On 2012/10/03 02:01, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Tuesday, 2. October 2012. 18.52.10 jdow wrote:
On 2012/10/02 13:17, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
On Tuesday, 2. October 2012. 20.56.34 Roberto Ragusa wrote:
On 10/02/2012 03:45 PM, Alan Cox wrote:
Another factor is that the drivers may contain a lot of clever stuff. A
long time back one of the problems raised was that vendor A had the
better hardware but vendor B the better drivers. Vendor B's product won
all the benchmarks. If they open sourced it then vendor A would duly
have
borrowed all the software tricks and then won hands down.
So final users would have had the best hardware running the best drivers
(open source too).
This is something which must not be permitted to happen. :-/
That is one of the features of civilization based on capitalism --- the
target is to gain most money, and to make life miserable for the
competition. The actual needs of the end-users are completely irrelevant,
as long as your product sells more than the competitor's product. ;-)
Without the capitalism the customer can expect zero improvement,
particularly with hardware. What incentive would I as a person trying to
make a living off clever video drivers to continue doing so? How would I
put food on my table?
[snip rant about Communism]
How about government funding? There is a tried&tested scenario used for some
time now all over the world, say in science. For example:
Then you get what the government says you will want not what you do want.
We saw that in Soviet Russia as a very glaring example.
* You need money, and you have some skill to do something better than others.
* You apply for a research&development project; if you have a good idea, you
get a grant.
Is this how you'd start Google, Twitter, or Facebook? My, how quaint.
* You use your knowledge to do something creative and useful. You share the
results of your work with everyone else (you're being paid by taxpayer money,
so this is fair).
Am I paid MORE if I produce something creative, whether or not the
government wants it? How about if customers want it and the government
does not, especially if the government does not want it?
* You apply for the next R&D project, and the next, and the next... You build
reputation according to your performance, and in time get bigger grants,
bigger money, etc.
You only get funding for what the government has declared the citizens
want. Can you imagine an iPhone designed by a government? My imagination
is not that strong.
* As a side-effect, you also get fame&glory (if you did something very useful),
respect by other people, etc., which can be a strong non-financial motivation
to continue to do even better.
Fame and glory is fun. Food is more important.
I *LIKE* the idea of sharing knowledge. But that like bruised its nose
and boobs when it ran head on into reality.
This scenario is not optimized to make most money, but to make best quality
products. Others can build on your work and your knowledge, and you can build
on theirs. It's a model which promotes cooperation instead of competition.
No, sir, it is optimized to produce what the commissars declare you will
build. And commissars seem to have a lamentable disconnect with the people
they own.
Similar ideas work in the FOSS model for software development. ;-)
Yeah, I've noticed. Why does FOSS critically lag with regards to what
the general public wants? Why isn't the desktop experience in Linux
NEAR as rich and good as on Macs or Windows machines? They're playing
catch up in most cases, particularly where there is an incentive to
keep information private because you can please more customers (and
make more income THAT way) than sharing the information. It's only in
the afterthoughts like email and browser features that Mozilla can
do a little better. (The only reason I use Mozilla is that it has
slightly better mail sorting capabilities. I'm too lazy to do that
with procmail or alternatives.)
If I know how to do something that people really want and can live
comfortably on what I can earn doing this, by what right does anybody
come in and tell me I have to share my know how with all and sundry
so that I'm stuck cold and hungry because I can no longer earn money
performing my unique service? That is the foundation if the concept of
intellectual property.
Umm, no, what you are describing is called a "trade secret". And it is
completely ok, even necessary, to have trade secrects in the free market
scenario (as opposed to the government-funded R&D scenario that I described
above, where trade secrets are disfavored and disfunctional).
Do you realize that you are contradicting your screed above? Video driver
software IS trade secret information, Kemo Sabe.
OTOH, "intellectual property" is the scenario where you tell everyone else
your trade secret, and then require everyone not to use that information for
their benefit, or otherwise you'll sue them in court or require them to pay you
royalties. I see no reason for that to exist, other than making more money
based on the abuse of the current legal system.
Information property is what you hold or control that others don't hold
or control. Trade secrets are information property, especially when
estimating the market value for a corporation. Often they are more
important than patents or copyrights. (And as a society, both the US and
the world, we are patenting and copyrighting things that never should be
patented or placed under copyright protection. But that is another rant.
This rant is about my giant urge to live well on the results of hard work.
I have tossed a few "throw-aways" into public domain or <shudder> GPL.
The Amiga File System partition parsing software in the Linux kernel
owes a fair amount to my work. I needed it for myself and it was easier
to have it in the kernel than to patch it in every time a new kernel
came around. Sharing it saved me time for other work that made money.)
{^_^}
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