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Re: [ox-en] Germ of a new form of society or germ of a new form of business?



On Sun, Feb 01, 2004 at 06:03:47PM -0000, Niall Douglas wrote:
What happens when a fix to a security weakness requires breaking the
ABI?

I know this is possible but I can't think of an example off the top of
my head when this happened. In any case, this is not a problem unique
to GNU/Linux. Microsoft has to protect against, and in some situation
deal with, the same thing.

Sure, if a company steals your work and markets it ruthlessly you
have a right to be bothered, but a company could also integrate your
work and return enhancements it makes back to the communal
fold. It's too easy to see dragons everywhere and worse, to scare
people into thinking there are more dragons than there are.

[examples snipped]
All of these are based on the idea of selling software licenses and
restricting access to software as the only way to make money from
software and to make development profitable enough to support. I think
this is just uncreative.

This will sound condescending but - have you ever read any economics 
books?

It is condescending. I've read many books about economics on many
levels and from many perspectives. 

Spent time around entrepreneurs?

Yes. I'm currently working as upper management in a one-year-old Free
Software company. I've worked doing project management in quite a few
new companies as well. I've even been an entrepreneur myself once or
twice.

If there was really any money in free software economics, you can be
sure they'd be piling in there. They're not, therefore there isn't.

That's silly!

Entrepreneurs support bad ideas -- sometimes en mass -- and fail to
support good ideas for both good and bad reasons and for all lengths
of time. Your idea of determining good ideas versus bad ideas (in
absolute terms, no less) based on where the folks starting businesse
happen to be (or, as the case usually is, where the venture capital
is) is ridiculous.

This is not a culture immune to fads. You seem to have forgotten the
way that only a few years ago, money and entrepreneurs alike flocked
to anything with a .com its name and an IPO on the horizon. Did you
ever really believe that selling dog food online *really* worth
uncountable millions?

More importantly, as time passes, people find new ways to
commercialize technologies and business methods and to work in
different situations. A decade after the invention of printing, the
press was still being used as a "automatic scriptorium" to print
bibles and the odd indulgence. Fact is, the really revolutionary uses
for that technical hadn't been figured out yet. Linux is about a
decade old and the the GPL has enjoyed a lot less time than that in
the business world's spotlight.

That said, I've been able to be creative enough to pay myself to
produce GPL'd software for the last half decade.

FreeBSD is a better Unix on a technical level (which is why I used
"superior").

Which technical level is that? I just looked for technical comparisons
of the two and couldn't come up with anything that wasn't pure
marketing material or propaganda. I can think of quite a few things
that Linux does a lot better than FreeBSD (or that FreeBSD doesn't do
at all!).

Where's the proprietising if you don't alter the original?

Taking my freely available non-proprietary piece of software and
restricting people's freedom to use it as they wish, change if they
like and distribute it, and its modified versions, to their friends is
proprietarization.

How can it be that the identical binary DLL is being "stolen" just
because of what links to it?

Dynamic linking is, for all intents and purposes, just like taking a
given library, or bits of pieces of it, and including it in your
application. You link to a library because you don't want to write
that code yourself. Static linking, something that's only a compiler
flag difference from dynamic linking, will actually include the
library code into your binary. I shouldn't have to explain this all to
you.

I've got my own worries about using a software license to protect
against linking but they have more to do with similarities I see with
interface copyright.

Regards,
Mako

-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako debian.org
http://mako.yukidoke.org/



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