RMS fights against private software and its social implications is a battle to the death. As he highlights in his speeches, the law created more problems for those who want to publish free software than to those who would like to unveil plans for an atomic bomb. This is what he stated at Zaragoza, during an event organised by Zaralinux and the Giunta citizens.
Richard Stallman: “Free software is neither to the right nor to the left”
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
>sharing copies of any information technology product over the computer for most of us is a good act, it is social
cooperation.
>it is (not) legitimate to impose penalties to those who make unauthorised copies, because sharing these copies is not immoral
>A winning society will be one in which cooperation among citizens is promoted and not prohibited like it is nowadays.
What a knucklehead. I guess in his ‘Utopia’ the government would pay for the creation of any intellectual or artistic property? Give me a break.
But isn’t the free distribution and access to any kind of information our fundamental right to begin with? I think this right by itself is even more justifiable than existence of governments and countries and their respective laws. I think Freenet project (freenetproject.org) has already made a lot of progress towards achieving this ultimate goal.
But isn’t the free distribution and access to any kind of information our fundamental right to begin with? I think this right by itself is even more justifiable than existence of governments and countries and their respective laws. I think Freenet project (freenetproject.org) has already made a lot of progress towards achieving this ultimate goal.
And where, pray tell, does this right come from?
If I come up with a recipe for a new type of cookie…I don’t have to tell anyone that information. I can take that secret to the grave with me, in the interest of profitting from this information, which I painstakingly acquired by my own means.
If I come up with a recipe for a new type of cookie…I don’t have to tell anyone that information. I can take that secret to the grave with me, in the interest of profitting from this information, which I painstakingly acquired by my own means.
A legend tells of a mysterious old man, who lived way up in the mountains. It is said that during thunderstorms, demented laughter would be heard from there and an old tired voice shouting “I have the ultimate cookie!”.
Seriously, wouldn’t you rather bake some cookies, share it with your neighbours, have a small BBQ and such? Don’t be so antisocial
If I write a piece of code … be it an app, OS, or whatever, you don’t have any inherent RIGHT to do anything with it unless I say you do.
I mean, I don’t have a problem with free software (both as in speech and beer), but where do people get off saying they have some God-given right to do stuff with software that they themselves did not write?
As I said, free software is fine, but it is ultimately up to the author to decide what can and cannot be done with it, IMHO.
I guess in his ‘Utopia’ the government would pay for the creation of any intellectual or artistic property?<P>
First, the product of your intellect isn’t property. It’s an idea, which is fundamentally different from the tangible, physical things which comprise property.
<P>
The US and some other countries have laws which assign a property right, for a limited time, to some intellectual products. Think how different this is from physical property (e.g., your computer), which is yours, permanently.
<P>
Second, why do you assume that art and ideas must be paid for? Most artists seem to create for one of two reasons: either because it’s their day job, or because they have a story/tune/picture in their head, scratching to get out.
<P>
If we eliminate copyright, some monopolists who are gouging the public via those property rights in intellectual property will have to get honest jobs. We’ll see a lot few potboilers in all the art forms. Most artists who create because they must will just keep their (usually non-artsy) day jobs, and won’t notice the difference.
<P>
If we eliminate patents, the situation is a bit more complicated, but I think that what it boils down to is that most fields of endeavor would be unchanged. For a good take on how valuable patents are to most real people, take a look here: http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.html . Don Lancaster makes good sense in thses anti-patent screeds, and he comes at it from a strictly pragmatic viewpoint which is quite different than RMS’s.
Of course it is your right to keep that information secret. But IMHO you have a moral obligation to add your knowledge to the public domain after you profited from it for some time, since in every single piece of technology you use contains a lot of knowledge and information from very intelligent people that added their knowledge to the public domain.
Where would we be now when people like Newton, Einstein, Turing, von Neumann etc. had kept their knowledge secret in order to maximize profit? If you are a software developer, you use plenty of very intelligent algorithms that people like Donald Knuth have put into public domain, so it is only fair that your own creations should enter the public domain at some point in time.
People who freely use the material from the public domain for their own profit, but are unwilling to put any of their own creations into the public domain should be regarded as thieves (I am thinking of e.g. disney here).
An example for a moral approach to the whole intellectual property issue is ID Software. They put their old stuff under public domain so that the code is not lost and people can learn and experiment with it. Their reward is that the code of e.g. the original doom will be marveled at by generations of 3d developers to come, while other 1990 area games will fade to obscurity.
It has been said previously;
“If I write a piece of code … be it an app, OS, or whatever, you don’t have any inherent RIGHT to do anything with it unless I say you do. ”
and,
“If I come up with a recipe for a new type of cookie…I don’t have to tell anyone that information. I can take that secret to the grave with me, in the interest of profitting [sic] from this information, which I painstakingly acquired by my own means.”
I think the people who wrote those comments, just don’t get it. Here’s the short version:
1. Ideas are NOT property, property is property.
2. When you sell/give something to someone else, your RIGHT to have a say in what they do with it ended when they took possession of it.
Now for the long version:
An idea isn’t something that you can own, like a house, or a car, or a loaf of bread. If you have a car, and I take that car away from you, you no longer have the car, I do. If you come up with the word “zubbly-zubbly-zoo” and I want to say that word, there is nothing stopping you from saying “zubbly-zubbly-zoo” as well. We could even say it together. Our demented legal system aside, there is now way that you can “own” a word. If a million people all know the word “zubbly-zubbly-zoo” neither you nor the 999,999th person is lessened by all of the other people who know. Everyone can use the word without infringing on the right of anyone else to use the word. Except for Jesus Christ, I don’t know of another who could share a loaf of bead with two or ten, or a hundred people and still have everyone get the same amount of bread to eat.
If you have the ultimate anything, cookie recipe, song, way to fold your socks, no one is forcing you to tell the world. I think what Stallman is saying is that once you tell someone else, they have the right to tell others what they know. Morally, you don’t have the right to stop them just because you came up with it first.
If I buy a stick from my local lumber yard, I have the inherent right to do practically anything I want with it, except destroying other peoples property, beating them up with it, or other things along that line. I can build a baseball bat, anchor my fence, whittle it down to toothpicks, or throw it on the fire. The lumber yard had no right telling me what I can or can’t do with it. When I buy a can of coffee, I can make coffee, abstract art, new age kitty litter, the grocery store don’t have the right to tell me what I can or can’t do with it once I’ve bought it. So if you right a piece of code, what gives you the right to restrict what other people can do with your application after they have a copy? A dress designer can’t restrict me from wearing her design to formal events, when the weather is clement. I can wear it while slopping the pigs during a rainstorm if I want to. According to your interpretation though, YOU believe that I have absolutely NO rights to do ANYTHING with your program. That’s rich……
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
[email protected]
If I write a piece of code … you don’t have any inherent RIGHT to do anything with it unless I say you do. <P>
Interesting idea. The other extreme would be that ideas are meant to be shared, and that I have the inherent right, and perhaps the duty, to copy the ideas of others. That’s how the world worked until about 500 years ago. People who had nifty new ideas tried to keep them secret, so they could get some advantage over others. This secrecy impeded progress; you couldn’t build on and improve the ideas of others if they were kept secret.
<P>
Here in the US, our founding fathers tried to strike a happy medium between the two extremes by authorizing (but not requiring) Congress to grant patents (temporary monopolies) to inventors who publicly disclosed the details of their inventions. Similarly, to encourage publishers to undertake the then-expensive process of publishing the works of authors, Congress was allowed (but not required) to grant copyrights (temporary monopolies) to authors.
<P>
The original aim of US copyright and patent law was to increase sharing, and enrich the public domain with ideas and literature which would otherwise have been allowed to die with their authors. The creation of temporary property rights in the intellectual product of the authors was a necessary evil. Today, of course, our copyright and patent laws are having exactly the opposite effect: they are impoverishing the public domain.
<P>
I think that a reasonable view would be that learning from others and using the intellectual works of others is an essential part of being human. Any law which aids that process (e.g., the US’s original patent and copyright laws) is of some value, and any law which prevents that essential human function (like modern-day US copyright and patent laws) is inhumane, and counter productive.
“Where would we be now when people like Newton, Einstein, Turing, von Neumann etc. had kept their knowledge secret in order to maximize profit?”
Maybe in a society that doesn’t know as much as ours but is a lot happier. At least that’s what I would have hoped for.
“YOU believe that I have absolutely NO rights to do ANYTHING with your program. That’s rich……”
Well, what you want is rich – because that programmer would end up with nothing. If you buy anything physical from someone you can do whatever you want with it because you cannot copy it. Buy a loaf of bread and double it. Not possible. Buy a program and double it. Easy. That’s why you cannot compare those two things. You just want to get rich on someone else’s costs. If you can explain to me how a programmer is supposed to earn money when he gives everything away for free, then I will be willing to give you the right to do anything with my programs.
Didn’t you get it yet that HTML markup does not work here…
I mean, I don’t have a problem with free software (both as in speech and beer), but where do people get off saying they have some God-given right to do stuff with software that they themselves did not write?
Some of us read software licenses, which give us those rights. They weren’t granted by God, however. Richard Stallman created a license that allows everyone to share the source code and the binary products like we share mp3s on P2P nets right now, only this license and software is legal.
This means we care about working together within this “community” of people who like to share. And we don’t care if you don’t want to share. Go keep all your code to yourself. We don’t even really want to hear about it. You are irrelevant, unless you want to share or help us make our products better. Its a community thing. Maybe you just don’t get it.
But this is not public domain. This is very different. This is anti-capitalism, in a sense, because it forces all parties to play on a level playing field. You can charge all you want for your products, but every customer has the right to sell your products for less than you do, creating additional competition. Its good for consumers, is the bottome line. Good for capitalists? Well.. fuck ’em. We don’t need their money.
“We don’t need their money.”
Then whose money do you want?
Anonymous, do not use HTML tags. Just press enter when you want a new line.
The html is a reflex, I guess. If this silly thing had a preview button, I’d have noticed before I posted. If I’d read the instructions, I’d have noticed that only bold and itallic work.
I suppose that if I’d cared, I’d have looked at my first post before making the second. Thanks for the pointer.
The goal of capitalists is to get a monopoly on some products or markets to maximize profits while minimizing costs. The easily way to obtain this is with the limitted monopoly rights granted by copyright. Think about it.
There are many corporations talking about copyrights and piracy today, all over in the media. But have you ever known any corporations to author any IP? I know of many employees that author IP, but the copyright should never belong to a corporation, IMO. When we give our intellectual property rights to corporation what are we doing? Giving their board of directors and share holders full control over how that property can be sold and used. And what are the board of directors and share holders? Capitalists.
From that point on they will burn the content that is out of copyright and encrypt and horde the content that they own, selling it at the highest prices the market will bear. That’s the typical practices of any monopoly, which are most large corporations. Take DVDs for example. Why are they region coded?
Why are monopolies bad?
Listen, even if you can’t answer these questions or if you don’t understand them, none of it matters anyway. Nobody has any power to change the system, even if we knew how to improve it. The only alternative is for everyone to just start giving away their IP to everyone else under licenses like the GPL. If the public floods the market with media of equal quality to the corporations, the corporations will lose their profitable position and will crumble under their own inefficiency, etc.
But never forget that corporations are not people, they have no morals or ethics to guide their decisions, they will happily outsource their labor costs, until their labor costs nothing. This is known as slavery, if they still have employees, and automation if they lay them all off. Both are not very good things for people forced to pay for their food.
Love is the only answer, IMO. But do any of you understand what that means?
This technology, in a repressive government such as the current U.S. one, which does not respect civil rights or democracy, is really very dangerous.
Amazing how someone can be so intelligent, yet so ignorant. Well, I certainly haven’t been repressed lately. Anyone here been repressed by the US government? And no, funding withdrawl from OpenBSD does not count as repression. Visit places like North Korea or Nigeria if you’re having trouble remembering the definition of repression.
“Love is the only answer, IMO. But do any of you understand what that means?”
I guess so. I, as a programmer, have no way to make any money so that I can buy food and clothes and pay for rent.
Monopolies are bad, but market-economy is not the same as monopolies. What impressed me in my first economics class was that we learned about the entrepreneur who also has some obligations towards society. I guess nowadays nobody really cares about that. And don’t blame companies for that. They may not be people, but they certainly are not run by themselves. It takes people who make decisions. Blame them and not companies.
>> “Where would we be now when people like Newton,
>> Einstein, Turing, von Neumann etc. had kept their
>> knowledge secret in order to maximize profit?”
>
> Maybe in a society that doesn’t know as much as ours but
> is a lot happier. At least that’s what I would have
> hoped for.
>
So you think that ignorance is bliss and dying at 35 from some infection is somehow noble? I don’t get it.
Why should society be happier if it were less technogogically advanced? Please explain! I really do not understand this line of reasoning, even though it seems to be very popular in germany.
“Why should society be happier if it were less technogogically advanced? Please explain!”
Because we wouldn’t have lawyers sueing our asses off. Anyway, there are other ways a society could work, different from what we have now and I am sure there would be some that put the human being in the centre and not some piece of paper.
“I really do not understand this line of reasoning, even though it seems to be very popular in germany.”
What does that have to do with Germany? Remember 1955? Austria got independent that year. So what do I care what they think in Germany?
Because we wouldn’t have lawyers sueing our asses off. Anyway, there are other ways a society could work, different from what we have now and I am sure there would be some that put the human being in the centre and not some piece of paper.
Laws != Technology. Technology was once unencumbered by legal issues, way ago in the times of classic Greece, and it benefitted men. Imagine they’d had put some patents on pulleys back then.
Now the situation has changed, mostly because of the extreme greed of many people that want them to be the only real benefitors of technology they invented. Basically, it looks like you agree with Stallman in the end.
tuttle
People who freely use the material from the public domain for their own profit, but are unwilling to put any of their own creations into the public domain should be regarded as thieves (I am thinking of e.g. disney here).
Well, in the case of software, that would depend on the software license, wouldn’t it? If the author’s license says that I have to re-distribute the source code if I modify it and I don’t do so, then I am technically a theif. But if a program is released under a license that says I don’t have to give away changes I make, then how am I a theif by not doing so?
And along the same lines, if you download a program (such as Gaim) and use it, but don’t contribute any code in return, are you also not a theif? The notion of sharing ideas means that you are actually contributing something back, does it not?
If you learned how to fix cars from your dad who was an auto-mechanic, should you then feel obligated to fix cars for free for the rest of your life simply because it cost you nothing to learn how to do it?
someone247356
An idea isn’t something that you can own, like a house, or a car, or a loaf of bread. If you have a car, and I take that car away from you, you no longer have the car, I do.
The fallacy of your logic is that you are trying to prove that physical objects are the exact same as digital code. if this were the case, then pirating software WOULD be the exact same as stealong a car, but it’s not the same. And neither is it the same in this case. Are you saying that just because we can copy it, then we should copy it? What happens when technology progresses to the point where you can copy physical objects? Just because you would be able to do this, would it then be ethical to make 5,000 copies of your new porche and then give them to all of your friends and anyone else who wants one? Don’t you think you would then be restricted on what you could do with physical objects if you could one day copy them freely as you can now do with digital files? Use some common sense here.
Speaking of ideas, software programs are not ideas .. they are tangible things that you can use and interract with, built using knowlege. And people like to use their knowledge to make a living. Some auto mechanics would choose to fix cars for free … maybe do favors for their friends and family, but most want to get paid for their work, and so do software programmers. So, how am I supposed to do that when I’m giving away my code for free? Is there something morally wrong with making a living by programming?
If this whole thing about ‘knowedge should be free’ is true, would it then not apply to piano teachers, yoga instructors, doctors, etc?
Finally, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t write free software if they want to, but I am saying that unless you wrote it, your rights can and should be governed by whoever did!
You said;
“If you can explain to me how a programmer is supposed to earn money when he gives everything away for free, then I will be willing to give you the right to do anything with my programs.”
Please reread my post, where did I say that a programmer has to “give everything away for free”? (Hint: I didn’t)
I said that a programmer’s right to dictate what I can do with a piece of code ended when he sold it to me. I never said he had to give it to me.
“Buy a loaf of bread and double it. Not possible. Buy a program and double it. Easy. That’s why you cannot compare those two things.”
Lets see, 100 AD copy a book hard (getting enough literate monks to make that two million initial run is going to be tough) 2003 AD copy a book easy, (For n = 1 to 2000000, copy a_book.pdf a_book_%n.pdf, Next n) That’s why you can’t compare those two things.
Or how about, making nails, 1700 AD hard (make each by hand), 2003 AD easy (machines churn out millions per hour) I guess you can’t compare making mails to well…. making nails.
1990 AD companies make basic commodidized applications (spreadsheet, word processor, etc.) keep programming code secret make millions, 2003 AD community of intelligent coders pool their resources and agree to share code, not only don’t they make millions, non-coders start to question why they are giving all this money to 1990’s era software companies.
Programmers are expected to earn money just like every one else, by working. I’m sure Alan Cox, and Linus Torvalds spend every moment that they aren’t coding holding a tin cup begging for enough money to prop up the cardboard boxes that their families are forced to live in. If the current insanity that is copyright, and patent law gets rectified does that mean that programmers will starve? Hardly. What it does mean is that it will be very difficult to simply write a piece of code and become Bill Gates rich.
Is anyone else getting tired of the starving author/musician/programmer that gets dragged out every time there is a discussion of the problems inherent in treating ideas like tangible property? Times change, driving displaced buggies displaced horses displaced oxen, displaced hauling stuff around on your back. LED lights are displacing fluorescent and incandescent bulbs displaced lanterns displaced candles displaced torches displaced only doing work during the day. That which was hard to do gets easier to do, those that made fortunes doing what was hard to do, either change what they are doing or make a lot less money. Those currently making their money doing what was hard, fight the strongest against making it easier.
This time it has gotten to the point where the things you write, say, think are being regulated. Sharing your favorite cookie recipe with the family used to be a given, now it’s valuable “intellectual property” and you could be sued or jailed for sharing the information from inside your own head, without paying a license fee and vetting it with high priced lawyers.
Reading a bed time story to your children used to be encouraged. Check out the EULA’s on some ebooks (even for public domain stories) that prohibit reading aloud. I guess that would be considered a “public performance”, apparently you have only paid for reading silently to yourself rights.
Stallman has it right, perhaps he doesn’t go far enough. The original U.S. copyright/patent process might have been argued for as a necessary evil. They were short, limited, and tended to encourage a richer public domain. The cancerous festering mass that is “IP” should be treated with surgery and vigorous chemo before it kills society.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
[email protected]
Atci: But isn’t the free distribution and access to any kind of information our fundamental right to begin with?
What? Where did you come up with that? How is it your fundemental right to have access to every article written on Salon.com or every book written just because they were written? Is it your right to take a copy of software that a company has spent millions of dollars developing just because it’s not tangible? The fact that because you are taking it, they still have just as much as they did before you took it does not justify you taking it. The whole point of a company creating something is, yes, the evil word PROFIT!. What motivation would any company have to exist without the means to sell their product?
(IP: 146.63.90.—): First, the product of your intellect isn’t property. It’s an idea, which is fundamentally different from the tangible, physical things which comprise property.
I think that an IDEA is much different from a software application such as, for example, Photoshop which is certainly a PRODUCT and as such, is the property of the creator. At what point an idea ceases to be an idea and become a product is debatable, but I don’t think you can argue that something that has taken hundreds of people thousands of hours to create is just an ‘idea.’ That is a much too simplistic view.
(IP: 146.63.90.—): If we eliminate copyright, some monopolists who are gouging the public via those property rights in intellectual property will have to get honest jobs.
By your definition, every author who hasn’t released his or her book to the general public for free is a “monopolist… gouging the public.” Does this make Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Orwell and thousands of others who have written books monopolists who are gouging the public? They were, in their own rights, artists who created large works and sold them for *gasp* PROFIT. Perhaps you should be the one to tell them to go get “real jobs.”
tuttle: …IMHO you have a moral obligation to add your knowledge to the public domain after you profited from it for some time, since in every single piece of technology you use contains a lot of knowledge and information from very intelligent people that added their knowledge to the public domain.
To some extent, I agree with you. I don’t think Amazon or Apple should be able to patent ideas such as the recycle bin or one-click shopping–those are things which I would consider to be ideas that, while they may have come up with first, they shouldn’t be the only ones who can use them. On the other hand, I see no reason for Amazon or Apple to EVER have to hand over the code they used to create the recycle bin or one-click–that’s their property. If someone wants to make something similar and sell it or give it away, that’s capitalism, and in that sense, Amazon and Apple have fulfilled their “moral obligation to add knowledge to the public domain.”
someone247356: 2. When you sell/give something to someone else, your RIGHT to have a say in what they do with it ended when they took possession of it.
To a reasonable extent, sure, but again, going back to the example publishing books. If authors lose all control over their book after they’ve sold the first copy, anyone could proceed to make copies sell them for 5 bucks cheaper. Or, why not just take the book and put their name on the cover and sell it as their own? Copyrights have their place in society. I agree, they are often abused, but they do have a place. Information is not always free.
hmmmm: Some of us read software licenses, which give us those rights. They weren’t granted by God, however. Richard Stallman created a license that allows everyone to share the source code and the binary products like we share mp3s on P2P nets right now, only this license and software is legal.
This means we care about working together within this “community” of people who like to share. And we don’t care if you don’t want to share.
I couldn’t agree more. If the software gives you the right to copy it or do whatever you want, by all means! I use Open Source software every day and contribute to it when I can. What I don’t understand is how some people fail to see that just because open source software has a very real place in society, not all software HAS to be open source and closing the source does not make you an evil monopolist capitalist pig! Is theKompany an evil entity? They both contribute to the OS world as well as selling closed source software? I think they are a wonderful example of a company who benefits the public by offering the best of both worlds.
hmmmm: The goal of capitalists is to get a monopoly on some products or markets
Perhaps some companies strive for monopolies, but there are so few monopolies in the USA that I challenge you to name even 3… Capitalism is based on COMPETITION, not monopolies. Repeat after me.. corporations are not evil… who pays your bills? “Love is the only answer??????” sure, love is wonderful but it never paid my rent…
Some people here take technology into the future where we will be able to copy any physical object. Right now it is possible to duplicate almost any shape (there are a few exceptions related to support structures and convexness but they are easily circumvented)
If we gain that ability, why shouldn’t it be allowed to copy anything you own ? After all, it’s yours.
Take food for example. At that point we can feed, house and clothe everybody using just the energy of sunlight (and even if the human race grows in numbers at a high rate, it will be possible to maintain that for a very long time).
At that point you are going to suggest denying food/house/clothing to some people because otherwise there would be no economy. Where is the need for an economy ?
Do you think no serious products will be made ? Think again, go check out kde, gnome, apache, linux (the kernel). They all rival (and beat) their commercial counterparts, so I don’t think that’s an argument.
Money only exists for about 5500 years now, while humans lived, worked and enjoyed themselves tens of thousands of years before that.
I see a piece of software as a product, not as some kind of knowledge.
You don’t buy software, you buy a license of that software and you get a digital copy of that software to use it. This means that you are not the owner of the software, but you are the owner of the license of the software.
When you rent a car, you don’t own the car, but you do control it. In both cases, even if you have the physical object or digital copy of a product, you are not allowed to do with it what you want, because you don’t own it.
The main difference between physical objects and digital data is that digital data can be easily duplicated and physical objects can’t. And that is why they shouldn’t be seen as the same thing (in the case that you ‘own’ it and that you can do with it what you want). Digital data is still a product. Like a physical product, it has to be designed, developed and produced (whereas producing digital data is simply copying it) and there it is equal to eachother. Digital data is NOT some kind of knowledge, it’s a product.
If you see digital data as something you own and you have the right to do anything with it, it also means that you are allowed to copy music, movies, documents and everything else in a digital form you have a copy of. Should you also have the right to copy the digital data on your bank card (magnet strip or chip) and any other stuff if you own it and it can be copied? It seems so…
Darius you wrote;
“Speaking of ideas, software programs are not ideas .. they are tangible things that you can use and interact with, built using knowledge. And people like to use their knowledge to make a living. Some auto mechanics would choose to fix cars for free … maybe do favors for their friends and family, but most want to get paid for their work, and so do software programmers. So, how am I supposed to do that when I’m giving away my code for free? Is there something morally wrong with making a living by programming?
If this whole thing about ‘knowledge should be free’ is true, would it then not apply to piano teachers, yoga instructors, doctors, etc?”
Try reading what I wrote, instead of reacting to what you thought I wrote.
There is nothing wrong with charging people for a service. Doctors, Yoga instructors, auto mechanics, programmers should all be allowed to work by charging people for their work. Why is it that people keep thinking that I’m advocating forced slave labor upon programmers? Perhaps the problem you are having is the whole knowledge vs. product dichotomy. Let me see if I can clarify it for you and any other interested reader.
Let us say you are an auto mechanic. You weren’t born knowing how to rebuild a stock Chevy v6 engine, so you had to learn that from someone. Let’s say Bob taught you everything you know about fixing cars. Does Bob have the right to restrict when, how, for whom at what price you are allowed to fix cars? No? Why not? After all you didn’t know how to fix cars until Bob taught you how. Fixing cars is valuable “IP”. Bob is well within his rights to prevent you from diluting his valuable “IP”. What if you started fixing peoples cars for free? Or at least for a lot less than what Bob charges. How’s Bob going to make any money. Oh, and don’t think about telling other people how to fix cars. If everyone knew how to fix cars, Bob would starve. His children would go hungry because he can’t make a living as an automobile repair instructor anymore. You sick commie bastard. How could you do that to Bob and his thirteen starving children. Because of you he had his 10,000 sq. ft mansion repossessed. Now that everyone knows how to rebore a cylinder there isn’t any money to be made fixing cars. No one will work as auto mechanics and broken cars are littering the planet, blighting our streets with their broken masses since you have devastated the industry with your thoughts of sharing knowledge. Sounds kind of silly, no?
Someone once said that the only natural user interface is the nipple (just who escapes me at the moment). Practically everything that everyone on the planet knows he either learned from someone else, or build his new idea on what he had learned from someone else. For time immemorial we have taken it as a given that within certain logical limitations (like killing each other) we are free to do whatever we want with the knowledge we have learned. Doctors are free to practice medicine, and to charge for that service, but they are not allowed to tell you how you can use that hand they have just fixed. Yoga instructors can teach you yoga, but having been allowed to prohibit you from teaching it to others, or practicing it buck naked while watching old loony toon cartoons. Programmers can charge you for writing a program for you to balance your check book, but they shouldn’t be allowed to restrict you from giving a copy away to your mother, or using it to balance a savings account instead.
Just because something is easy to do, doesn’t mean it should be regulated more heavily, or cost more. Building an incandescent bulb and a lantern to use it in is difficult, so we’ll make it cheap and not regulate the process at all. Sticking a piece of cloth in a bowl of oil and lighting it, real easy. Therefore we need to heavily regulate it, charge an arm and a leg, and make the sharing the knowledge of how to build a crude oil lamp punishable by a $250,000 USD fine and 20 years in the federal pen. Yea, that will teach them. How is this relevant? You said,
“Don’t you think you would then be restricted on what you could do with physical objects if you could one day copy them freely as you can now do with digital files? Use some common sense here.”
Umm, how do I say this… ? No. A copy of digital code is a tangible object. The actual ideas embodied in the code are not. If we could someday copy bread as easily as the latest album from Pink, I would dance in the streets. I would not seek to bury it under a mountain of regulations. Farmers and bakers might have to find a new profession, but the fact that we could now make starvation a thing of the past wouldn’t goad me into charging $1000 a slice and regulating how, and with whom you could eat your replicated bread. How to make replicated bread, play the guitar, sort a b-tree is knowledge. You should be free to share that knowledge, or not as you see fit. You can charge people to transfer that knowledge, or teach others for free. You can charge for baking a cake, or bake it for free and give it away to others. You can charge someone to code an app, or you can give away your code for the betterment of humanity. No one, especially me, is arguing that you have to do ANYTHING for free, or at all. All that I am saying is that you shouldn’t be able to restrict what other people can do. Either with their knowledge, or with the things they possess, even if they bought it from you. Not being able to restrict the conduct of others is NOT the same as forcing you to do anything.
Perhaps that is where the crux of the problem lies…….
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
[email protected]
Captialism is not evil. Other than that, I think we disagree. I said:
>>(IP: 146.63.90.—): If we eliminate copyright, some monopolists who are gouging the public via those property rights in intellectual property will have to get honest jobs.
and you said:
>By your definition, every author who hasn’t released his or her book to the general public for free is a “monopolist… gouging the public.” Does this make Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Orwell and thousands of others who have written books monopolists who are gouging the public? They were, in their own rights, artists who created large works and sold them for *gasp* PROFIT. Perhaps you should be the one to tell them to go get “real jobs.”
and I reply:
Everyone who is using the monopoly granted by our copyright laws is indeed a monopolist, by the usual definition of that word. I don’t think there’s anything controversial in that statement.
Orwell and Hawthorne were indeed authors, and wrote their works when copyright was a far more limited monopoly than it currently is. I think that it’s reasonable to say that their works, done without the promise of millions in royalty payments, are a far more enduring contribution to the public domain than those two politicians’ ghost-written pot boilers, if for no other reasn than Gore’s and Clinton’s stuff won’t be in the public domain until many decades after they’ve been deservedly forgotten.
It’s too late for Orwell and Hawthorne, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the current crop of politicians got real jobs? In any event, I wouldn’t object to the monopolies if their net effect on society was positive.
If you had read all of my message, you’d have see that I also suggested that artists generally shouldn’t be getting paid for their art. Art is communication, or at least expression, and I think it falls into the same category as sexual intercourse: doing it for money doesn’t make it better. In fact, doing it for money makes it worth less.
Here, it’s probably more appropriate to talk about coding than art, though there’s some overlap. Read what Donald Knuth has had to say about patents on algorithms at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt . Given the algorithm, does it really matter who typed it in? Or even who translated it into a given language?
People do algorithms (and math in general) because they love it, and can’t help themselves. That’s why I’ve kept talking about art: innovative programming isn’t like sign painting, it’s math, and art. Outside of academia, most of the mathematicians have day jobs, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.
It would work out fine for programmers, too, since most of the world’s code is written for inhouse use, rather than for sale in boxed sets. That is, most programmers are doing service jobs rather than production jobs.
If you had read my other message, you would have seen:
The original aim of US copyright and patent law was to increase sharing, and enrich the public domain with ideas and literature which would otherwise have been allowed to die with their authors. The creation of temporary property rights in the intellectual product of the authors was a necessary evil. Today, of course, our copyright and patent laws are having exactly the opposite effect: they are impoverishing the public domain.
and
I think that a reasonable view would be that learning from others and using the intellectual works of others is an essential part of being human. Any law which aids that process (e.g., the US’s original patent and copyright laws) is of some value, and any law which prevents that essential human function (like modern-day US copyright and patent laws) is inhumane, and counter productive.
What it does mean is that it will be very difficult to simply write a piece of code and become Bill Gates rich.
I think people are missing this point. What it means is that all those programmers writing software like Windows (Bill Gates, contrary to popular belief did not write all the lines of code in Windows) will be paid all those billions we stuffed in Bill Gate’s pockets.
Perhaps without copyright we’d still have a tech economy worth talking about and enough jobs to feed our starving developers.
There was a time when I thought that the computer industry would be around forever. But now, although I recognize the need for the technology, I don’t think the people want to build an economy unless it makes them uniquely and individually rich.
Its just no fun if everyone gets rich at the same time.
Think of it this way, if we could design and build robots to build all the products, buildings, roads, etc. That make up our environment. And if we built this environment everywhere for everyone, what would happen?
I bet most of you wouldn’t know what to do if you had the rest of your time on this Earth handed to you, making you equally free and valuable as everyone around you. I bet most of you would sit on your couch and watch TV. Me? I’d write code. Because I’d finally have the time to write the code I like to write and never have to worry about your patents taking it away from me. Right now I don’t write code because I work 6 hours a day and save all my excess cash in a bank account, preparing for the day that automation replaces most of our jobs.
Perhaps some companies strive for monopolies, but there are so few monopolies in the USA that I challenge you to name even 3
Au Contrair, copyright gives companies a limited monopoly on a specific work of art. This includes, but is not limited to, software, music, movies, and books. Corporations that hold a monopoly on certain types of content include AOL/Time Warner, Disney, Sony, MSNBC, Apple, Sun, IBM, etc. RedHat has a monopoly on their rpm icons. Everyone has a monopoly on something.
But why are monopolies bad? Did they teach anyone this in economics class? Enlighten us, all-knowing economics students.
But why are monopolies bad? Did they teach anyone this in economics class? Enlighten us, all-knowing economics students.
Ok.
Monopolies can be bad, because they will price above marginal cost, thus introducing a deadweight loss. That is, they do not merely transfer some of your consumer surplus into their own pockets, but they also (because of that above-marginal-cost price) prevent some trades from taking place which would be mutually beneficial. A perfectly discriminating monopolist wouldn’t cause this deadweight loss, but of course perfect price discrimination isn’t possible. Still, price discrimination does reduce the deaweight loss.
The only time that a monopoly isn’t bad is when average cost is still above marginal cost where the demand curve crosses the marginal cost curve. Is a realistic circumstance for software? Marginal cost is right at zero, but the *BSD’s and the GNU/Linux system show that fixed costs are also potentially right about zero, too.
I said that a programmer’s right to dictate what I can do with a piece of code ended when he sold it to me. I never said he had to give it to me.
Ok, so let’s say I were to build a program similar to Wine that would allow you to run Windows apps natively under OSX without the need for Virtual PC or some other emulator. So I compile it and then sell it to you for $49.95. Now, by your way of thinking, it is within your right to take the copy that I sold you and do whatever you want with it, including giving it away. Now, I’ve got 10,000 prospective buyers that are interested in buying this program, but why the hell should they when you’re giving it away for free? See how much money I would lose here? Even if as much as 5,000 out of those prospective 10,000 buyers were to buy a copy (and that is a VERY liberal estimate), I’ve lost 5,000 x $49.95 = $24,9750.
Now, would you like to pay me that much for you right to give it away for free? Certainly you could fork over that extra $25,0000, couldn’t you? And if not, how is this fair to me? If I spent 3 years of my life working on this thing, yet you’re just giving away a copy to whoever wants one. Can you understand where I’m coming from here? You yourself said that if we were able to freely copy bread, that would probably put farmers and bakers out of business. So then, how the hell are programmers supposed to survive ?
Eventually, the public would get smart enough to realize that all they’d have to do is wait for somebody to buy a copy and then leech it off them, making it downright impossible to make money (unless you’re writing it for only one person!) Therefore, that is why I say that if I were to write programs under your ‘business model’, I’d HAVE to give it away for free because nobody but the very honest (and how many of these kind of people exist now? Maybe 10-15?) would bother actually PAYING for it.
Again, when people are able to copy something free (and I mean, something tangible that you can feel/smell/touch/interract with, etc), there has to be some restrictions in place if anyone hopes to make a business out of it.
After we share all of our stuff that we have created by ourselves with the rest of the world for free, we can hook up into a communal mind and *really* share everything! now, wouldn’t that be nice?
I would not sit on the couch and watch TV. I would Ride my motorbike (choise of whichever I felt like for the time and kind of ride I wanted to do), play some simulations, read, enjoy the company of my companions, create music and post it on the web for others to hear and enjoy if they so choose.
Talking of the last action, being an artist in todays world can be very difficult. My take on this whole IP crap and copyright is that the few are bleeding the many and a lot of people are being repressed so a few can be very affluent. For instance the RIAA and our dear local cousin of it ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) very strtictly control what music enters the public domain via commercial means. They control airplay, and distribution of music and they are the ones who mostly benefit from the sales of music in their respective countries.
In Australia (Melbourne for me) we also have a few other means for music to enter public domain in the form of the ABC (government broadcaster) and Public Radio Stations like RRR and 3PBS here in Melbourne. The later are sponsored by subscription from the community in which the subscribers can then enter competitions and get some discount benefits from supporting commercial businesses.
Enter stage left the Internet and personal computing. Now with some finance (working you butt off in a lack lustre job) a musician can build themselves a home studio and record their own works. They can now publish their work on the public domain via the Internet and with CD/DVD replication becomming really cheap they make duplicates of their recorded masters for the Public to purchase direct via the Internet. This whole process bypasses the established means of distribution and the institutions who have benefited from this at the detriment of the musicians are very afraid for their revenue streams. All this Piracy stuff is FUD against the establishment of a new an more direct means of music distribution.
Ironically with the rise of Peer to Peer networks many people were able to exchange music and be exposed to material that would rarely be hear in the main media. This benefitted the smaller recording studios and the sales of music CD’s actually increased. With the RIAA shutting down some of these networks, sales of music CD’s decreased althought the RIAA tried to claim that the decrease was actually from the networks they had just disabled.
It’s just an example of what potential exhists bypassing the established monopolistic means of intellectual property distribution. I mean come on, what right does Disney have to take other peoples artistic works (Fairy Tales), sanitise them to extream bordom and then claim copyright on the whole lot indefinately? What is happening today in film is no different than a century before which gave birth to Hollywood. New York film producing monopolies forced people to set up shop in the West and they foundered an industry form it. Now this very industry is doing the same as what lead to its creation in the first place. As for DVD region coding, technology has bypassed that and this has led to simultaneous World Wide Film Releases which means that yes, the consumer is making a difference even when strick controls are put in place to prevent them.
This board has been a pleasure to read with everyone’s areguments and counters and I’m glad to be a part of it. I festers a sense of online community which OSNews seems to be about. Sharing of thoughts and information is about community and I feel today that is something that is most at danger with the current drive for intellectual property rights and copyright. I want to be paid for my art and I do get some, but I also don’t want to restrict who can get access to it. If people like what I do then I believe they will give for me to continue. I don’t want to be filthy rich, I would prefere to live in a world of sharing than one where I have everything whilst others have nothing and I find the current world rife with a disease which encombers Billions of people and that is greed.
My 2 cents
Darius, the problem is with your business model.
“Now, I’ve got 10,000 prospective buyers that are interested in buying this program, but why the hell should they when you’re giving it away for free?”
Why would anyone in their right mind buy a copy of RedHat Linux? I mean the GPL allows one person to purchase a copy and give copies to all their friends for free? Last I heard they were actually in the black.
“So then, how the hell are programmers supposed to survive ?”
You answered your own question with this line;”…making it downright impossible to make money (unless you’re writing it for only one person!)” You may find it hard to believe, but I am willing to wager that most programmers are writing programs for just one person, or more correctly one company. Most likely you won’t be a millionaire, but you won’t go hungry either.
“Therefore, that is why I say that if I were to write programs under your ‘business model’, I’d HAVE to give it away for free because nobody but the very honest (and how many of these kind of people exist now? Maybe 10-15?) would bother actually PAYING for it.”
Nope, isn’t my business model. It’s the increasingly outdated model of building commodity software, shrink wrapping it with a brutally restrictive license and selling identical copies to the masses. If you just spent three years of your life working on such a product, you have my condolences. Of course you are in the same boat that the guy who just spent three years of his life designing a better buggy, or candle when the rest of the world moved on to automobiles and electric lights respectively. This is the business model that requires restrictions that are too drastic, (re: RIAA wanting to make 60 million P2P traders instant felons), too harsh, and just too nonsensical (can’t read bedtime stories to the grandkids) to be allowed to continue. When reproducing songs/books/movies/(I don’t think it ever was hard to reproduce programs, how’d that get here?) was costly and required a large outlay of capital, companies could make a killing being in that business. Now that reproducing books etc. is trivially easy we have two choices. We can either move on to other business models (live performances, readings, theatrical productions, individualized programming, service, support, etc.) or artificially raise the costs to keep the current business model profitable. Apparently you are siding with the MPAA, RIAA, BSA in trying to artificially raise the costs of doing things anyway that which allows you to be profitable according to the old business model. Do you realize once upon a time salt was ridiculously valuable, so valuable in fact that the Roman’s paid their solders in it. In fact the word “salary” is derived from the Latin “sal” (salt). Are you still paid with a bag of salt? Why not? Perhaps it is because we found it almost trivially easy to extract salt from seawater, and modern mining techniques make it very cheap to mine the stuff. What happened? You now get paid with something else.
I’ll go out on a limb here and make a couple of predictions. If/when we get the rotting festering mass that is “IP” under control programming and programmers will probably shift to something like this. Commodity software with be produced by collectives of open source programmers. It will be packaged by companies, who will provide packaging, training, support for a fee. Other companies or programmers will make their money either customizing the commodity software, or programming custom solutions for their clients. They will either work for a company with an interest in commodidized software (ala Alan Cox and RedHat), a hardware vendor will hire programmers to customize software for their hardware (Sony, IBM), or for a non computer company supplying their programming needs (Wal-Mart, Shell Oil, etc.). There will even be independents that will provide custom solutions/training/support for a fee.
If I were you, I would stop trying to sweep the tide back out into the ocean with your broom and align your expenditures of labor with the changing times. Just don’t subject the rest of us to the imperial thought police because you think you are entitled to simply copy a product (for a trivial cost per copy) that you have created for and sell it for “big bucks”.
P.S. Mozart never copyrighted any of his works, that didn’t stop him from composing.
Walt Disney is dead, extending the copyright term of “steam boat willie” to a million years isn’t going to entice him to create a single new work.
Just my $0.02 (Canadian, before taxes)
[email protected]
Disclaimer: I don’t like RMS, something about his writing just rubs me the wrong way, this doesn’t mean I think he has no valid arguments.
Thank you to whoever gave the link to Professor Donald Knuth’s letter to the US patent office. Apparently my beliefs are very similar to his.
It isn’t the code that’s important. Read it again and understand what I’m trying to say. In and of itself access to the code is inconsequential. The important things are the algorithms the code implements, and this is why commentary by RMS annoys me so much because he wraps this central issue up with so much baggage that it becomes lost.
Unfortunately computer programming has lost its way. It has been taken out of the world of academia and found itself hijacked in the land of high commerce. This isn’t the way it should be. Computer programming at practically any level is simply mathematical algorithms, the end result may not seem it, but in essence that is all programming really is. In mathematics circles if someone comes up with a new formula they publish a paper, make their research data public and move on. What they don’t do is try to patent their method and prevent other mathematicians using it. This is precisely where the academic ideal that represents truly free programming comes into conflict with the commercial motivation to maintain solitary control of a product.
Forcing the evolution of computer programming back into the academic model is the principle worth fighting for here, that is the true freedom that has somehow been forgotten in the goldrush years of OSS. IP is inconsequential, as is access to view the source code of an application. So long as the algorithms behind an application are within the public domain the functionality of the application can be reproduced by someone else. There is nothing wrong with making a living selling software which you retain the IP of, but that IP should relate only to that specific implementation.
For example if someone produces a word processor then there is nothing wrong with calling that word processor their own and selling it to people. What they shouldn’t be able to do is prevent someone else producing a different word processor that contains the same algorithms, eg those that translate saved files to onscreen documents. Nor should they be permitted to keep those algorithms out of the public domain.
Open source software alleviates this to some extent because programmers can reconstruct the algorithms used by someone else from the source code, but the idea of programming freedom has been drowned out by the idea that having access to the source code of a program represents programming freedom. I could write my app in hex and provide a dump as the source, would that really help anyone trying to use the same principals after me? How many folks are left that can read a hexdump, I’m guessing they’re pretty thin on the ground.
Now if instead of being forced to release my source I was forced to release the algorithmics used in my source then whoever came afterwards could implement a similar app in whichever programming language they desired. This is where I part company with RMS. I don’t want/need/desire the source to a program, I don’t care that someone has IP over a specific implementation of a set of algorithms and preventing people from selling copies of it, what I _DO_ care about is that those algorithms are forced into the public domain for future programmers to use as they see fit. The algorithms will be around a lot longer, and be more useful to programmers in general, than any amount of source code containing them.
i’m not liking your example much, but I do agree with you that “a programmer’s right to dictate what I can do with a piece of code ended when he sold it to me” -makes absolutely no sense.
i interpret stallman (and i could obviously be wrong):
“advocate freedom of information”
i do not interpret stallman as:
“capitalism and earning a living from programming, composing, writing must come to an end”
from that perspective, I say we absolutely must have proprietary software available. And it will require a secure/efficient means of distribution…but not at the cost of my rights to use my computer.
opensource software should be the choice of the programmer and user.
i use both.
I : the product of your intellect isn’t property.
Interesting assertion, but incomplete because the premise does not include the source of input.
II : It’s an idea, which is fundamentally different from the tangible, physical things which comprise property.
If it is true that an idea is separate from property, then show a concrete example of a property that is not a product of an idea. This is hard to prove since it doesn’t exist, hence a fallacy.
If I were you, I would stop trying to sweep the tide back out into the ocean with your broom and align your expenditures of labor with the changing times. Just don’t subject the rest of us to the imperial thought police because you think you are entitled to simply copy a product (for a trivial cost per copy) that you have created for and sell it for “big bucks”.
So you think you’re entitled to set the terms of how much money someone should make from their hard work? You think that the cost per copy is only the cost of the distribution media? What about the startup costs? The costs associated with research? The fixed costs associated with employing people and having an office? The cost of marketing and sales? The cost to develop the actual software? Let me paint a simple picture for you and the rest of the collectivists here who try and sell their ideology as freedom.
After 13 years as a professional software developer, I see a certain set of problems that I have a solution for. The solution involves building a pretty complex software application. In order for me to build and sell this software I need to hire a small team of 6 senior programmers, a sales/marketing person, a couple of QA people, someone to create the necessary documentation, and project manager. Let’s say that it will take 18-24 months to be able to release. During this time I need to pay these people, provide a benefits plan, pay for an office and utilities (hydro, water, telephones, etc), and provide computers and software tools to develop, test, and document the application. I will most likely want to spend some money on trade shows, and travelling to meet potential customers. After all is said and done I have spent about $2,000,000.00.
Now, if anyone that purchased a copy was legally allowed to make additional copies and give it away for whatever they wanted, how much do you think I would charge for the first copy that I sold? The worst case scenario would be that I would only sell one copy and all other users had gotten their copies off the Internet for free. So how would I recoup my initial investment and ensure that the company had enough money in the bank while trying to convince everyone to pay for support? How could I pay my senior development staff to evolve the application? I would need to charge an enormous amount of money for that first copy ($3,000,000.00 – $10,000,000.00).
Since the return on investment for the first and only customer wouldn’t be high enough to justify the cost, I would most likely not be able to sell it. And since my business plan would identify that risk I would most likely not invest my money or time. So my idea would never come to fruition. It’s that simple. So, instead of each person paying a relatively small price for the solution, the solution wouldn’t be developed because YOU believe that I have no right to set the terms of my labour.
And using Redhat to prove your argument is a joke. Their initial investment came from Wall Street hyping the stock during their IPO. They were able to survive during the loss years because of their IPO cash. And since they’re only in the black by about $14 million this year, I wonder what their earnings per share is. Will the initial investors ever see a return on their investment? They have also realized that targeting corporate clients for services based around their Linux offerings is where the money is (much like IBM). What if the software I’m selling doesn’t require configuration or any on-going support?
Please enlighten me.
Why would anyone in their right mind buy a copy of RedHat Linux? I mean the GPL allows one person to purchase a copy and give copies to all their friends for free? Last I heard they were actually in the black.
Wonder how much more money they would be making if not for GPL, but I guess we’ll never know. Also, I’m curious … are products like the Professional Edition and Enterprise Server of Redhat GPL? If not, that’s probably why people buy it. Otherwise, why can’t I just go and download Redhat Pro somewhere rather than just the ‘Personal Edition’?
Also, if hell were to freeze over and MS were to release MS Office 2003 as open source and GPL, do you really think they could make money that way?
“So then, how the hell are programmers supposed to survive ?”
You answered your own question with this line;”…making it downright impossible to make money (unless you’re writing it for only one person!)” You may find it hard to believe, but I am willing to wager that most programmers are writing programs for just one person, or more correctly one company. Most likely you won’t be a millionaire, but you won’t go hungry either.
I could see how this might work when you’re writing a program for a particular purpose, but I can’t see very many complex programs would be written like this. I mean, I could write an entire OS for just one person (assuming I had the technical knowledge required), but I’m gonna charge them a helluva lot for it!!!
Commodity software with be produced by collectives of open source programmers. It will be packaged by companies, who will provide packaging, training, support for a fee.
I’m a little concerned with this business model, especially the first part. If we’ve got to sit around and wait for the open source crowd to come up with decent alternatives for programs like Propellerhead’s Reason, we might be waiting til 2040 or longer. Personally, I’d rather just plunk down the $300+ and live with the restrictions. I’ve seen some really good OSS apps, but there aren’t nearly enough for the ‘niche’ market.
And besides, do we really have enough open source developers willing to develope commodity software to satisfy the gap that would arise from the departure of commercial apps? Also, how are the open source developers making money this way? Do they just get a cut of whatever the people packaging the software get? Or will anyone programming commodity software be expected to do it for free?
someone247356: Commodity software with be produced by collectives of open source programmers. It will be packaged by companies, who will provide packaging, training, support for a fee.
Darius: And besides, do we really have enough open source developers willing to develope commodity software to satisfy the gap that would arise from the departure of commercial apps? Also, how are the open source developers making money this way? Do they just get a cut of whatever the people packaging the software get? Or will anyone programming commodity software be expected to do it for free?
Some of these developers would work for the companies that provide packaging, training, support, etc for a fee. Others would work for hardware companies. Some would be doing it for nothing.
Of course… Just because a company provides say… Training for an OSS program, doesn’t mean they’d nessecarily have many, if any OSS programmers working for them. They could decide to “cut costs” and just let everyone else develop the software.
Also… I wouldn’t rely on a company that trains for a fee to help develop an “easy to use program”. Since it would be in their best interests not too.
And I wouldn’t rely on a company that provides support for a fee to provide a “quality program”.
Etc…
One can hope that maybe between them they’d produce something worthwhile.
Heh.
One can hope and maybe they would… For awhile… Or even forever.
AUT: “If you can explain to me how a programmer is supposed to earn money when he gives everything away for free, then I will be willing to give you the right to do anything with my programs.”
I know I’m not the one you are responding to, but, I think I will answer that question.
I am a professional programmer.
In the job I do, copyright laws make no difference one way or another as to how I make my money. I write software for a military contractor. Everything we do, software and hardware, has never been done before, at least, not exactly the way we are doing it. If we were to release all of our code (none of it requires clearance) it would make little difference. Another contractor, presumably, could take it, and what? Make copies of what we’ve done? Fine. We only make one or a few of whatever we make, then the military hires some other firm to do exactly that, make copies. Improve on what we’ve done? Good! And, presumably if the lack of copyright works in every direction, we can take what they’ve done and improve on it again! The only thing that freeing all software would do, is eliminate reinventing the wheel. Which is good — I’d rather work on new stuff.
So why would the govornment or the contractor I work for pay me at all? Well, if they don’t, I won’t work for them, which means that the cute little toys we deploy to do their master’s bidding would never get built. Every time someone wants to do something differently (the vast majority of computer programming work, by the way. Mass market consumer apps, utilities and OS’s are an almost invisibly small subportion of the total amount of programming work that is done, but they make up a disproportionately large amount of the money that gets moved around — not to programmers but to the IP property holders. A programmer gets paid by fair market value of their work– not by the market value of what they write, so that you know, which means that freeing all software would not affect a programmers pay rate. Not having to reinvent the wheel all the time will probably reduce the total number of programmers needed, however)
In fact, in what I do (embedded systems mostly), every single thing I’ve done would need to have been written, mostly from scratch, in exactly the same way, in order for the project to have been successful. So, in that world, there would be a lower demand for programmers, but had I decided to be a programmer anyway, my pay would be identical, or higher (since it would be a rarer skill). Much like an organ tuner (which I did part time when I was young — suprisingly high pay — very few can “fit” into the profession as there are only so many organs to be tuned. But, it was fun! And those that do it don’t starve) Meanwhile, those of us who would be programmers would be constantly working on brand new stuff, which is a very high priority in my career.
Now, AUT, according to your deal quoted above, you owe me the right to do whatever with your programs. What? You don’t have any programs? Didn’t think so.
Erik
Let me reiterate clearly, in point fashion.
#1: Most software is unique (vertical) — it does something very specific that not a lot of people need software to do. This software must be written by someone. Alternatively, a lot of software is closely associated with specific hardware. Ever wonder why video card manufactuers let you download their drivers for FREE off their web page? It’s because they know that it will only run if you buy their hardware.
#2: Most common software (horizontal) — OS’s, common applications and utilities — would be very cheap in a healthy economy, because of compeitition. Only the existence of a monopoly drives these prices up. Microsoft has done more for open source — by making the need for it clear — than any other software company in the world.
#3: The vast majority of programmers are work for hire. They get paid their market value. They do not get paid in accordance to the market value of thier works. As long as software is needed (see point #1) their pay and numbers will be reflective of the total market.
The most important thing to consider is that open source will modify the way the software economy works, in much the same was as a total lack of software copyrights would. Simply, horizontal software will be open source, and vertical software, which would have had to have been paid for anyway, won’t be. Then again, few will have any use for it.
Erik
The times they are a changing! Much of the proprietary software and music market will soon change beyond anything we now recognize. The copyright laws came about in a time when it was not cost effective to make one copy. Before the printing press there were no copyright laws because all copies were made one at a time at great cost no one could make any large sums of money off a law restricting copying. Now we can make one copy as easily as millions so anyone can make themselves a copy at little if any cost. Only in the days when making thousands of copies was much cheaper than one could the present day copyright laws work. The RIAA is trying to enforce the old copyright laws by going after hundreds of thousands of people in some cases parents of “offenders” – heres the problem they face. Every time they go after someone for they do not just make one enemy but several. Soon they will face millions of enemies and when congressmen cannot get elected without taking a stand in favor of softening the copyright laws – then money will do the RIAA no good.
This is not greatly different from what happened after the invention of the printing press. It was the printing press that lead to the down fall of the Catholic Church in the 1500s and changed the way the world worked. Now the Internet and computers came along and again the powers that be are against the wall. Again the world is changing.
Erik: #2: Most common software (horizontal) — OS’s, common applications and utilities — would be very cheap in a healthy economy, because of compeitition. Only the existence of a monopoly drives these prices up. Microsoft has done more for open source — by making the need for it clear — than any other software company in the world.
Competition in “common software” does not require OSS. What it requires is support from the community, in one form or another.
And I don’t know about you… But the “computer people”/”community” I deal with have historically never provided much, if any, support to alternatives to MS in any way shape or form.
Even when the alternatives would actually work well for them.
One problem in particular… Is piracy. I’ve known alot of people who “can’t” afford the software they want. So… What do they do? Look at a cheaper alternatives to say Adobe Photoshop? Nope… They just pirate Adobe Photoshop instead.
How about MS Word? Too expensive? Maybe check out Wordperfect, Star Office, or Gobe? Nope… Pirate MS Word.
As if that wasn’t enough, alot of people don’t even know about the alternatives and just plain don’t care. I’ve even met people who think Macs still only have B&W displays.
If anything… Piracy and the community helped kill the competition for MS and other companies to start with.
rspickles: Soon they will face millions of enemies and when congressmen cannot get elected without taking a stand in favor of softening the copyright laws – then money will do the RIAA no good.
Who do you think gives the congressmen money to run their campaigns? Also… A person can say one thing and do another. And if that wasn’t enough… Not everyone agrees with your views and as a result there may still be more than enough people to elect someone who openly supports the current copyright laws.
However… I would like to add though, that I think the real problem here is that alot of people just plain don’t care about the “other side”. Pick a side… Any side… Chances are they really don’t care about how the other side feels or even why they feel that way. Sure… Some people on the other side are just plain jerks, but some people are a little more reasonable than they might initially appear.
For example… (Since I was “negative” towards the community in my last post I’ll take a different angle).
In the case of say games… Why should a friend of mine pay $50 for a game, if he is only going to play it say once a month at a LAN party and never makes use of the single player functions, the internet play functions, never hosts a game, etc?
I think what is needed is for people to be a little more considerate towards the “other side”.
Like in the case of games… Why not have say… “Lite” version of games where you pay only $5 (or $10 or whatever), but are restricted to only joining multiplayer games. Or allow people to make “spawn” copies for free (like some games have done in the past).
I think if people would “bend a little” they’d find that there are people on the “other side” who are willing to do the same.
However… I believe that in alot of cases, the ones who need to bend first are the companies. They have the power to enact changes which can potentially satisfy customers who currently are dissatisfied. But many (not all) choose not to.
The only true Free Software is that that is unincombered with any Intellectual Property claims or restrictions by being voluntarily placed in the Public Domain. (I say voluntarily because it seems impossible for copyright especially to expire naturally as long as Disney remains a viable corporation ;-).) The “Free Software” advocated by Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond and the others is nothing but PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE but with a communist rather than a capitalist licensing agreement. Indeed all of this talk about copyLEFT, “community”, contributing back, “volunters” and all the rest of the “free software” and “open source” catch phrase vocabulary come streight out of communism and socialism. Furthermore the lacadasical communistic process by which source is accepted by “Free Software” projects is on the verge of KILLING its major “crown jewel” anyway. Linux is pretty much on the verge of being TOAST or pay software at best due to Linus Toravlds’s lacadasical acceptance of source code from the International Occultist, War Criminals and Traitors Corporation. (more officially known as IBM).
I think you know that I am refering to SCO V IBM here and PLEASE don’t point me at that “public” FTP link you “Free Software” people always point me to when this topic comes up. I wouldn’t click on that with a 100 foot mouse wire because I don’t want to go to JAIL and lose my right to use a computer for several years like Keven Mitnic!!! And Also
I can come up with DOZENS of links of my own that would show that the first name I gave for IBM is the CORRECT one
and that they are EXACTLY the type of company that would put the SCO code in Linux for the express purpose of KILLING it while pretending support for it and you won’t even go to JAIL for clicking on them. Believe me I have already come off OS-NEWS’s first CLASSIC flame war allied with another poster name Screen named Top Speed over that link with a “Free Software” zealot that kept bringing it up and I was smart enough not to touch it there either.
Well back to the subject at hand. Your software is NOT FREE.
It is PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE with a license agreement politically different from but in other ways just like the Microsoft EULA and it’s high time you stop being HYPOCRYTICAL about it and call it what it is COMMUNIST PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE. The only non proprietary software is PUBLIC DOMAIN software void of any Intellectual Property entanglements and licenses PERIOD.
Si it wint work here.
“I mean come on, what right does Disney have to take other peoples artistic works (Fairy Tales), sanitise them to extream bordom and then claim copyright on the whole lot indefinately?”
ACTUALLY disney didn’t “sanitize” them all and all…if you watch every disney cartoon/movie ever made you *will* find something pretty “unsanitary”… they were on acid and much much mor ein the magic studio
just look at alice in wonderland…she eats shrooms man!! SHROOMS!!!
“Maybe yes, but this does not mean that it is legitimate to impose penalties to those who make unauthorised copies, because sharing these copies is not immoral and we could tolerate a condemnation of this type only in the hope that it would lead to an indirect result that would be favourable to our cause.”
strikes me as odd. I’m going to write Stallman and see if he actually said that.
Last I remember, he said that while he wouldn’t brook the concept of software “piracy”, and that he’d rather see people take the attitude that it’s OK to copy software, he had also said that this pretty-much applied to *free* software, and that he would rather not see people do *anything* with proprietary software, *especially* copy it, because that just spread the stuff around more.
But then, peo9ple have been known to contradict themselves.
Me, I’m fully in Stallman’s camp, but I would *never* suggest that people re-distribute software without permission from the author.
I thought the same exact thing. RMS is insane.. probably ate paint chips when he was a child.
“People who freely use the material from the public domain for their own profit, but are unwilling to put any of their own creations into the public domain should be regarded as thieves (I am thinking of e.g. disney here).
“An example for a moral approach to the whole intellectual property issue is ID Software. They put their old stuff under public domain so that the code is not lost and people can learn and experiment with it. Their reward is that the code of e.g. the original doom will be marveled at by generations of 3d developers to come, while other 1990 area games will fade to obscurity.”
so what we wind up with is a lot of people ogling at somebody’s idea of a virtual experience for awhile, while the author makes some money. Then, when the money runs out, it’s tough toenails for everyone who comes after. I got mine. You don’t get yours; you got it already.
What—just because that soft drink contains absolutely no nutritional value doesn’t mean you get it for free! You “enjoyed” it, didn’t you? And in return, I get to have TWO yaghts instead of one!!!*
MOOOOHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHAAAAAA!
*The “one yaght” would be somebody who actually gave you some *nutrition* with your beverage; it costs more money to do that.
This is America. We keep getting all that crap about my, me, I, nobody else, private, you pay, etc. when what these people really mean is:
I get mine. You got yours. Just a little bit.
“This land is your land
this land is my land
that, too, is my land,
and so is that land
“wnat once was our land
is now just MY land…
This land was made for mostly me.
—an ode to the Disney corporation
“What if the software I’m selling doesn’t require configuration or any on-going support?
”
I have software like that. The company is gone, their last release was poor, but some of their releases were not.
Let’s suppose that 50, 100 years from now, one of my descendants or heirs decide they want to make use of that software.
Well…it if were a house, and there was a leak, they’d fix the leak.
If it were a car, they might scrounge up replacement parts and get it back into working order.
But if it were software, then what?
Oh…and what proof do I have that your heavily-invested software that I’m about to buy isn’t made ot of source code that contains someone else’s copyrighted work?
Or that it didn’t have code stripped from some software that was intended to be shared?
I understand that people want to make a living at what they do. But this particular industry is problematic that way. Bill Gates (and others) tried to impose a particular view of what a software industry, or a software entity, should be, and now they are apparently trying to force that view on all of us, by law.
As much as I sympathise with your need to make a living, I simply cannot understand why we must be forced to view software the way we view material goods. We should be free to view software (and software development) any way we please, and so should you.
But none of us (including you) have the right to impose our views on anyone else, with guns and police and judges and tricks of law and contract.
The least you commercial software developers could do is release your source code when you’re done with it, so people who follow after you can make use of it.
I think Stallman and the rest of you who support him, should go and live either in Cuba or North Korean, I think you’d all feel a lot happier there than living here in the capitalist west.
Stallman is succumbing to a foible usually found among the thick-skinned “conservatives”, or right-wingers, group-think. This presumption assumes that there is a certain one-ness of mind, of inclination, of intention, among a certain class of people (e-g, “The Iraqui people”) when there isn’t.
The issue of free software does not have to be slathered on the entire world of computery. Let those, such as in Linux community, who agree to work under the conditions outlined as policy in this community, do so, and obey the rules, arrived at presumably “democratically”.
And let others who want to sell their work have every right to copyright protection. Obliterating too much of the copyright laws, or not enough–as in the case of new anti-copy technology found in DVDS, etc–is not the way to go. It’s not as dramatic, and some people crave the drama of extremes, which group-think feeds, but the anser lies in BALANCE.
Copyrights have been confused with distribution. One person distributing thousands of copies of a song over, e-g, Kazaa, HURTS the copyright holder. This wasn’t the original intention of the copyright laws. This issue, as a matter of degree, has changed, whether or not money is exchanged.
Applying a blanket philosophy to these issues is Stallman’s mistake.
If you have the ultimate anything, cookie recipe, song, way to fold your socks, no one is forcing you to tell the world. I think what Stallman is saying is that once you tell someone else, they have the right to tell others what they know. Morally, you don’t have the right to stop them just because you came up with it first.
I agree 100% with this statement.
If you have the ultimate anything, cookie recipe, song, way to fold your socks, no one is forcing you to tell the world. I think what Stallman is saying is that once you tell someone else, they have the right to tell others what they know. Morally, you don’t have the right to stop them just because you came up with it first.
If I write a program that allows people to run Windows apps native in OSX and sell it to them, I am not TELLING them anything. I am granting them the right to use said program with the condition that they don’t freely share it with others. If others want the program, let them buy it .. I want to get paid. Why is this so hard to understand?
On the other hand, I have no problem if whoever bought it wanted to give away the ORIGINAL copy, but I think it’s a little unreasonable to expect software publishers (who wish to be financially conpensated) to look the other way while you make copies of their hard work and give it away to anybody who wants a copy.
1st of all, it’s nice to be back on OSNews after my little hiatus =)
2ndly, reponses:
1) By anon (IP: —.caltech.edu):
I think Stallman and the rest of you who support him, should go and live […} in […] North Korean […]
I’d love to, but I can’t maintain an erection that long.
2)
One point that a lot of you on either side of the argument are forgetting is that the VAST majority of programmers write one-off custom code that has virtually no resale value. Programmers that write COTS code comprise 10% of the software market AT MOST.
ILTBT,
Good Grief
Any respect I had for Richard Stallman has just fallen through the floor. Nobody has the right distribute copies of music, software etc unless that musician or programmer (or software company) gives them that right. I am all for free software, but I do not condone software piracy or music piracy.
By the way, what he said contradicts the GPL. If people have the rignt to copy anything (which is what he implies here) that also means that you can copy any GPL or LGPL code and put it in any other program, under any license you want.
For this reason, I will never release any of my code under the GNU licenses. Instead, use disclaimer-only licenses such as the BSD or X11 license.
Amazing how someone can be so intelligent, yet so ignorant. Well, I certainly haven’t been repressed lately. Anyone here been repressed by the US government?
Yes, we all have. And at this point, I would say most people are well aware of it. Interesting that Stallman can make a statement like that, and do to your own ignorance on the subject you immediately assume he is ignorant. In fact, if you merely open your eyes a bit you will notice the drastic losses in all of our civil rights the last few years. Not to mention the increased manipulation and censorship of the corporate news media. Or the fact that many hundreds if not thousands of people in the United States have been “detained,” arrested, or otherwise disappeared without due process or access to an attorney to the extent they were previously guaranteed. Or maybe the fact that our entire nation was dragged into a perpetual war based upon heresy and agendas, unsubstantiated evidence and “clear links” that are never found.
I recommend educating yourself on the so-called USA PATRIOT Act, for starters. Then you might want to think about concepts like election fraud, illegal wars, and flat out lies coming from the Commander in Chief.