developers. That's not a good thing. The retail model of software development and dissemination ensures competition by flattening the market.
A barber has a nonfungible job; it can't move a hundred or a thousand miles away. Software development can. If you understood this, you would understand why your example is retarded.
The idea that the consumer is going to pull-aggregate ahead of time is nonsensical. Can you even point to one industry where this happens, where a huge group of consumers gets together and says "we will pay $X now for this widespread consumer product to be brought to market"?
It doesn't work that way. The reason people are willing to pay that much in aggregate is because they aren't taking a risk on it. They can buy it right then. It already exists. It's a product that they can pull right off the shelf or order off the Internet.
Of course they are. If they want software written, and the only way to get that done is to pay for it, what do you think they're going to do instead?
It won't be developed. You'll still have the little shit open source games (like I said before--all of the worthwhile open-source games are based off originally closed-source code), but it would be the death knell of the Half-Lifes and their ilk because the consumer won't offer money ahead of time for a product with as wide a variance as software. Even pre-orders happen when the game is essentially done.
You are attempting to use those who create physical objects as a blueprint for an industry that creates information instead. It does not fit the situation. Does copyright need fixing? Yes; the durations are far too long. Is abolition of copyright even remotely sensical? No.
Is this some kind of new drooling troll with which I am not familiar? Or is it just a moron?
Barbers and hairdressers are nonfungible jobs. Software development is entirely fungible. You're a fucking moron.
Now, is there a reason you think retail is a better model than services for software development? Or are you just going to swear and insult me some more to distract from the lack of substance in your argument?
Retail: consumer-push system; the consumer sees a bunch of products, all priced fairly cheaply, and has his pick of which one he wants. Low cost to the user. Low risk to the user. High risk to the developer, but the process seems to succeed enough that developers stay in business.
Service-based: consumer-pull system; the consumer has to hope he can find a bunch of like-minded people willing to pay enough money to get software written (given how much software actually costs to get written, the likelihood of this is slim). If the end product delivered sucks, the group of users have wasted a huge chunk of money gambling on a developer. High cost to the user00if you think you're going to find enough users willing to pay money up front to cover costs to the point where software would cost anywhere near the same as a retail box, you're nuts. Very high risk to the user. Low risk to the developer, but if the developer can't drum up business, the developer's going to go under--and your system ensures that all but the big-name developers are going to tank. Bravo.
One of these systems puts the risk on a corporate entity and affords consumers choice--and if the consumer guesses wrong, oh well, it's $50. The other makes consumers shoot blind and the costs are far, far greater if they guess wrong.
More reasons why this is unsustainable, in addition to other posts downthread. And you have not given one single reason why your business model would work for consumable software (games, Microsoft Office in the home, whatever). Nobody is going to pay.
The ACs are getting more and more retarded these days. Kind of funny, really. :-)
Your business model is simply unsustainable in most industries, as I stated above. It may work for service-based applications--it's much like the business model I use for website design, in fact--but for consumer applications? Impossible for small developers and impractical for large. Large developers would have to charge huge amounts of money up-front in order to cover expenses for work done, more than any of your magical aggregate "groups" will ever fork over. Small developers don't have name recognition, and so nobody will come to them to pay them to make software in their field (and their prices for the same software can't be brought low enough to make them a seriously attractive option over a larger company--it still takes roughly the same number of man-hours to complete a project).
It'd also entirely fuck over content creators like novelists--no publisher would ever be able to effectively sell books to the majority of readers, "special editions" aside, and the idea that an advance could be provided to an author under such a business model. So not only do you lose quantity, you lose quality due to a lack of professional writers! Brilliant!
Something tells me you don't understand how the current business model actually works, to be honest. Large companies can complain about piracy, but it doesn't really affect them. It does affect small companies, and brutally so. Those small companies are the same ones that would be unable to manage contracts in your business model due to a lack of name recognition--but they're able to sell Some Sleeper Hit Game without problem. A customer doesn't care how big and effective your organization is because the product's sitting right in front of him--the risk to the customer is minimal. A client does care, because he has to pay up front and the risk to him is huge.
There's simply no way for an entirely service-oriented economy to prosper. It doesn't scale and you push all the power into the hands of cartels and conglomerates. Horrible, horrible proposition, built on the terribly foolish idea that copyright is "bad." I suppose the idea makes sense if you don't subscribe to the notion that creators deserve rights over their creations, but from a practical standpoint it's simply infeasible in too many markets. Ideological failure, practical failure.
Right - in other words, the company he works for has chosen a copyright-based business model. They've decided to use their own money to pay their employees to write code, and then (hopefully) make it back later by selling individual copies of that code.
But they didn't need to choose that business model. Instead, they could've chosen a service-based model, where they offer to write software for a certain price, instead of selling copies of software that's already been written.
When it comes to software, front-loading the process--getting the customer to pay you ahead of time--doesn't work well in most cases; it works only in very specific industries.
Example. Take Joe Blow, an indie games developer. Just a one-man developer. Who the hell is going to come to him and pay him to make a computer game for them? What standing does he have? The answer is "absolutely nothing." So in your dream world, he can't get a handhold to move up. There's no effective way for him to do so. Sure, he could release a bunch of games for free, but the whole "needing to eat" thing breaks that down. Whereas under the current system, Joe Blow can go "hmm, that's a pretty cool idea, I'll make that!" and sell it. The back-loaded process has more risk, but actually has some chance of success (and a potentially very high reward)--whereas there is no chance of success in a front-loaded process.
Your argument falls on its face, unless all you want making software are established companies. Personally, as an independent game developer myself, I'd rather avoid that.
No, it'll just need to be paid for differently: by charging for the programmers' labor instead of charging for copies of the files they produce.
Oh, sure! Programmers are totally going to be able to make a livable wage off a product that isn't made first! Look at the fucking game market and see how realistic that is. Put down the bong first.
More like god damn the people who are too blind, or too attached to a broken business model, to realize that you don't need copyright to get paid for working. People in most other industries manage to get paid for their work without any special monopoly protections like copyright.
Because the people in other industries are producing physical objects. When your creation (and it is as manifest a creation as anything physical) is easily copied, the framework of copyright ensures that you as a creator get a fair shake.
But no, you quite plainly don't give a fuck about the rights of creators. You and your GNUtard friends (and keep in mind, I write open-source code) plainly don't give two shits about the rights of those who are actually making things.
(And you're utterly, factually wrong about businesses "doing the work once those customers have agreed to pay them for it." Never fucking heard of retail, dipshit? Software development's profit cycle is essentially retail, not service-based, because service-based doesn't work for mass-market software one fucking bit.)
ROFL, seriously? Link please!
(...I miss TechTV. :( )
While I dislike the **AA's tactics as much as the next guy...you wouldn't cut somebody slack for not realizing that, say, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit is illegal, would you? Or that going 105 MPH in a 55 MPH zone was illegal?
Ignorance isn't an excuse.
Does water taste like fine wine in your little dream-world, too? Stallman's old, tired line that people will continue to produce high-quality projects "because they love it" is idiotic. That may fly for what are largely single-creator or small-group projects, so you [i]might[/i] see some projects emerge in the realm of music and novels. But anything large-scale that isn't infrastructural (meaning recreational software) is going to essentially die in your sick little fantasyland.
Take games for example. You say that it'll still be produced, except "maybe not at the same rate it is now"--are you really so dense as to think that you'll get games of the same quality as you do now? Do you seriously think that there's any way that something like Half-Life 2 would be produced among the open-source community? Look at the not-entirely-shitty F/OSS games out there--Nexuiz et al. are based on an originally closed-source engine. For an example of the "quality" of entirely open-source engines, go look at something like Cube. Decent-for-free, but shitty in comparison to something commercial. Or compare Civilization 4 to FreeCiv; if you say FreeCiv isn't lacking you're deluded.
How dare those people expect to make a living out of their work. It should all be free for you to use, and god [i]damn[/i] the whole "making enough money to eat" thing. Or is it just that now they've [i]already[/i] made the games, it's okay in your entitlement-based mind to say "oh, fuck you, we're going to take it and make it free for everyone, and too bad for you if you relied on it for income"?
Fucking GNUtards need to get a job in the real world.
Your premise is so idiotic that it needs no "debunking"; your postulates do not reflect the real world and so attempting to discuss anything with you is a waste of time.
Oh god, you're a truther. No wonder you're fundamentally headfucked.
You obviously don't understand what interfaces are for.
Yes, defining the interface means only specifying method prototypes. That's the point. I can use (I'm a C# programmer, not a Java programmer, but the principle is the same) IDisposable, an interface to ensure cleanup of resources, regardless of what kind of object it is. Or I can use ICollection in order to guarantee that a wide variety of different data structures implement the same functions, though the underlying implementation obviously must differ.
The entire intent of interfaces is to provide a contract that can be effectively implemented by disparate object types. Nothing else.
If you need to write functions that must be able to interact with a set of classes that are similar, not inheriting them from a shared parent class in which the interface is implemented is stupid. If you need to write functions that must be able to interact with a set of classes that are not similar, then obviously the individual implementation of the programming interface for each class will have to be done anyway, so why are you complaining?
Static typing has warts. This is not one of them and your categorization of them as such belies your ignorance.
The Hague? You can dislike Bush all you want, but he's done absolutely nothing that is an offense punishable by the ICC. Anyone who says "Bush is a war criminal" does not know nor understand international law.
I assume you're talking about VB.NET?
VB.NET is the braindead version of C#; the two languages map almost directly onto each other, though VB.NET is gimped with trash like the My namespace. Pick up C# and get away from that VB nonsense and Java will come easily to you as well.
Because the GPL is manifestly less free than the CDDL and contributions licensed under the GPL could not be folded back into the CDDL version?
And don't try to say "well, they could stipulate that all submissions have to be dual-licensed"--you and I both know we'd see some stupid little gnuZFS the same day as ZFS was GPL'd, just to get around that.