Prev: German Language in Europe
Next: Memory Leak Issue in Weblogic, SUN, Apache and Oracle classes
From: ClassCastException on 29 May 2010 17:23
On Sat, 29 May 2010 14:48:46 -0400, David Lamb wrote:

> On 29/05/2010 4:17 AM, ClassCastException wrote:
>> Copyright was born from the theory that letting authors of "writings
>> and discoveries" close off access and control the use of their work,
>> e.g. to set up a tollbooth, would promote progress.
>
> Well, that theory *used* to be true; Dickens apparently got no royalties
> from "pirated" US editions of his works. But that was a long time ago
> when the world was very different.

Interestingly, Dickens actually profited from this. Hence why I said that
that was the *theory* behind copyright; there is some evidence that that
theory was false, or at best semi-true. In actual practice, the existence
of art of many kinds for thousands of years before anyone thought of the
concept of a copyright is perhaps the strongest evidence that it wasn't
ever actually needed. A case for it being needed for some very expensive
modern art forms such as blockbuster movies might be made. Open source
development models, including with licenses like BSD that permit closed-
source derivative works, point to its *not* being necessary for software
innovation to occur (without copyright software development would
probably be very similar to how it actually is in BSD-like-license-
dominated ecosystems, such as those surrounding BSD Unix itself and
Apache; there could be some closed-source derivative works but this
potential doesn't seem to have killed BSD or Apache).

Perhaps even more interesting is that a similar case can be made for
getting rid of patents on most everything except pharmaceuticals, where
they seem both most needed (drug development costs make $200 million
blockbuster movie productions look cheap at times) and most controversial
(artificially inflated drug prices can actually *kill*, unlike
artificially inflated movie prices or artificially inflated software
prices).

Cleverer minds than mine continue to argue, cogently at times and quite
acrimoniously at times, both sides of the debate, in the comments of both
the blogs I named elsewhere in this thread. (And, at one of the blogs,
there's also Twisted ... apparently taking a particularly radical anti-
copyright anti-patent position ... for whatever that's worth.)

Meanwhile open source continues to win practical victories. The recent
school laptop scandal, for example: the initial scandal just cries out
for owner-override rights for hardware owners, so against any species of
so-called "trusted computing" such as has been pushed at times by
Microsoft as a way of limiting "piracy" (and such as has quietly been
actually implemented in game consoles, DVD/BluRay drives/players, and
Apple's iPod/iPhone/iPad portables); the later revelation of serious
security flaws in the "remote administration" software that was snuck
onto those machines points to the dangers of using closed source remote
administration, operating system, or security software of any kind: at
best you may have severe security flaws hidden from peer review but
eventually findable by a determined black hat; at worst the nightmare
scenario from the movie "The Net" where some popular closed-source
firewall software or similarly turns out to have a deliberate back door
and its makers, once it becomes very widely deployed, start using it in a
nefarious world-domination plot or to pull off massive heists or
whatever. (Imagine a deliberate back door in Windows Vista and a
"Praetorian" conspiracy within Microsoft. Shudder. Install Linux. Sigh
with relief. Recall that many government and other trusted-by-the-public
computer systems and networks are riddled with Microsoft software.
Shudder. Note that Apple has even tighter control over the iFoo
ecosystem. Shudder. Ditch your iPhone for an Android phone. Sigh with
relief. Watch as a controversy breaks out over Amazon's retroactive
unpurchasing of Kindle customers' copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four by
Amazon and how all their annotations unexisted because Amazon decided
they were doubleplusungood, or something like that. Shudder. Ditch Kindle
for ... er, wait, dammit!, the iPad is just as evil. Groan and use the
Android phone with its inferior reading display and wait for a googlePad
or similar device to hit the shelves. Pirate what isn't available at
Project Gutenberg, because officially-sanctioned ebooks aren't available
for Android platforms, at least not yet; maybe buy a paperback copy of
each pirated book so the authors get some money. Or perhaps just lug
actual paper books around and forget e-reading for now. Sigh with relief;
now your books can't be unpublished by Amazon, Apple, or anybody else
short of jackbooted thugs breaking down your door and prying them from
your cold, dead fingers, and you trust your 12-gauge named Old Betsy
together with an electric fence, basic property rights, and the 1st, 2nd,
and 4th Amendments to keep any wannabe Guy Montagues at bay. Remember how
most of the AI-takeover apocalypses also have a similar element --
defense contractors buying from US Robotics in I, Robot, defense
contractors buying from Cyberdyne in Terminator, etc., and these having
intentional backdoors in them that let Viki/Skynet/Colossus/whatever take
over. Shudder.)
From: ClassCastException on 29 May 2010 18:22
On Sat, 29 May 2010 21:54:24 +0000, Stefan Ram wrote:

> Thomas Pornin <pornin(a)bolet.org> writes:
>>So the GPL is, in practice (not in theory), incompatible with for-profit
>
> If you put a box in a shop with some software for $329, people who
> think that it addresses their needs will buy it. It might contain a
> sheet of paper with the GPL and directory with the source code. Most
> consumers will not read either of them. There are bought many goods in
> our world that one also might get for free by some other means.

Perhaps. Though at that price point they might feel ripped off if they
later learned they could have gotten it for free elsewhere.

On the other hand I can see someone spending even $40 on a CD that's nice
and easy to install and considering that okay even if they find they
could have had it for free as a downloadable .iso file to figure out what
to do with to install it. People will willingly pay, sometimes quite a
lot, for convenience. Hence fast food, more expensive than home cooking
and often not as good yet very very profitable.

> This would entitle /you/ to redistribute it, and your customers might
> not like this. Also, once they have the software, how do you make them
> pay you? The GPL already entitles them to legally own it without any
> payment to you.

Obviously you'd structure the transaction as an up-front sale: swap the
money for a disc.

>>Also, theory has it that big money resides in support and maintenance
>>contracts. The software is then some kind of commercial argument, and
>>you can give it for free since users automatically become potential
>>customers for your support and maintenance activity.
>
> Or for the support and maintenance of any other skilled party ...

Still gives you an incentive to develop the code:

1. The more valuable you make the software, the larger the support pie,
and the larger the support pie, the larger your slice of it,
regardless of what percentage of the whole pie that slice might be.
2. The more of it you've developed, the better you know the codebase
relative to any other skilled party, and the better you know the
codebase relative to any other skilled party, the better you can make
your support offering compared to anyone else's. This makes your slice
of the pie larger.

So, you can potentially get yourself a larger slice of a larger pie by
participating in developing the open-source software, compared to if you
let other people do all the development work on it. Developing it builds
in-house expertise with that software, and it's the time of your experts
that you're selling; making those experts better experts makes that time
more valuable, and so does making the thing they're experts on more
popular.

Make that time more valuable and you can attract more customers so you
can sell more of it, charge more for it, or whatever.
From: ClassCastException on 31 May 2010 06:37
On Sat, 29 May 2010 21:47:50 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 29-05-2010 03:56, ClassCastException wrote:
>> This might have something to do with the fact that Aquafina makes quite
>> a bit of money bottling and selling stuff that pretty much all of their
>> potential customers can get out of a faucet for free.
>
> Not a good comparison.

Of course it is. It's the *classic* example of successfully competing
with free!

>> It might also have something to do with the fact that the entertainment
>> industry is not, contrary to popular belief, losing revenues to piracy.
>> Declining sales of things like DVDs and recorded music have a complex
>> web of causes, in which the effects of online piracy are not reliably
>> different from zero according to the statistical studies.
>
> That "fact" is very disputed.

By idiots. The studies' results are what they are, even if many refuse to
accept them.

Anyone who clings to a theory despite a growing weight of contrary
evidence has ceased to practice science and has become a pseudoscientific
quack at best and a religious nut at worst.

>> The moral of the story: the GPL absolutely is NOT incompatible with
>> profiting from selling software, NOT EVEN if you restrict your business
>> model to selling copies.
>
> Companies making monet on GPL usually do it by selling support

Correction: usually have at least *one* revenue stream be selling
support. It need *not* be the *only* one.

> The GPL license does not prohibit it, but the terms of GPL plus basic
> economics do that you need something other than selling copies to
> prosper.

If that were true, then Aquafina would have to sell more than just
bottled water to prosper.
From: ClassCastException on 31 May 2010 06:46
On Sat, 29 May 2010 22:10:56 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 29-05-2010 04:17, ClassCastException wrote:
>> On Fri, 28 May 2010 20:31:14 -0400, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> If everybody could copy software exactly as they wanted then I am
>>> pretty sure that the software industry would be in a very poor shape.
>>
>> I actually doubt this; I think it would work rather differently from
>> now in some ways, but that people would have found a way to make it
>> work and to profit in it. Plenty of businesses profit from open source
>> software in various ways, including by selling support or simply by
>> funding development of open source software that they use in-house and
>> get productivity gains from, and, by funding it, get more influence to
>> have features they'd find useful added and the bugs that particularly
>> harm their productivity prioritized.
>
> Since open source requires copyright then no copyright means no open
> source.
>
> So the existence of open source does not prove that copyright is not
> necessary.

I don't think so. Open source with the BSD or Apache license has so
little restriction on distribution that if all software code was public
domain, the BSD license and Apache license using development/business
models would pretty much be unaffected.

If copyright disappeared tomorrow, the whole software industry would
eventually reorganize along the lines of such projects.

Note that the world's premiere web server software is one of those
projects. So I doubt we would want for software or software development.

>>> Sounds like blogs from teenagers that wants to be able to download
>>> everything for free and have parents to pay the bills.
>>
>> I have my doubts whether Against Monopoly (run by a pair of degreed
>> economists) and Techdirt (run by a successful dot-com entrepreneur) are
>> "from teenagers that want to be able to download everything for free
>> and have parents to pay the bills". :)
>
> Given that you do not provide links or names or anything, then the
> teenager guess is as good as any.

I noticed a rather abrupt, borderline-rude tone in several of your recent
posts to this thread. And now this. It boggles the mind. I gave two
specific names, a quick Google of either leads to links, and I posted a
link to one of them at the very start of this thread, and yet you accuse
me of providing neither -- *while quoting the names*?!

What the hell is the *matter* with you? I get the distinct feeling that
you might be arguing purely for the sake of arguing. Or that any
questioning of copyright sends you into a violent, negative, emotional
response so powerful as to render you incoherent and reduce your capacity
for either reason or restraint (and thus diplomacy).

If the latter, you have some issues that need working out. It's not like
it's a matter of life or death or something!

Now, since you seem to need some real hand-holding here, I'll post the
links:

http://www.againstmonopoly.org/
http://www.techdirt.com/

HTH.

> There may be many different ways to use copyright.
>
> But copyright works identical for all - open source or closed source.
>
> In fact open source are some of the fiercest enforcer of copyright,
> because:
> * they need it even more when they hand out source code
> * a large fraction of open source people do not believe in
> patents, so they only have copyright

Most open source licenses do not actually enforce anything crucial to the
business model, so to the ability to profit from the software
development. Arguably even the GPL doesn't, but particularly most of the
non-"copyleft" ones just ask for attribution and maybe one or two other
minor things. Trademark law and laws against misrepresentation and fraud
could probably be used to cover such needs, and they can probably be done
without.
From: ClassCastException on 31 May 2010 06:52
On Sun, 30 May 2010 19:59:36 -0700, Roedy Green wrote:

> [copyright] is required or it would be almost impossible to make money
> writing books or programs. Custom programs would survive, but no one-
> size-fits-all.

That is the popular misconception, yes, but there's mounting evidence
that it simply isn't true.

For one thing, authors made money long before there was copyright.
There's only been copyright for about 300 years, but people have been
writing (and being paid to write) for thousands.

Lots of software development, including "one-size-fits-all", occurs under
the aegis of very liberal licenses like BSD and Apache. This development
includes a fair bit that's for-profit and not one dime of their revenue
came from copyright enforcement. Still more such development is non-
profit in character. The Linux kernel itself was written as a hobby, for
example. Copyright was not needed to incentivize this.

The question about copyright now, realistically, is not whether it is
*needed* or *nothing* will get created, but what amount will maximize
creation and access to the results. It's becoming clear that that amount
is much lower than what we currently have -- perhaps two or so years with
broad fair-use exemptions, enough for books, movies, and new software
versions to make the bulk of the money they will ever make -- and quite
possibly zero.
First  |  Prev  |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3
Prev: German Language in Europe
Next: Memory Leak Issue in Weblogic, SUN, Apache and Oracle classes