Java editor

[nebulous99]

Can anyone else copy and sell "IntelliJ", legally? No? Then they have
a monopoly -- a state-enforced one at that -- on "IntelliJ".

But...[snip]

If you are seriously going to argue that copyrights (and patents) are
not a type of monopoly right, then this discussion is over.

Nobody can build their own identical IntelliJ from their own spare
parts (i.e. electrons) and sell it legally, even under another name.
That smacks of state-monopoly power to me. Same as building their own
<foobar> from nuts and bolts, if <foobar> is patented, and going into
competition against the originator, and so forth. Nobody can make
their own Mickey Mouse cartoons -- even with wholly original plots --
without Disney's permission. Still think copyrights and patents don't
grant monopoly powers?

 

[Mike Schilling]

That doesn't refute anything I've said. There are plenty of other
reasons than expected revenue from the direct sale of copies to
develop software.

But you think that developing software i order to make money by selli g it
is a bad idea, which is why you want it to be illegal.

Oh, and calling that tiny company a "monopoly", for the second time now,
confirms [insult trimmed in the interests of civility and decorum]

Surely you've been called worse than "moron".

Can anyone else copy and sell "IntelliJ", legally? No? Then they have
a monopoly -- a state-enforced one at that -- on "IntelliJ".

Can anyone other than the Coca-Cola company sell Coca-Cola? Can anyone
other than the onwer of a house sell that house? Monopolists, every one of
them.

 

[Mike Schilling]

Can anyone else copy and sell "IntelliJ", legally? No? Then they have
a monopoly -- a state-enforced one at that -- on "IntelliJ".

But...[snip]

If you are seriously going to argue that copyrights (and patents) are
not a type of monopoly right, then this discussion is over.

Then it's over, because that's not what "monopoly" means. There are lots
of Java IDEs, some of them free, and IntelliJ has no ability to control that
market or to affect the sales of other IDEs by any means other than
out-competing them. You could argue with equal logic [1] that Wonder Bread
is a monopoly, because no other bakery can sell its white bread under that
name.

1. That is, none.

 

[Lew]

Can anyone else copy and sell "IntelliJ", legally? No? Then they have
a monopoly -- a state-enforced one at that -- on "IntelliJ".

But...[snip]

If you are seriously going to argue that copyrights (and patents) are
not a type of monopoly right, then this discussion is over.

Now don't go changing your argument in mid-stream, Twisted. You said that
IntelliJ had a monopoly, not that they exercised a "monopoly right". Two
different things.

I am seriously arguing that IntelliJ does not have a monopoly, in the usual
sense of the word "monopoly". Thank God, that means the discussion is over.

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

Can anyone else copy and sell "IntelliJ", legally? No? Then they have a
monopoly -- a state-enforced one at that -- on "IntelliJ".

From the OED (emphasis added):
monopoly (n.)
I. Simple uses.

1. a. The exclusive possession or control of the trade in a
commodity, product [1], or service; *the condition of having no
competitor in one's trade or business*. Also: an instance of this.
In Eng. Law: a situation in which one supplier or producer controls
more than a specified fraction of the market.

b. As a mass noun: [trimmed]

c. Monopolies Commission, [trimmed]

2. An exclusive privilege conferred by a monarch, state, etc., of
selling a particular commodity or of trading with a particular region.

3. In extended use (often with conscious metaphor). [trimmed]

4. The commodity, trade, etc., in which a monopoly is held, granted,
or operated. Also in extended use.

5. A company that has, operates, or claims a monopoly.

6. In form Monopoly. [trimmed]

IntelliJ has several competitors in its business (Java IDEs): NetBeans
and Eclipse, for starters. Therefore, by definition, it is not a monopoly
under any definition.

[1] I should mention that "product" here is used as a noun in the same
vein as "output" or "commodity", being used as a general descriptor as in
"The product of the mills..."

 

[blmblm]

[ snip ]

[ snip ]

Obviously you didn't bother to follow that link.

Well, I did, and found ....

[ snip ]

Now go read what's at that link I provided. Don't worry - it won't
bite, although there are pdf files. If you're really worried, paste
the link into Firefox, and at the pdfs, right click them, "save as",
do a full virus and badware scan, and read them offline later.

as you say, PDF files [1], but PDF files that seem to represent
the chapters of a book. I'm mildly curious about this argument
you find so compelling, but not interested enough to read a book.
I don't suppose you'd care to point us to a shorter summary?

[1] Are PDF files really a potential security risk? Huh. I guess
it must be possible to embed more in them than I thought ....
<shrug>

 

[Twisted]

IntelliJ has several competitors in its business (Java IDEs): NetBeans
and Eclipse, for starters. Therefore, by definition, it is not a monopoly
under any definition.

In response to this and two other new posts here: To the extent that
the others cannot be substituted for IntelliJ, its makers do hold
monopoly powers. For example, if there are problems with
interoperability. (Likely they can all work as clients to common
version control servers, but supposing this were an issue, you would
then have one company gatewaying access to interoperate with your
IntelliJ-using shop. This happened for real for years with the
MSOffice document formats making having, and frequently upgrading,
MSOffice effectively mandatory for all business computers in the
world, and only recently has OpenOffice and its MSOffice compatibility
seriously eroded Microsoft's monopoly power in this area.)

To the extent that copyrights and patents limit the ability for anyone
to make products that can completely substitute for or interoperate
with IntelliJ, there exists a significant problem. In principle, the
threat is enormous, especially given the ability to use gratuitous
encryption on some protocol IntelliJ uses and then claim
"circumvention" under the DMCA and equivalent laws against any
competitor that tried to reverse engineer it and make an interoperable
or fully-substitutable product. Likewise, if the protocol involves
some gratuitous and patented convolution, even an independently
designed or clean-room-reverse-engineered third-party codec allowing
interoperation has to license the patent or it infringes. Ouch!

In fact, the threat isn't just theoretical. Both types of tactics are
used to stop competitors making substitutable or interoperable
products every day. There have been attempts to use legal measures to
stifle interoperable third party:
* Game servers (BnetD);
* Remote controls;
* Ink-jet ink cartridges and print heads (multiple occasions in the
case of ink, and at least one with print heads);
* Car parts; and
* Assorted software of various sorts.
That's just so far. Some of the times the bullies lost in court.
Fairly often they've won and retained a lock on interoperable
products.

While I have no reason to believe that the makers of IntelliJ are
doing anything nasty like that at this time, the only way you can be
sure a vendor won't pull a stunt like this to enforce lock-in at some
future date is if the product is open source. At minimum you better be
able to get your data out in an open format via an open protocol or as
a disk file. In the case of IntelliJ, if it can interface to bog-
standard CVS or SVN, or output plain ASCII or Unicode .java files (and
it can probably do all three), you are not at serious risk of lock-in,
though it would be nice if project definitions could be output in a
universally usable form as well (ant buildfile? I know Eclipse can do
that, but can IntelliJ?...)

Even then the original issue still stands. If IntelliJ is not
superior, wasting money on it instead of using a free IDE is silly. If
it is, the question arises of why Eclipse and/or NetBeans don't catch
up rapidly. If it involves patents or circumventing encryption in ways
that may run afoul of the DMCA, then it means it's because IntelliJ's
makers have a bona fide monopoly. If it does not, then you might want
to consider carefully whether you want to spend money to line some fat
execs' pockets, or instead spend some time improving the Eclipse or
NetBeans codebase to have equivalent functionality.

If the functionality is proprietary, ask whether it's as desirable as
it seems ... or even desirable at all, as proprietary functionality
may be a route to becoming locked in to one provider of some service,
and then you'll have to pay, and pay, and pay perpetually. That way
lies digital serfdom, as with adopting any kind of "software as a
service" with a high cost of switching. The one kind of "software as a
service" I'll ever accept is the sort that does not involve any
proprietary protocols and so provides no cost of switching. Web search
and Google Groups being cases in point -- Google don't have the
world's only search engine or access to nntp news, and no important
data is built up over time that I can't easily either lose or extract
(just the read/unread data for news postings), so the cost of
switching away is virtually nil. No danger of lock-in.

 

[Twisted]

But you think that developing software i order to make money by selli g it
is a bad idea, which is why you want it to be illegal.

Whoa, words in my mouth --! I never said I wanted it to be illegal.
You go right ahead and try to make money by selling copies, if you
think you can even without restricting other peoples' abilities to
make more copies and use them as they see fit, including resell them.
It isn't impossible -- Red Hat makes money partly by selling install
kits, which anyone could freely copy under current law as it's all
GPL, and there's often a market for limited edition/original signed
whatevers, where copies may be made, but don't have the market value
the originals command. Why is an original Rembrandt saleable for huge
amounts of money even if cheap copies can be had everywhere? It isn't
copyright law. And that means copyright law isn't needed to motivate a
future Rembrandt. Build up a reputation and originals of your own
works, including retroactively ones you made before you became famous,
may be worth a fortune on eBay. Of course becoming rich and famous has
always been something of a crapshoot, but that won't be changed, and
if large industry groups didn't gateway access to the major methods of
distribution and venues of visibility, it might become less of one.
Actually, no matter what happens to the law, in the immediate future
those groups will lose most of their power anyway. Now they can be
bypassed and distribution and exposure had by way of torrents, cheap
web hosts, Myspace, and Youtube, with a big push of momentum from
being blogged about, if you make something worthy of note. In fact, in
the next twenty years the world is going to change more than you can
possibly imagine ... whether you want it to or not. Prepare as best
you can; hedge all bets, avoid those slow-maturing bonds, and keep
your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, because we are
going to be experiencing some turbulence.

Can anyone other than the Coca-Cola company sell Coca-Cola? Can anyone
other than the onwer of a house sell that house? Monopolists, every one of
them.

Sure, and irrelevant. Anyone can make Coca-Cola and sell it; they just
can't call it Coca-Cola unless they have the trademark. I'm fairly
sure the formula is only a trade secret, not a patent, so if you can
discover it you can probably use it, as long as you don't do something
like bribe or otherwise induce a Coca-Cola employee to breach a
confidentiality agreement or the like, or break wiretapping or
trespassing laws. Finding it out by dumpster-diving is probably
perfectly legal, assuming it's possible. Trial-and-error discovery of
a fizzy formula that tastes identical is certainly legal.

As for the house, nobody else can sell that house, but they can
probably legally build their own exact replica out of their own
pocket, and sell that. They can't build their own replica of IntelliJ
that way and sell it, even if the parts (a blank CD, some bandwidth,
some electricity) are paid for out of their own money. Therein lies
the difference.

 

[Mike Schilling]

Even then the original issue still stands. If IntelliJ is not
superior, wasting money on it instead of using a free IDE is silly. If
it is, the question arises of why Eclipse and/or NetBeans don't catch
up rapidly.

Presumably because a small software company whose income depends on software
sales is motivated to produce a superior product. A hardware company that
gives software away is not. If that disturbs you, feel free to move to
North Korea.

If it involves patents or circumventing encryption in ways
that may run afoul of the DMCA, then it means it's because IntelliJ's
makers have a bona fide monopoly. If it does not, then you might want
to consider carefully whether you want to spend money to line some fat
execs' pockets,

Not some talented developers' pockets? As I thought, you hate the profit
motive.

or instead spend some time improving the Eclipse or
NetBeans codebase to have equivalent functionality.

You've evidently never looked at the NetBeans codebase. It would be best
improved with gasoline and a match. At any rate, your notion that excellent
software can be produced in the spare time of a mob of people with no
specific expertise in the subject area shows, once again, that you're a
moron.

 

[Twisted]

as you say, PDF files [1], but PDF files that seem to represent
the chapters of a book. I'm mildly curious about this argument
you find so compelling, but not interested enough to read a book.
I don't suppose you'd care to point us to a shorter summary?

[1] Are PDF files really a potential security risk? Huh. I guess
it must be possible to embed more in them than I thought ....
<shrug>

Not that I'm aware of, but I'll vouch for these ones in particular
being apparently safe. I can also vouch that you can skim them or get
quite a lot from reading just part, and that it's not especially long.
In summary, though, there is strong evidence that so-called
"intellectual property" laws hinder innovation rather than aid it, and
aid only corporate rent-seeking, lining the pockets of various three-
piece suits and raising the cost of living for the little guy.
Consider that all that money, if it didn't line those expensive
pockets, would probably be spent regardless, but instead trickle down
to real laborers of various stripes. That's a lot of wage increases
and new jobs, along with a cost of living decrease, in a bundle also
known as "economic progress". That would include actual programmers,
who last time I checked are salaried employees or freelancers for the
most part and don't see a dime of any copyright royalties, and whose
fairly scarce skills ensure their employability for the foreseeable
future in this computer-rich civilization. Lack of copyright royalties
might mean some no longer work for certain big corporate behemoths,
but they'll have plenty of other opportunities, and their own costs
will have gone down. The ones that might be in dire straits are the
really awful ones Microsoft keeps hiring, who don't know their null
pointers from their NICs, but they really should not be working in the
field anyway, for the sake of our sanity. I'd be happy to see my last
ever "illegal operation" dialog that was due to some chimpanzee's
inability to recall that errno should be checked after calls to
hwMakeFooWidgetSocketConnection(); or at least the return value
checked for being null. Happier still to see the last one resulting
from a rhesus monkey forgetting that declaring "int a[1000];" followed
by stuffing a value in a[1000] is a Bad Idea(tm), and using "strcpy"
instead of "strncpy" and the like an even worse one. And don't get me
started on the IO functions that can suck an arbitrary amount of data
down and append it all to a 4096-byte array. Those are responsible for
fully half of all Windows exploits and a lot of common unix ones. All
by themselves. Some of the half-bad C code I've seen has shocked me
into wishing all network-facing code was written in Java, right down
to the last line. The worst C code I've seen has made me suspicious of
the wisdom of using C for anything except the kernel, some drivers, a
basic API layer to access these, a low-level debugging and recovery
tool, and a VM. With only root, and only when logged in at the
physical console, having access to any component outside of the VM.
Maybe on the computer system of the future...

 

[blmblm]

as you say, PDF files [1], but PDF files that seem to represent
the chapters of a book. I'm mildly curious about this argument
you find so compelling, but not interested enough to read a book.
I don't suppose you'd care to point us to a shorter summary?

[1] Are PDF files really a potential security risk? Huh. I guess
it must be possible to embed more in them than I thought ....
<shrug>

Not that I'm aware of,

Then why did you say, in your earlier post:

?

but I'll vouch for these ones in particular
being apparently safe. I can also vouch that you can skim them or get
quite a lot from reading just part, and that it's not especially long.

Call me lazy, but when I discover that the first chapter has
about 14 pages, I say -- "no, not that interested". So thanks
for summarizing below.

In summary, though, there is strong evidence that so-called
"intellectual property" laws hinder innovation rather than aid it, and
aid only corporate rent-seeking, lining the pockets of various three-
piece suits and raising the cost of living for the little guy.
Consider that all that money, if it didn't line those expensive
pockets, would probably be spent regardless, but instead trickle down
to real laborers of various stripes. That's a lot of wage increases
and new jobs, along with a cost of living decrease, in a bundle also
known as "economic progress".

Seems plausible. My feeling is that it shortchanges the people
who create "intellectual property", but -- <shrug>. The ease and
negligible cost with which many forms of intellectual property
can now be reproduced does seem to change things. I don't have
a preferred solution at this point.

That would include actual programmers,
who last time I checked are salaried employees or freelancers for the
most part and don't see a dime of any copyright royalties, and whose
fairly scarce skills ensure their employability for the foreseeable
future in this computer-rich civilization. Lack of copyright royalties
might mean some no longer work for certain big corporate behemoths,
but they'll have plenty of other opportunities, and their own costs
will have gone down.

Yeah, maybe. If it's impossible to copyright software and enforce
copyright protections -- I don't know. I used to work for a
little software company, so I'm fairly sympathetic to the argument
"how can we make money if we can't charge for the code we write?"
For me, the attraction of no-cost software is as much the lack
of irritating licensing restrictions as about not having to pay.
"YMMV", maybe.

The ones that might be in dire straits are the
really awful ones Microsoft keeps hiring, who don't know their null
pointers from their NICs, but they really should not be working in the
field anyway, for the sake of our sanity. I'd be happy to see my last
ever "illegal operation" dialog that was due to some chimpanzee's
inability to recall that errno should be checked after calls to
hwMakeFooWidgetSocketConnection(); or at least the return value
checked for being null.

Huh. I know a few people who've worked at Microsoft in technical
jobs, and they're smart folks, and they say the other technical
people there are equally bright people. I would therefore suspect
management pressure to get the products out the door rather than
programmer incompetence. But I could be wrong; the only way to
be sure is probably to look at source code. <shrug>

[ snip ]

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

In summary, though, there is strong evidence that so-called
"intellectual property" laws hinder innovation rather than aid it, and
aid only corporate rent-seeking, lining the pockets of various three-
piece suits and raising the cost of living for the little guy.

Imagine a world without software patents: would companies like Apple or
Microsoft be inclined to create OSs if they were guaranteed to make money
off of it? No matter what you say, people need money to live [1];
therefore they need to make money. People would not be inclined to
program if they were not compensated for it [2]; therefore a corporation
would have to find some means to pay for this talent (innovation is
included in my discussion). A corporation would be very bad off it had no
source of income, ergo they would have to charge money for software.

Now, the reason that corporations will bother investing in innovating at
all is that it would bring the prospect of more income. In a world
without patents, or IP rights, someone else could swoop in, take the hard-
wrought final product and go make money off of it. Look at problems in
China with so much scavenged software. IP rights, in summary, encourage
more companies not to scavenge but to truly foster innovation.

In short, intellectual property laws are necessary to some degree to aid
innovation (although, in the most predominant scenarios, they are
probably a little too strong).

[1] The only way money would become unnecessary is in a world without
scarcity, therefore money would need to exist no matter what economic
process a society is in.

[2] People will counter with OSS, but most OSS programmers tend to be
students not yet having to fully compensate themselves. Once these
programmers begin to enter the workforce, they tend to stop programming
on OSS.

 

[Mike Schilling]

[2] People will counter with OSS, but most OSS programmers tend to be
students not yet having to fully compensate themselves. Once these
programmers begin to enter the workforce, they tend to stop programming
on OSS.

Many OSS programmers are being paid foir it. That's also true of the core
developers of Eclipse and NetBeans, who are employees of IBM and Sun
respectively.

 

[Twisted]

[1] Are PDF files really a potential security risk? Huh. I guess
it must be possible to embed more in them than I thought ....
<shrug>

Not that I'm aware of,

Then why did you say, in your earlier post:

?

I know people can find PDF files annoying, and I know at least some
PDF files may contain evil DRM. I don't know if they can do worse,
although I do know a wide variety of browsers misbehave if you stumble
into a PDF file -- for example, IE will just lock up and sometimes
crash, sometimes eventually recover. Firefox will freeze for a short
while, with the stop button, other tabs, etc. all nonfunctional, but
invariably quickly recover. Most likely this behavior is actually bad
behavior of Adobe's plugin, combined with browsers that don't ensure
that plugins can't lock out the browser UI or crash the browser.
Judicious use of threading would have permitted Firefox to still work
while a plugin that was slow to load hogged a thread and didn't yield,
for example, and let users use the Stop button to abort loading the
plugin when they realized they'd hit a PDF link (leaving a blank page
to hit Back from, or Refresh if they decided to go ahead despite the
slow load).

I don't know what level of security risk pdfs pose though in practise
I think it's quite low, at least for non-IE-users.

Call me lazy, but when I discover that the first chapter has
about 14 pages, I say -- "no, not that interested". So thanks
for summarizing below.

No problem.

[snip]

Seems plausible. My feeling is that it shortchanges the people
who create "intellectual property", but -- <shrug>.

I find it likely the market would find ways to remunerate them, and
the people would find business models, suited to the internet age,
without ham-fisted regulation being needed.

The ease and negligible cost with which many forms of intellectual property
can now be reproduced does seem to change things. I don't have
a preferred solution at this point.

The important thing is that unlike some you appear to have an open
mind.

Yeah, maybe. If it's impossible to copyright software and enforce
copyright protections -- I don't know. I used to work for a
little software company, so I'm fairly sympathetic to the argument
"how can we make money if we can't charge for the code we write?"

Why couldn't they? They could say they could do such-and-such if
pledged some money, etc.; there's a lot of scope for work-for-hire
without copyright royalties. If someone needs particular code done
urgently they may be willing to pay a premium for it to be prioritized
instead of getting it for free "eventually". Other people won't be so
willing; but so long as someone pays, it's not like the work has to be
repeated for everyone else who wants to use the new feature. Once it's
done it's done and it's easy to copy. If nobody is willing to pay,
then it may be longer before someone with the programming talent does
something. But desired features lots of people want might end up
having a "bounty" on them, and talented coders with the right area of
knowledge might be able to collect those bounties. Needless to say
there might be a lot more freelance-type stuff and guns-for-hire and
less cubicle farms involved in programming within such an economic
environment. That might not be a bad thing. Cubicle farms might still
have their place, as a company could form a business model based on
organized bounty-hunting. I'll bet there'd even end up freelancers
moaning that all the best stuff is being snatched by businesses
instead of individual lone-wolf coders after a while. Of course,
narrow expertise would give you the pickings from some niche areas --
high-performance mathematical/numerical arcana for example, or
massively-parallel optimized code.

For me, the attraction of no-cost software is as much the lack
of irritating licensing restrictions as about not having to pay.
"YMMV", maybe.

Likewise. One important part of software freedom is not being locked
into dependence on the beneficence of a single vendor. Freeware
doesn't guarantee that freedom; open source as a rule does. Nor is
open source even automatically at odds with selling copies; as
mentioned earlier Red Hat makes a fair bit of money selling copies,
despite disavowing any copyright-type restrictions on a customer
turning right around and selling their own second-generation copies.
One company started doing exactly that, and Red Hat still outperforms
them financially, probably because they have a trusted and
recognizable brand and a first-mover advantage; copiers are always
playing catch-up, both on features or other changes to the product and
on the expertise used to deliver ancillary services such as support.
One area that will always be lucrative is selling genuine technical
support to those for whom the software is mission critical and it
costs them more money to wait for a helpful forum posting or their own
local geek brigade's eventually fixing a problem than it does to pay
an expert who's seen the same problem a thousand times and knows the
fix backwards and forwards. The code's author is the sort of expert
whose ancillary expertise will remain scarce and valuable, even if
copies of the code are abundant and cheap to the point of being
essentially free.

Also worth noting is that content of any kind works as a loss leader
to sell storage media, hosting capacity, bandwidth, etc. by making the
latter more valuable as people have more stuff to store or transmit.
Imagine buying all music rights and a large broadband ISP, then
charging by the gigabyte of transfer and allowing unlimited p2p music
sharing for your customers, subject to their paying their ISP bills on
time. Related post-copyright business models, where someone sells
bandwidth or storage space of some sort and pays content creators to
make it more valuable by giving away content, are a gold mine waiting
to be exploited.

Huh. I know a few people who've worked at Microsoft in technical
jobs, and they're smart folks, and they say the other technical
people there are equally bright people. I would therefore suspect
management pressure to get the products out the door rather than
programmer incompetence. But I could be wrong; the only way to
be sure is probably to look at source code. <shrug>

The source code is going to be shoddy either way. It might be partly
management pressure, but I suspect they also just hire any old person
who knows a C compiler from a carburetor and throws a lot of them into
a bunch of cubicles and circulates a set of requirements for the next
version of Winword; out pops something that manages to creak along
looking sort of like it knows what it's doing, on which marketing
slaps a pretty splash screen and a bunch of logos. It finally
compiled! -- Ship it!

If genuinely talented coders are there, they're probably living a
nightmare of terrible and confining management policies combined with
spending their time fixing bad coders' bugs.

I'm quite sure MS has loads of net-negative-producing coders on the
payroll, though. Maybe the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sees them
as charity cases or something and donates jobs?

 

[Twisted]

Imagine a world without software patents: would companies like Apple or
Microsoft be inclined to create OSs if they were guaranteed to make money
off of it? No matter what you say, people need money to live [1];
therefore they need to make money. People would not be inclined to
program if they were not compensated for it [2]; therefore a corporation
would have to find some means to pay for this talent (innovation is
included in my discussion). A corporation would be very bad off it had no
source of income, ergo they would have to charge money for software.

Explain how open source can thrive then. Linux is an OS that was
developed without the traditional guarantees of remuneration. Despite
which Linus Torvalds is filthy rich these days. Obviously the
invisible hand has ways of making products and remunerating labor
without requiring shackling information in chains. Those who think
copyrights or (worse) software patents are necessary grossly
underestimate the power of a free market.

Now, the reason that corporations will bother investing in innovating at
all is that it would bring the prospect of more income. In a world
without patents, or IP rights, someone else could swoop in, take the hard-
wrought final product and go make money off of it. Look at problems in
China with so much scavenged software.

China has problems alright. It has a booming economy these days,
rapidly developing industries, a gradually improving political
outlook, and military might enough to be a contender for co-superpower
versus the United States Real Soon Now. I'd say they have a big
problem with growing pains. I suppose shackling information in chains
might make that problem go away. Giving everyone in the world an
abortion would get rid of labor pains too -- as well as H. sapiens,
once the existing generations grew old and died. Does it seem like a
very good idea despite this?

IP rights, in summary, encourage more companies not to scavenge but to truly foster innovation.

But a healthy ecosystem needs scavengers, and all kinds of other
safety valves against becoming brittle. Scavengers never get the first
pickings, which balances their advantages with disadvantages; they
don't get a free lunch as they never get the first-mover advantage.

[2] People will counter with OSS, but most OSS programmers tend to be
students not yet having to fully compensate themselves. Once these
programmers begin to enter the workforce, they tend to stop programming
on OSS.

This has already been rebutted in another post by a different author.
I see no reason to repeat what has already been said.

 

[Malcolm Dew-Jones]

Joshua Cranmer ([email protected]) wrote:
: On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 03:07:38 +0000, Twisted wrote:
: > In summary, though, there is strong evidence that so-called
: > "intellectual property" laws hinder innovation rather than aid it, and
: > aid only corporate rent-seeking, lining the pockets of various three-
: > piece suits and raising the cost of living for the little guy.

: Imagine a world without software patents: would companies like Apple or
: Microsoft be inclined to create OSs if they were guaranteed to make money
: off of it?

Apple started by making hardware. The hardware would have been useless if
they had not provided some kind of OS, so if they wanted to make money
selling their hardware they would always have had a strong inclination to
create an OS for it.

It might be true that if people had been allowed to steal ideas from
Apple's OS then Apple would not have been inclined to improve it after the
initial version was created. But on the other hand, if anyone else had a
better idea of how to use Apple hardware then Apple themselves would have
been free to steal those ideas to put them back into the original Apple
OS, which would represent a cheap way to improve their own software -
which would leave them inclined to do the improvements after all.

I don't see it's cut and dried that Apple would not have created their OS
even if they knew the ideas in it could be stolen.

 

[blmblm]

On Jun 24, 2:57 pm, (e-mail address removed) <[email protected]> wrote:

[ snip ]

I know people can find PDF files annoying, and I know at least some
PDF files may contain evil DRM. I don't know if they can do worse,
although I do know a wide variety of browsers misbehave if you stumble
into a PDF file -- for example, IE will just lock up and sometimes
crash, sometimes eventually recover. Firefox will freeze for a short
while, with the stop button, other tabs, etc. all nonfunctional, but
invariably quickly recover. Most likely this behavior is actually bad
behavior of Adobe's plugin, combined with browsers that don't ensure
that plugins can't lock out the browser UI or crash the browser.
Judicious use of threading would have permitted Firefox to still work
while a plugin that was slow to load hogged a thread and didn't yield,
for example, and let users use the Stop button to abort loading the
plugin when they realized they'd hit a PDF link (leaving a blank page
to hit Back from, or Refresh if they decided to go ahead despite the
slow load).

Huh. Firefox on the Linux systems I use sometimes just displays
a blank page for PDF files. I misremember whether this happens
only when using Adobe's reader or is sometimes a problem when
using one of the comes-with-the-system PDF browsers [1]. On one
of the systems I use, it seems to have helped to configure things
so the PDF reader always pop up a new window rather than trying
to display in the browser window. Probably not the optimal
solution, but okay for now.

[1] Two that I know of. This is a Unix-like system, after all.

[ snip further discussion of intellectual property and how
to compensate programmers ]

Snipped because of lack of time to think further about it right
now. I came across the following link in another newsgroup,
though, which seems to contain an interesting summary, including a
proposal for what sounds to me like an irritating "solution" (ads):

http://www.invece.org/article/financing.html

"FWIW", maybe.

[ snip ]

I'm quite sure MS has loads of net-negative-producing coders on the
payroll, though. Maybe the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation sees them
as charity cases or something and donates jobs?

Curious. Microsoft has a reputation for having a very tough
interview process for programmers. But of course that doesn't
necessarily mean they hire only the competent.

 

[Twisted]

Huh. Firefox on the Linux systems I use sometimes just displays
a blank page for PDF files. I misremember whether this happens
only when using Adobe's reader or is sometimes a problem when
using one of the comes-with-the-system PDF browsers [1]. On one
of the systems I use, it seems to have helped to configure things
so the PDF reader always pop up a new window rather than trying
to display in the browser window. Probably not the optimal
solution, but okay for now.

Adobe is evil and its software is crap. (Sounds like another software
company that casts a somewhat larger shadow for non-Mac-users, hmm?)

[ snip further discussion of intellectual property and how
to compensate programmers ]

Snipped because of lack of time to think further about it right
now. I came across the following link in another newsgroup,
though, which seems to contain an interesting summary, including a
proposal for what sounds to me like an irritating "solution" (ads):

http://www.invece.org/article/financing.html

"FWIW", maybe.

Ads, schmads. Ads are going to go the way of the dodo in a decade at
most. Narrowcast, foo-on-demand, smart client devices, users being in
charge of their own client devices, and filtering capabilities will
kill any kind of advertising that isn't either interesting content in
its own right or embedded plugs and product placements. The latter
will, if too blatant, damage the host content's rating on the peer
review based charts, and it won't make the top forty that week or any
week. (We already have the beginnings of this. Firefox with Adblock.
Rotten Tomatoes and other sites with crowdsourced movie ratings.)

The only thing that can save the traditional commercial is the
imposition by fiat of "trusted computing", i.e. taking our computers
away from us and renting the functionality back at ridiculous prices,
or at minimum "a government/Hollywood cabal owns root on all boxes;
everyone else, regardless of if they paid for and own the physical
hardware, is a mere unprivileged user". I find it unlikely the forces
pushing for that nightmare can prevail in the end. Putting region and
"UOP" restrictions in DVD players provoked consumer backlashes and
griping; reaching into our general-purpose computers to impose similar
restrictions would provoke a broad-based revolt by IT professionals
and serious non-professional computer users alike. (Microsoft's put
some evil stuff like that into Windows Vista. At last report, Windows
Vista is not selling very well, and those statistics fail to take
account of those who try it and then reinstall Windoze XP, counting
them as one more Vista convert. Contrast the rapid uptake of Windows
95, and later of Windoze XP despite the controversy over WPA.)

One other form of ad will survive, besides an ad that's entertaining
in its own right and an embedded plug. That will be the classified ad,
where people specifically go when they want information about things
for sale, and can be considered to include online things like
sponsored links at Google and sites like Craigslist and eBay. (Google
AdWords is another matter. It will die, though not quite yet.
Sponsored links on the other hand appear while you're searching for
something rather than getting in your way when your goal is something
other than search, and, if they are relevant to the user's search,
they may remain successful indefinitely.)

Curious. Microsoft has a reputation for having a very tough
interview process for programmers.

How did you think they kept out the ones that know what they're doing?
The ones that would spot code that was there just to make Netscape or
(these days) Google Desktop Search perform poorly, or win.exe not work
with 4Dos and PCDos (ok, maybe before your time), or whatever and blow
the whistle to the media, or would spend all their time fixing bugs
and thereby denying the Microsoft Support side of the operation
revenue, or would make Notepad so efficient and useful that nobody
would shell out for Word anymore, or would fix some of the dumber
algorithm choices like Explorer's frequent use of bubble-sort and
other quadratic-time algorithms, thereby causing Microsoft to fail its
under-the-table obligations to Intel to force people to buy ever-
faster CPUs in exchange for kickbacks?

Let's face it -- Microsoft does not want to produce quality software.
If they did, with their money they could surely manage it and yet they
do not. Therefore they obviously don't want to. Quality software is
easy for the competition to interoperate with. It's easy for users to
avoid paying your support department if the software simply works. If
the built-in abilities don't suck they compete with your own paid add-
ons. Hardware manufacturers pay you to make your software gratuitously
slow and bloated, and pay a lot more than your customers do. The
entertainment industry pays you to cripple it in other ways*, and pays
a lot more than your customers do.

* Disclaimer: documented in the case of Zune-related goings-on. Not
proven in connection with Vista misfeatures. Yet.

 

[blmblm]

[ snip ]

How did you think they kept out the ones that know what they're doing?

Dumb luck, maybe, since the reputation is for asking questions that
reveal general smarts and an ability to think on one's feet?
I suppose, though, that those characteristics don't necessarily
correlate with ability to write good code.

Just out of curiosity, are you basing your opinions on the quality
of the products Microsoft ships (based on how they behave), or on
acquaintance with some of their technical employees?

The ones that would spot code that was there just to make Netscape or
(these days) Google Desktop Search perform poorly, or win.exe not work
with 4Dos and PCDos (ok, maybe before your time),

Yes and no:

"Yes" in the sense that my exposure to anything produced by
Microsoft only goes back to 1980-something, and I've rarely been
in circumstances in which I was working mostly in a DOS/Windows
environment. The Microsoft-versus-others wars you describe --
nope, I wasn't really aware of them.

"No" in the sense that I've been working with computers of some
sort (mostly mainframes/minis/workstations) since 1970-something.
(That background undoubtedly explains a lot about my taste in
tools. I *am* willing to agree that moving from punched cards
to terminals with text editors was an improvement, and that
full-screen text editors are an improvement over line editors.
Beyond that the "advances" start to seem a little iffier. Sort of
a . )

[ snip ]

 

[Twisted]

"No" in the sense that I've been working with computers of some
sort (mostly mainframes/minis/workstations) since 1970-something.
(That background undoubtedly explains a lot about my taste in
tools. I *am* willing to agree that moving from punched cards
to terminals with text editors was an improvement, and that
full-screen text editors are an improvement over line editors.
Beyond that the "advances" start to seem a little iffier. Sort of
a . )

Well, apropos of a certain other thread, I have the opinion that
having a proper folder view (especially with the tree) when browsing,
opening, and saving files is to full-screen text editors as tab-
completion on a one-line prompt is to line editors. So there. ;P