| Richest man in the world: Free Culture advocates = Commies | |
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Bubu - Hubbub  |
Bill Gates Interview The good part: Q: In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed? A: No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist. _______________ make install -not war This post was edited by Bubu on Jan 06 2005 06:48pm. |
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| Comments |
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Rosales - Student |
if you touch my sh!t y will hunt you down b!tch... _______________ yo soy rosales |
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JavaGuy - Student 
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Microsoft belongs in Crazy Stuff.  _______________ My signature is only one line. You're welcome. |
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Squibit - Student 
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wow javaguy, that was very impressive. Has a post ever been moved FROM the crazy forum TO the general forum before?  _______________ Quote: fiZZe: its SIR Fizzy Fluffy :p Quote: FiZZ[JAK]: that was what I call a counter Ah, things you only ever expect to hear once
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delta - Student 
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w00teh! JavaGuy for dictator! _______________ ~Dav Proud Former Padawan of 3th |
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Bubu - Hubbub 
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Couldn't have said it better myself. And this on the crazy forum! JavaGuy for president! _______________ make install -not war |
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3th - Retired 
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here here! _______________ this is the internet, be serious damn it! |
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JavaGuy - Student 
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Speaking as a software engineer, I too think that Gates is wrong, and I agree that he thinks every scrap of code should carry a royalty payable to Microsoft. Let me begin by noting my own personal biases: I do believe in property rights, intellectual and otherwise. I am not any kind of Communist/Socialist/any-other-kind-of-collectivist; au contraire I'm more of a libertarian/Conservative, as those who follow the political threads can attest. I am not a fan of Microsoft, but I believe that most specific criticisms of Microsoft that I hear stem from simple envy rather than from anything bad MS has done. I do have good things to say about MS (though not many). It is ironic that Gates should take such a position. MS has lots of technologies that are proprietary to it and that it would scream bloody murder if anyone else incorporated them into his own software. Yet MS was founded on an operating system and later a group of core software applications that have, at their core, a bunch of algorithms and techniques developed over the years by coders who certainly got no royalties from Microsoft. Somebody show me just one canceled chec k where Gates paid somebody a royalty for the Quicksort algorithm. Looking at the jazz analogy, you could argue that this is like asking if a musician playing a simple scale has to pay a royalty to someone for it. At the one end of the spectrum a musician plays a single note that has been played by another musician before. At the other end of the spectrum he reproduces a complex composition, note for note. Moving up from the simple end of the spectrum, he might borrow chords and short phrases from other works--this is inevitable because there are a finite number of notes. At what point do we draw the line and say, "On this side of the line you are simply using long-established techniques available to everyone, and on that side of the line you are a plagurist?" The question is the same for software. Well as both a software engineer and a musician, I humbly submit that the line should be drawn a bit beyond the simplest algorithm or phrase of music. The answer Gates seems to want for that question is that anything new, especially if developed by MS, should be proprietary and off-limits to everyone. But Quicksort was new once. The very idea of database tables, columns and constraints was brand new once, and continues to revolutionize the world--nor is this a "simple" idea like a short musical phrase, but a very complex group of interrelated ideas about relational databases that MS certainly did not invent but uses in its SQL Server technologies. Gates argument for property rights is that without property rights we have the Tragedy of the Commons and no proper incentives to work or innovate. I agree, if we're talking about property rights as a matter of principle. But the open-source movement he so despises does respect property rights and, in fact, introduces a whole new set of economic incentives to innovate and produce. Gates' objection to it is that he personally is not receiving a check for it (it doesn't help that Linux is a better, cheaper and more secure OS than anything MS is ever likely to produce). Gates himself has seen this before. Netscape captured most of the browser market by giving away its browser for free. Then Netscape cried like a baby when MS started giving away IE "for free" with Windows and recaptured much of the market. (In retrospect, look how silly that whole argument is--can you imagine an OS that doesn't come bundled with a browser today? And the Justice Department attorneys had absolutely no clue how the software worked, that IE is essentially a collection of components that are integral parts of the OS anyway, nor could it be explained to them once their minds were sealed by the caulking of ideology.) Despite finding himself on the wrong end of that stick, Gates now complains about "free" software. Well gimme a break. There are property rights in the open-source movement...it has even spawned lawsuits. Ever actually read the open-source software license? As one guru put it, when you hear "free software," think free speech, not free beer. The licensing is pretty restrictive, but it also allows, even encourages you to do things that the "old style" license did not allow. There are plenty of proprietary Linux distributions, and though I believe they all have a free download as well there doesn't seem to be any shortage of money to be made there. And yes, there's an economic incentive to work on open-source stuff: A line on your resume that says "Wrote X percent of the code for blah-blah-blah..." The new Firefox browser was written by about a dozen people or so (compare to the army of MS zombies who worked on IE). Imagine the salaries any one of those people can now command. The bottom line is that we're entering new territory. I've given it a lot of thought, and I mean a lot of thought, and still do not know exactly how intellectual property rights should be defined, except that I do believe we should have strong intellectual property rights, probably based on strong, strictly enforced contract law. And I do not believe Gates' idea of owning every jot of new code is the model--again, I don't see him writing any royalty checks for Quicksort or for database constraints. Communists? Gimme a break. _______________ My signature is only one line. You're welcome. |
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tarpman - The Tarped Avenger 
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DISCLAIMER: I lean quite strongly to the left wing and completely disagree with capitalism; by many definitions, I am a Communist. I play jazz. I also listen to jazz, to the great jazz musicians like Miles Davis and Bill Evans. Jazz artists have been sharing and using each others' ideas and work from the very beginning and still do. Most improvised jazz solos include at least one passage quoted from another player's solo, or even the melody from a different song. Most jazz players improve their listening skills by learning to play melodies composed by other people and other artists' improvised solos simply from recordings. Does any of this cost money? No. Rather, it contributes to the growing richness of material available to draw on for inspiration when composing a new song or when ad-libbing a solo. Bill Gates wants this to not happen - not for jazz specifically, but in most fields this analogy could apply to. He wants every bit of quoted or transcribed content to carry a royalty, preferably paid to Microsoft. IMO Open Source is the future of computing and Microsoft is a company like any other, interested far more in profit than in contributing to the growth and/or well-being of the customers and the material itself. _______________ Saving the world, one kilobyte at a time. |
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