On 8/26/07, Ed Leafe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Funny that you're using the 'crime' argument while talking about a > company that has single-handedly had to pay more in settlements for > them breaking intellectual property laws than all other companies > combined. >
MS (and most everyone else) knows there's some pirating of their code going on. They have used it as a way to beat out the competition and then tighten up on the rules to get folks to buy the upgrades. "First hit's free" is the name of the marketing scheme, I think. AutoDesk beat up GM pretty badly over pirated AutoCADs a while ago. I don't have a problem with this, and GM ought to pay up. I don't believe we have any software here we haven't a legitimate paid-up license for. I believe most business are pretty scrupulous about this. And, yes, we all have an anecdote about that numskull former client or former boss who stole software or electricity or something else. There will always be thieves. You hope they get theirs in the end. To everyone who's asked if I have every been robbed or mugged or had my car or house broken into: yes. (I've been shot at and even depth-charged, too.) Equating physical property with intellectual property is a lazy way out of this discussion. The former are criminal offenses. Prior to DMCA, the latter were civil matters of copyright and contractual violation. Equating the two is a stretch. In the first, a thief takes a possesion away so you can no longer use it. In the second, a consumer uses a item in violation of an agreement that the user may or may not have agreed to, and may or may not have had any choice to agree to; a coerced agreement is rarely a legitimate one. And dragging in open source is equally lazy. This isn't some idiotic argument about "everything ought to be free." Apache is free for the download. IIS comes with the purchase of a license (or two or three, and maybe CALs) for a Windows server product. That's the marketplace and there's nothing wrong with that. There's lots of for-pay open source models, and many of them are doing well. The open source "gifting" economy and the proprietary software economy are competing models, and both probably benefit from the other. Competition is good. Don't throw the open source red herring in here. What's bad is Digital Restriction Management that prevents you from using your machine and your software to get your job done. If I'm at 35,000 feet going cross-country with my laptop when it decides I have to contact the vendor to re-validate my license. Or my vendor's servers are inaccessible and I'm without the product. Ten thousand years from now, alien archeologists will visit the cratered remains of planet Earth and be unable to read our proprietary undocumented Visio formatted files because they can't get their product key to validate. Seems a shame, but probably won't be that great a loss. Just last weekend, I bought a PDF from the Pragmatic Bookshelf imprint. They generate the PDF on the fly, and the bottom of every page says something like "Prepared exclusively for Ted Roche." Good motivation not to share, for me, as Stephen notes, others are not as motivated. (I recall getting a school report a few years ago that said EXPIRED EVALUATION COPY at the top and bottom of every page. When I asked, I was told "it always said that." Man!). Anyway, I tried this PDF on my Linux box under evince, and didn't like the fonts. I tried in on Windows using Acrobat Reader 8, and I tried in on the iMac under Tiger. I saved it to my home directory on the network so I could access it from whatever machine I happened to me on at the time. I use it like a book: Only I have access to it. If the team all needed to simultaneously use the book, I'd buy them all copies. If we wanted a copy as a corporate reference, I'd check with the publisher about a site license. What I appreciated was the trust the vendor gave in me to let me mess with the PDF on various platforms, displays and font settings. I wasn't locked out. I had the freedom to use the media in the way that was best for me. At the same time, I respected the publisher's right to prominently display the fact that this book was not freely distributable. I have no problem paying for things of value. As an author, I appreciate when others feel the same way. This isn't about free the price, it's about free as in freedom. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
