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[DrPizza]

The issue is that he was saying that to discredit. Grakelin gave examples of people who also were career academics (citation needed, I dunno their history) and who were nonetheless valuable. This suggests that despite Stallman being a career academic, he may be valuable. His career does not automatically place him as a worthless person, as Blacken suggested.

Blacken's comment had context. RMS makes a lot of pronouncements on what people who actually have to work for a living should do. It's easy to say "Oh, you should just give away everything you do for free" when you are living off hand-outs and a university salary that quite literally you do not have to work for. What RMS advocates simply isn't viable for a great many people, and RMS would know that if he put himself in their shoes.

If we all did what RMS wanted, the IT revolution would have never happened. The Internet would remain a niche academic and government network, there would be no home computers, and in workplaces we would all be stuck on dumb terminals connected to mainframes.

The ability for corporations to sustainably develop consumer, end-user desktop software was fundamental to the proliferation of computers. People in this thread have reaped the rewards, even as they denounce proprietary software.

[ThreeToe]

My apologizes to the people who had something productive to say, but I had to erase 6 pages of fighting.  If you have a problem with someone, use the moderator report button.  Warnings have been issued.  Sorry for the hassles.

[KhazâdAimênu]

@Deathworks,

That's actually just about the best argument I've seen in favor of moral rights copyright, but I remain unconvinced. I agree with your general principle of liberal government - the issues come up when we start looking at the balance of harms. As I understand your argument, you're saying that, especially in the case of the noncommercial artist, control over the distribution of art may be extremely important, as it represents an expression of of the artist's self. The opposing interest, unauthorized redistribution, is not a particularly strong one for the potential redistributers. Therefore, the balance of harms comes out on the side of the artist.

One issue I have with this is that while from the standpoint of consequentialist ethics your argument works, law and ethics aren't the same thing. Throughout history, legislatures and courts have been reluctant to bring the force of law against emotional harms, and for good reason; it's very difficult to establish in court just how upset you were by the harm, and what the relevant compensation might be. There's only one purely emotion-based tort on the US books, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and it's usually only available when there's an accompanying physical harm. In general, since emotions are so varied and so difficult to quantify, it's best for government to stay out of it.

From a purely balance-of-harms perspective, I have two other concerns: First, the harm caused by enforcement of the law must also be taken into account. This is particularly relevant for digital works, where copying is easy and enforcement is difficult. It's not merely unfettered copying that is lost by the public, since things like DRM and content monitoring by websites and ISPs are a natural outgrowth of the desire to enforce the rights granted by the law. Second, you characterize the harm to the public as the "minor frustration" of not being able to redistribute without authorization, but it seems to me there's more to it than that. We all benefit by having art be available to us, and any limitation on distribution would seem to lessen that availability. Of course, limits on distribution are valuable for other reasons, but that doesn't diminish the value of freely available art. Additionally, much new creation depends on the use of the old. If creators must constantly fear that their use of an existing work might lead to a lawsuit, creation is discouraged.

Now, these issues are criticisms of copyright generally. I raise them here not because I think they're killer arguments against the concept of copyright, but because I think that they tend to weigh against any moral justification for it. Once we bring in the practical justifications for copyright, I consider the utilitarian benefit of encouraging production and the mitigating effects of regulations such as the fair use doctrine enough to make the system, on balance, a worthwhile one, even if the current law is not as good in its particulars as I might like.

While I feel for those who feel as though they have, in a sense, been violated by those who deal roughly with their art, there's an extent to which when you put your work out there for all to see, you must accept that others will do what they want with it. It's part of living in a free society.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

First of all, I want to thank you for replying in such depth. It is very interesting indeed.

This brings me to another caveat or rather general point I want to make about that discussion. Of course, I would be really happy if I could convince people to see people my way. I would be a hypocrite if I claimed otherwise. However, I don't see the main purpose of this discussion in that. I am more interesting in understanding as such - that is me understanding more about how people see things as well as making people understand how I feel (and in this case, there is a lot of feeling in it for me, sometimes overshadowing the thinking, I have to admit). Of course, we still get arguments and counter-arguments, but I see the discussion itself, even if no one gets convinced, to be a worthwhile endeavor. In that spirit, I wish to comment on your propositions.

First, your summary of my points seems fittingly enough, so we do not need to dwell on that or discuss any misunderstandings.

One issue I have with this is that while from the standpoint of consequentialist ethics your argument works, law and ethics aren't the same thing. Throughout history, legislatures and courts have been reluctant to bring the force of law against emotional harms, and for good reason;

I tend to disagree with that as I see the border between emotional and psychological harm to be very difficult to define or rather a mute point from the perspective of the victim. And if you consider psychological harm, there are several things that are not accepted in civilized societies:

For a weak example, we have the restrictions imposed on the material you can present to children. Granted, children are not adults and thus their status as conscious members of society may be difficult to define, but I think that they do work for the argument. What is the reason for forbidding to show sexually explicit material to young children? Mind you, I am not talking about engaging in actual sexual acts with them, but only presenting them with the images/media without any further intervention from the adult. There is definitely no physical harm involved, thus, we can only assume that they are to be protected from psychological harm (and the freedom oppressed is incidentally also a freedom of redistribution, but with a focus on the recipient rather than the source).

And that example even has a nice further aspect to it: Such legislation usually uses a blanket age barrier to determine whether it is alright to confront the child with such material. However, children develop differently, so we are only talking about a potential psychological harm. Yet, regardless of whether the child will actually be harmed by the experience, it is a big don't.

I think that restrictions on legal drugs were actually motivated by similar concerns about psychological addiction, but since there are actually physical harms that also result from such drugs and which are inherent to children (like physical development deficits), I think we should leave that out.

Another example pertaining to adults and recent history is the legislature against torture. Really good torture does not include physical harm as that would seriously limit its application. Water boarding, for instance, while creating some short term physical stress from the air deprivation is basically physically harmless. As are fake executions. Yet, these things are considered serious crimes and are despised by civilize countries all around the globe.

Therefore, I think that emotional/psychological harm is not as irrelevant even to legislature as you may think.

First, the harm caused by enforcement of the law must also be taken into account. This is particularly relevant for digital works, where copying is easy and enforcement is difficult. It's not merely unfettered copying that is lost by the public, since things like DRM and content monitoring by websites and ISPs are a natural outgrowth of the desire to enforce the rights granted by the law.

Sorry, I don't consider this a valid point. Because that same argument would then propose that putting up automatic shooting devices around your property would be the logic consequence of enforcing your right to have your home secure from burglars. Enforcement of a right is done by the state, otherwise, that is vigilantism. When your daughter gets raped, you are not supposed to get out the torches, pitch forks and tar, but rather to turn to a court of law. Likewise, when your rights as an artist are hurt, you are to ask for justice to act on your behalf.

A right given by the government does not imply the need or even justification for self-justice.

Second, you characterize the harm to the public as the "minor frustration" of not being able to redistribute without authorization, but it seems to me there's more to it than that. We all benefit by having art be available to us, and any limitation on distribution would seem to lessen that availability. Of course, limits on distribution are valuable for other reasons, but that doesn't diminish the value of freely available art.

You are very vague in that part of your argument. It seems a little bit as if your argument could be used to say that entertainment, which is indeed beneficial to our mental health should be freely available to everyone. Or to stay with the term "art", museum fees which effectively limit access to art are something that violates a fundamental good.

And I am not arguing that freely available art is something bad, but rather that the artist must be allowed to decide whether their particular creation is freely available or not.

Additionally, much new creation depends on the use of the old. If creators must constantly fear that their use of an existing work might lead to a lawsuit, creation is discouraged.

That is actually a valid point but one that is actually already answered even in the current fair use clauses. You can create satire without fear of persecution. Of course, there is the problem of fan fiction, which is a real gray area that has brought forth a very interesting situation especially in Japan (people actually earn money with such often erotic tales of already existing characters, and that is most often accepted by the creators). However, I actually doubt that creation is actually discouraged by this as creators are usually aware of the fair use clause and are usually also highly aware of their own creation's differences to the original work. I mean, you create a derivative work because you usually see something that is not there or not as obvious in the original. You are expressing your own personal perspective in your own creation.

Now, these issues are criticisms of copyright generally. I raise them here not because I think they're killer arguments against the concept of copyright, but because I think that they tend to weigh against any moral justification for it. Once we bring in the practical justifications for copyright, I consider the utilitarian benefit of encouraging production and the mitigating effects of regulations such as the fair use doctrine enough to make the system, on balance, a worthwhile one, even if the current law is not as good in its particulars as I might like.

Ah, that is something where we very much agree, although I somewhat come from the opposing direction - I see a great moral/ethic need and see the commercial/utilitarian aspects to be just tools to get that enforced in society :) :)
But I agree that the copyright laws are "worthwhile" and I also  agree that the current laws need improvements in their details.

While I feel for those who feel as though they have, in a sense, been violated by those who deal roughly with their art, there's an extent to which when you put your work out there for all to see, you must accept that others will do what they want with it. It's part of living in a free society.

Well, that is something where I see this more emotionally and see a moral/emotional obligation of the person who benefitted from the generosity of the artist to feel gratitude for the good the artist has done to them. I don't know, on an irrational level, I would hope that people would be grateful for the good done to them and act accordingly (which, if it worked for everyone would make copyright laws unnecessary from my perspective).

Thank you again for your interesting answers. They brought up aspects that I have not taken into consideration before as much and thus have made this worthwhile. I hope we can continue this discuss in this atmosphere and maybe attract some more participants as well.

Deathworks

[Phmcw]

Art is unimportant. So is game.
Software is a tool for a lot of important matter. I use it extensivly. A software you cannot use is useless.
What good does it do to you that there is a hundred good game out there, you cannot buy them all.
What good does it do that matlab has advantage over octave. I cannot buy matlab alone, so I have to use it on the university computer.
Free software is good for society, free from marckeing, free from uncompaibility created to gain monopoly.
One software you can use is better than ten thousand you cannot.

Without the right to enforce copyright we would have a commissioned software economy ; with the obligation to share the code, we would have a sane, interpolable, virus free software ecosistem.

Enforcement of copyright bring unfair competition, violation of privacy,...

I'm afraid I have a rather utilitarian view of the matter.
The concept of ownership of a story, in any other way than the right to get credit for it is rather alien to me.

DrPizza: Not taking the bait thank you. And lol : office and visual studio "superior".

[DrPizza]

Without the right to enforce copyright we would have a commissioned software economy

Meaning that superior software--Matlab, Office, Visual Studio, etc.--would never exist. No-one can stump up the cash to commission Word or Excel. Copyright allows the massive up-front costs to be amortized over millions of users. Open source cannot and does not do that, which is why so much open source software is so lacking.

with the obligation to share the code, we would have a sane, interpolable, virus free software ecosistem.

How on earth does open source preclude viruses?

I'm afraid I have a rather utilitarian view of the matter.

If your view was utilitarian then you would acknowledge the immense utility that copyright provides, through allowing costs to be amortized, and recognize that this utility is greater than the disutility caused by copyright.

You are categorically not a utilitarian.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Art is unimportant. So is game.

Sorry, but I have to disagree with those statements if you keep them unqualified. If you want to claim that they are unimportant for you, personally, that is something too difficult to discuss for me here.

But as a general statement, both games and art have important functions in the mental health of society as far as I can tell as they are the cornerstones of entertainment, which helps reduce psychological stress that could otherwise cause serious problems. That is at least the way I see it.

However, I consider this aspect (the question of whether art and games are important or not in general) to be not central to what we are discussing.

Software is a tool for a lot of important matter. I use it extensivly. A software you cannot use is useless.
What good does it do to you that there is a hundred good game out there, you cannot buy them all.
What good does it do that matlab has advantage over octave. I cannot buy matlab alone, so I have to use it on the university computer.

Actually I have already bought more commercial/doujinshi games and downloaded more freeware games than I can play ... so yes, quantity may on first sight not be important. However, quantity comes into play when we allow for diversity - if there are only 5 games, there can only be 5 different games, so if you wanted a game doing something of type 6, you would be out of luck. On the other hand, if you have hundreds of different games, not all games are interesting for you - for instance, I am not good at action games, so all the racing and sport games are not even in my perception. Neither are the first person shooters and their kin or standard shoot'em ups. In short, I - and I assume a lot of people - do not want to buy hundred games, but a certain selection.

Free software is good for society, free from marckeing, free from uncompaibility created to gain monopoly.

I agree absolutely with the first part, that free software as such is a useful and good part of society. No doubt about that. Note, however, that the existence of free software does not mean the non-existence of non-free software and vice versa. Both are currently existing next to each other - does that make free software less useful for society?

I am not quite sure what the second point is, so I skip that.

Incompatibility created to gain monopoly or rather deliberate incompatibilities are not limited to commercial software. Open software is just as prone to it as different programmers/programming teams may (seen positively) have different ideas how to reach the best solution for a problem or they may (seen negatively) want to show off their uniqueness by deliberately not conforming to standards proposed by others.

One software you can use is better than ten thousand you cannot.

Well, now you are actually proposing a monopoly. Of course, the software that is unobtainable is not helping you, but if you narrow it down to a single piece of software, the complaint about monopolism becomes meaningless. Monopolism is problematic because there is no choice, and so this kind of contradicts your notion.

Additionally, again this argument fails in the face that we have both freeware and non-freeware software for many things. So, if you can't afford the commercial software, you can already use the freeware one, the existence of the commercial one not impeding your usage.

Or putting it in other words, "If there are programs you can use, what does it matter that there are others doing the same that you can't use?"

Without the right to enforce copyright we would have a commissioned software economy ;

I assume you are referring to my statements about copyright protection. As I said before, enforcement of laws is to be done by organs of the state and no one else. Copyright should be enforced - but not by private enterprises but by the police and by the courts - as has been practiced already when dealing with various peer-to-peer sites. As far as I know, those actions against them were not dependent on any copyprotection in the stolen goods but rather in state agencies being made aware of their illegal activity.

with the obligation to share the code, we would have a sane, interpolable, virus free software ecosistem.

Well, that is an ideal that is not unlikely, although it may be less perfect than we think if people fail to be careful about providing correct information about their modifications and dependencies - but that is only a minor point.

However, I agree with DrPizza that code sharing does not prevent the existence of viruses as the creation of viruses is as far as I know rooted in various motivations, some of which would still exist even if there wasn't commercial software to target around.

Enforcement of copyright bring unfair competition, violation of privacy,...

I don't see how enforcement of copyright necessarily results in unfair competition. I am aware that there has been abuse of the system (a main reason for the decline of public domain as far as I know), but that is not something to blame on the basic idea.

I also do not see the necessity for the violation of privacy. As I said, I see enforcement as something done by government agencies with means that are in accordance with the law. Thus, there is no additional spying on your private computers. But once you put out an advert on the public internet that you are dealing in pirated software, you can't complain about the police noticing. It would be the same as if you put an ad in the newspaper offering illegal drugs.

Of course, this means that enforcement is not absolutely perfect, but that is a general problem of enforcement: There are so many crimes that never get noticed and never get caught, but even with the legal methods, the police are quite capable of detecting and solving quite a good portion of them.

I'm afraid I have a rather utilitarian view of the matter.

Somehow, I failed to make a point I wanted to make earlier in this post, so I put it here as it does pertain your perspective. Initially, you pointed out that you are interested in applications and other non-game software. This is a legitimate position and I think we can agree that there are differences between art and application software. However, the differences are not so big as to protect against ambiguity in the border zone (as, for instance when dealing with the life simulators discussed in another thread - are they games, are they mathematical experiments and thus applications?). And while you might argue that scientific algorithms should remain free for all, an argument that is pretty complex, I believe, and not easily refuted or agreed upon, that ambiguity means that digital art and applications need to be subject to the same laws, so you can not simply ignore the needs of digital art, even if you only want to handle applications.
 

The concept of ownership of a story, in any other way than the right to get credit for it is rather alien to me.

As I said, from my own personal feelings as well as from what I have seen with other artists, for private artists, there is a part of their soul in their own art, and they are very vulnerable about their art as the art directly links to their own emotions. You could say that the art is actually a part of the artist, not really something that is completely unrelated to them. And just as you need to have your physical body protected against abuse, in those cases the artists need protection of their emotional body, part of which is their art.

Deathworks

[Blacken]

Art is unimportant. So is game.

A great many people who make their living off making both would disagree with you. I would go further to suggest that a great many people who do not make their living off either would disagree with you, because they derive utility from them.

Who are you to suggest that people should not be compensated for the utility they provide to people?

Software is a tool for a lot of important matter. I use it extensivly. A software you cannot use is useless.

Then buy it. Otherwise, do without.

And a game is most definitely "software." You may attempt to draw semantic differences that don't exist, but I will not accept them.

What good does it do to you that there is a hundred good game out there, you cannot buy them all.

...So? You fail to make a compelling point. There are hundreds of thousands of restaurants around the world, I'll never visit all of them. Big deal.

What good does it do that matlab has advantage over octave. I cannot buy matlab alone, so I have to use it on the university computer.

It does you no good. It does many people involved in the development of Matlab a great deal of good. It does people who build commercial add-ons for Matlab a great deal of good. That you do not value Matlab high enough to pay for it is an indictment of your refusal to make hard choices in life.

Adobe Photoshop is not a cheap piece of software. But I bought it, because it has value to me. I was a student when I bought it, and it was a sacrifice. But the return on investment was good, and so I'm glad I did. Because I am socially mature enough to understand that other people have rights, too.

Free software is good for society, free from marckeing, free from uncompaibility created to gain monopoly.

Free from user-friendliness, free from documentation, free from fixing bugs that would be boring to fix...

You belong in alt.linux.advocacy, I think. Your arguments fare poorly outside an echo chamber.

The option of having open source software is a powerful positive. In no way does it suggest that proprietary software is a negative, except in the hands of GNU-esque zealots.

One software you can use is better than ten thousand you cannot.

And you have software you can use. You have Linux. You have GNU Octave. So you are totally free to toddle off and go use it. Who are you to say others should kowtow to your rather selfish demands?

Without the right to enforce copyright we would have a commissioned software economy ;

In which large-scale, quality software isn't going to happen because nobody would have the money to actually commission it. RMS's essays posit this great wonderland of commissioned software, without pausing to realize that that's not how the world works. Without the actual profit motive for developing software, people will use "good enough" rather than investing a shitload of money--far beyond even the $999 I paid for Adobe Photoshop, for example--that they will almost certainly never recoup.

With the exception of ISVs, companies who develop software usually lose money because it is not their core competency. It costs too much money for them to develop it. Thus we have ISVs who develop and commoditize software, amortizing the costs across many consumers and making it affordable for all of them. (You do know what an ISV is, right? You do know what commoditization is, right? You do know what amortization is, right? I have to ask, because it seems like you don't really have a strong grasp of the open source ecosystem, let alone how proprietary software works.)

with the obligation to share the code, we would have a sane, interpolable, virus free software ecosistem.

No we wouldn't. Have you looked at Linux lately? Do you have the educational and experiential grounding to understand the Linux ecosystem? Or the BSDs, for that matter? They're a creaking mess, and they will never be fixed. If you think those are "sane," you have a very different definition of "sane."

Interpolable isn't a word, but I assume you mean interoperable, and guess what? I have not to date had any significant interoperability issue between OS X 10.6, Windows Vista, and my Linux machines. Even Exchange sort-of-works on Linux these days! Holy shit! Problem solved.

Virus-free? This is preposterous for the reasons my dear sockpuppet DrPizza mentioned above.

Enforcement of copyright bring unfair competition,

There's nothing unfair about it. The world does not exist to guarantee you everything that somebody else has. Work for it.

violation of privacy,...

If you are either engaged in copyright infringement and they drop a lawsuit on you (which is their right, you do understand that?) or you choose to purchase software with onerous DRM, yes, your privacy will be impinged. Thing is? The first is a legal process and you consent to the second. That you do not enjoy the prospect of being legally held liable for your oh-so-"principled" piracy, or that you don't have the intestinal fortitude to do without if you disagree with a DRM scheme, is nobody's problem but your own.

I'm afraid I have a rather utilitarian view of the matter.
The concept of ownership of a story, in any other way than the right to get credit for it is rather alien to me.

This is not a utilitarian view at all. A utilitarian will look at the utility provided by copyright, and say "it could probably be better, but it actually works." Cost amortization is powerful. A relatively small portion of people being upset that they can't have things for free is of vastly less nonutility than the economic benefits conferred by continued creation and commoditization.

Intellectual property is a fundamentally utilitarian compromise: how do we get people to keep making stuff? Well, we make sure they can profit off it. How? Copyright. And there you have it.

DrPizza: Not taking the bait thank you. And lol : office and visual studio "superior".

More uninformed "lols" from somebody who doesn't have the experience to do so. Microsoft Office is surely not perfect, but it is without question the most user-focused, workflow-friendly office suite in existence. Its developers actually work with an eye toward how regular people (not other programmers) actually work in the real world. Its feature set is unmatched. Its usability is unmatched. Its extensibility is unmatched. And its strong integration with other tools make it multiplicatively superior to its competition.

Visual Studio is, put simply, (again) the most user-focused, workflow-friendly IDE in existence. It is not designed to be easy on its developers, it is designed to be easy for the developers who will use it in the field. Its support for even very common features such as IntelliSense is unsurpassed, and its C++ IntelliSense in particular is leagues ahead of anyone else. It is trivial to extend, and integrates nicely with other Windows-platform tools to better allow the writing of extensions for those (example: Office installs, you now see options to write Office extensions within Visual Studio). And while it has its share of warts, nobody else is particularly close. Eclipse and NetBeans both try, and quite hard, but while their code engine is often very good (although somewhat limited, in that when you use anything but Java it's a crapshoot), their user interface is decidedly hostile and their full-featured extensibility frameworks lack...well...extensions, because of weak user adoption.

So, yeah. But hey. Keep going "lol." I'm sure your nonsubstantiative "arguments" (and I do use the word very loosely) are extremely convincing.



Honest question, Phmcw, because I am curious as to your standing in this argument. Do you create software? What do you create? Have you worked in the software development industry as a professional? Have you written or contributed to open-source software? I like knowing how close to completely basic principles I have to get to explain a topic. Thanks.

[Virex]

Another point I just realised is that enforcing open-source as the only licence could actualy decrease the accesability of corporately important software. In many industries any advantage is important, including having better software. Currently, companies developing software have controll over who has acces to their software and epsecialy with high-profile software like Matlab or Maya there are only a very few companies offering it and many companies using it. This means that it is most beneficial for the developers to sell their programs on the open market, since customers have little choice but to roll with it.

However, if software is developed on a commisioned base, single customers or small customer groups gain a lot of power over the developers of the commisioned software. This means that those companies have the ability to force the developers not to disclose the software but keep it a secret instead, either through contracts or by treathning to switch to a different developer if they don't comply. That way, a lot of comercialy availible software slips into secrecy, defeating the point of open-source alltogheter. To make it worse, it's probable that companies will no longer coin software patents (assuming those arn't abbolished as well) to avoid exposing important parts of their software, which again decreases the amount of knowledge that becomes generaly availible, essentialy forcing everyone to reinvent the wheel themselves. Considering this, it is expectable that the main source of freely availible comercial software will in fact shift to universities and small hobyist groups, with a small amounts of companies developing stuff for the comnsumer markets thrown into the mix, who gain money from adds on their site and similar things.

[Blacken]

gain money from adds on their site and similar things.

Common Misconception Dispersal Time: ads don't make much at all in terms of money. For sites that get 10,000 hits a day, we're talking maybe twenty dollars. A software developer's site, in addition to looking absolutely unprofessional with advertisements plastered on it (then again, Phmcw and RMS and the like hate the concept of professional developers, apparently they'd rather programmers be serfs), would be a one-visit website, and so repeated ad views are colossally unlikely.

Plus, in their fwee utopia, the software can be hosted by other people, so it's not like they'll be getting visitors anyway. Especially without the money to have a marketing budget. (Oh wait, I forgot, I didn't get the memo that marketing is bad, according to Phmcw.)



Your other point regarding commercial subversion of their "free" attempts is, however, utterly spot on and accurate. But that's okay. I'm sure Phmcw would just have us pass more laws and infringe more freedoms to make that never, ever, ever happen. (That smell is not the dog, it is sarcasm.)

[Virex]

gain money from adds on their site and similar things.

Common Misconception Dispersal Time: ads don't make much at all in terms of money. For sites that get 10,000 hits a day, we're talking maybe two dollars. A software developer's site, in addition to looking absolutely unprofessional with advertisements plastered on it (then again, Phmcw and RMS and the like hate the concept of professional developers, apparently they'd rather programmers be serfs), would be a one-visit website, and so repeated ad views are colossally unlikely.

Plus, in their fwee utopia, the software can be hosted by other people, so it's not like they'll be getting visitors anyway. Especially without the money to have a marketing budget. (Oh wait, I forgot, I didn't get the memo that marketing is bad, according to Phmcw.)



Your other point regarding commercial subversion of their "free" attempts is, however, utterly spot on and accurate. But that's okay. I'm sure Phmcw would just have us pass more laws and infringe more freedoms to make that never, ever, ever happen. (That smell is not the dog, it is sarcasm.)

It's enough to keep a bunch of browser-based games in the air, so I could imagine it keeping small companies in the air and a lot of advertisement for these kinds of things is word of mouth and reviews anyway. Plus, most of the code would be copy-paste from other projects, which means lower development costs. I don't think it's going to be enough to fund the development of, say, Microsoft Word or Dwarf Fortress, but enough to fund a replacement for Windows Calculator or solitaire should be possible.

[Blacken]

It's enough to keep a bunch of browser-based games in the air, so I could imagine it keeping small companies in the air and a lot of advertisement for these kinds of things is word of mouth and reviews anyway. Plus, most of the code would be copy-paste from other projects, which means lower development costs. I don't think it's going to be enough to fund the development of, say, Microsoft Word, or Dwarf Fortress, but enough to fund a replacement for Windows Calculator should be possible.

-Most browser-based games lose money. A lot of it. There are a few that at least break even, but they're getting bullshit amounts of hits per day. Zynga's web games get over twenty million hits per day. "Well browser-based games make it" doesn't even come close to the ten or fifteen hits per day that these marketer-less companies' ad-plastered sites would receive. It does not scale down anything close to the way you are positing.

-How do you think companies get reviews and how they start word-of-mouth generation? That's what marketing departments are for. And unless your product is incredibly cool (i.e., not the "Windows Calculator replacement" you mention), nobody's going to start WoM on their own.

-Code reuse happens, but it's not as common as people think, and it's never "copy-paste." Even if it was that simple, developers don't stop wanting their salary when you tell them "oh, just copy-paste that and we're done." People still have to get paid; development costs don't drop like you think they do.


It is an utterly unsustainable model, and just has no basis in reality. It sounds really good, sure--but instead of just saying "maybe if," you ought to go actually try to run one of those games, or run an ad-supported website. (DrPizza writes for an ad-supported website, and even Ars, one of the more well-read websites out there and with a huge subscriber and visitor base, has had to let people go over the last couple years because of the implosion of the ad market.)

[Phmcw]

It's enough to keep a bunch of browser-based games in the air, so I could imagine it keeping small companies in the air and a lot of advertisement for these kinds of things is word of mouth and reviews anyway. Plus, most of the code would be copy-paste from other projects, which means lower development costs. I don't think it's going to be enough to fund the development of, say, Microsoft Word, or Dwarf Fortress, but enough to fund a replacement for Windows Calculator should be possible.

-Most browser-based games lose money. A lot of it. There are a few that at least break even, but they're getting bullshit amounts of hits per day. Zynga's web games get over twenty million hits per day. "Well browser-based games make it" doesn't even come close to the ten or fifteen hits per day that these marketer-less companies' ad-plastered sites would receive. It does not scale down anything close to the way you are positing.

-How do you think companies get reviews and how they start word-of-mouth generation? That's what marketing departments are for. And unless your product is incredibly cool (i.e., not the "Windows Calculator replacement" you mention), nobody's going to start WoM on their own.

-Code reuse happens, but it's not as common as people think, and it's never "copy-paste." Even if it was that simple, developers don't stop wanting their salary when you tell them "oh, just copy-paste that and we're done." People still have to get paid; development costs don't drop like you think they do.


It is an utterly unsustainable model, and just has no basis in reality. It sounds really good, sure--but instead of just saying "maybe if," you ought to go actually try to run one of those games, or run an ad-supported website. (DrPizza writes for an ad-supported website, and even Ars, one of the more well-read websites out there and with a huge subscriber and visitor base, has had to let people go over the last couple years because of the implosion of the ad market.)

Yeah, there is no free software at all actually. Hell don't you know?
Windows is the most stable and secure O.S. known to mankind.

However, your wall of text boil down to three things :

1) You cannot makes as much money with a free software then with a privateer one.
This is true. This is one of the aim : invest less money, get more quality out of it.
How?
   A) by allowing user's themselves to adapt the system to theirs needs.
It work pretty well, if the users are knowledgeable in theirs field. A proof of this fact is Debian.
   B) You can use every free software. If there is 10000 hours spent on a free software somewhere all this work benefit to you. Not so much with commercial software. But more important, free software can use each other discoveries. Want a new word processor. Fork open office, or any other one, and improve it. Open office himself will then be able to use your work.

2) Commercial is better. Short answer no it isn't. Long answer  : read the innumerable flame-wars on the subject.

3)Marketing is wasted money for the user. Nuff' said.

[DrPizza]

This is true. This is one of the aim : invest less money, get more quality out of it.

"more quality" is an unsubstantiated claim.

Want a new word processor. Fork open office, or any other one, and improve it. Open office himself will then be able to use your work.

I particularly don't want to write a new word processor. But I can't afford to pay someone to develop Word--I don't have billions of dollars.

Commercial software allows the millions of people like me to pool our money and fund the development, without requiring us to actually know each other, or organize ourselves, or solicit bids for the development, or assign contracts, or anything like that. It actually makes development of this kind of application viable.

[Grakelin]

Everybody's had to let people go in the past couple years. There's a world-wide recession going on.

This doesn't seem to be so much of a tech debate as it is an economic ideology debate at this point. It is true that it is easier to mass produce an OS when you're a megacorporation than it is when you are a twenty-year old undergrad in Comp. Sci. in his basement. Nobody is suggesting that programmers be serfs here. What they're suggesting is more of a socialist or communist ideal where everybody is sharing the work. You're at least equally likely to be a serf in a corporate structure as you are in a communist one (and we have seen precedent of this in the past decade, when EA was hit with a class action lawsuit because of its treatment of workers).

To say that this doesn't work because they just can't fund it or churn it out is ignorant of what we already have in the tech industry. We have our Linux (which suits plenty of people just fine: arguing that you hate the system, and therefore Linux is not a suitable example is like saying you hate Just Us! Coffee and so Fair Trade will never work), and we have our Dwarf Fortress, and we have things like Braid, which actually get sold for lots of money.

In a socialist economy, this is how programming would get done. People would be open-sourcing everything (even if they were particularly fond of 'streetcred' or whatever, they would be pressured by the rest of their communities into open-sourcing their work, anyway). This is a capitalist economy, however, and so money is important. Programmers can't just hobby-program all day. They need food on the table. This is why we see more commercial products, and more quality out of commercial products: this is what people spend 8 hours a day doing. It's not because it is inherently better.