RMS on evil developers, spying social networks, the legitimacy of Anonymous
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The way I see it, games are much like an interactive film. It's an experience someone has personally created for us. It's more of an art than a computer program. I'm aware of open source games, but I wonder how an open source model would affect a game like Battlefield 3? Cheating would surely be rampant. I certainly do not expect Terabytes of data when I watch a film so I can make the changes I want, nor do I expect sheet music when I buy an album. Games are as much of an art as music & films.
What about consoles? They are viciously protected from custom modifications. I don't agree with this, I believe it's our hardware and we should be allowed to do as we wish (hey Microsoft, blowing fuses in my NVRAM without telling me is really not cool).
Text: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-versus-community.htm...
Search for "I distinguish three broad categories of works".
Not at all, as it is anybody can modify the game binaries in the same way they would modify the source code (albeit with more difficulty).
Cheating is prevented by having a central server validate all client actions for consistency, or in games without a simulation server (Starcraft II) having clients compare a game state hash and disconnect if they differ.
Client side cheating (Wallhacks, Aimbots) are not preventable without a locked down client, open source or not.
It's easier to trust a "cheating hack" if it comes as a source code patch or the source code is readily available. If I was so inclined to cheat, I certainly would not trust a strange patch/executable from some shadowy figure I knew nothing about.
Technology will eventually solve such problems (thin clients or fully homomorphic encryption) but these have serious issues of their own.
You can easily prevent wallhacks; just don't tell clients information they shouldn't display to the user, such as the positions of players the user can't currently see.
Also you may be able to hear the person behind the wall , for (even though it may only be a very quiet sound from the other character walking slowly). The client application will need a location in order to play the sound correctly, this information could be used to make a wallhack.
The other alternative would be to pre-prepare all sound on the server and stream it to the client , but this would put extra stress on the server and more demand on bandwidth.
If the data was received encrypted, you could have a relatively small decryption key sent when necessary, thus solving the "prefetch from server" problem.
If the model files were broken up into chunks and xored with each other in various ways, and saved in a redundant manner, I could imagine that there is a setup in which there are a combinatorially large number of possible ways to fetch a set of blocks which reconstruct a given model, and if you prefetch a few red-herrings as well, it would be infeasible to determine which model you are loading based just on the commands the sever sent you on which blocks to load. Then, when the time comes, they send a very short command which tells you which blocks to use and how to reconstruct the model. Hmm... but now I'm thinking about it, I think you'd need a large overhead in both directions to make it difficult to just match the patterns of which blocks you used.
Online games always walk a tightrope between performance and security. The currently popular model seems to be to optimise the game for performance but use a second program to verify that the client code has not been modified.
Of course you then have to make sure the anti-cheat is not modified itself. I have to say though that cheating is not a big apparent problem in most online games that I have played. Most cheating problems are in older games that have not been updated in some time.
I haven't seen RMS address that either; I think his views would be interesting.
Also, the home page for BOINC (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/) says it's open source.
The FAQ states they decided to make the code proprietary "for security reasons and for science reasons as well".
See Stallman's Reddit AMA (#7): http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html
Essentially, he thinks that the production quality associated with studio games is not worth the sacrifice in user freedom. Your point about games being much like film is an interesting one. Elsewhere in the AMA, he says that he doesn't consider proprietary software that controls, eg, a microwave, to be unethical as it's functionally indistinct from hardware. Now, with some games (cough BF3) being functionally indistinct from movies, it would be interesting to know whether he believes those, too, are unethical. My guess is yes, as there are many things like DRM and data collection going on behind the scenes that the FSF is opposed to.
I think RMS sees that as a loophole in the GPL rather than a desirable feature. Hence the existence of the AGPL.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/index_html
We recommend that people consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network
As for how this affects commercial innovation, I don't know. [Added:] I guess, the point is that human rights (according to RMS, proprietary software restricts freedom) are more important than innovation.
I don't have a solution, wish I did.
And even in the short term this is pretty much just plain wrong. Almost all GPL software is written by people paid to develop GPL software.
RMS is not proposing an increase in productivity, he's proposing a massive disincentive to engaging in one of the most productive, highest growth industries in the world's history.
"Over time, those freed from obsolete jobs are employed by society to do new stuff ...and we all benefit."
These jobs aren't obsolete. It's not like the same software will get done if all these people stop working and go do "new stuff". We just wouldn't get those advancements and would suffer greatly not benefit.
If every software was Free we'd eliminate plenty of redundant work.
You say tomato, I say tomato...
Seriously: if you were explaining to a space alien what the distinction was, how would you do it? The only one I can see is all the subtle connotations of the adjectives and superlatives you chose to throw in.
I mean, the automobile was a "massive disincentive" to the horse breeding industry too. The gun put a ton of blacksmiths out of work. And secretaries and typists were an awfully big part of the world economy in the recent past too... All those people (figuratively -- really the fraction of the workforce they represented) are now doing other stuff like building web apps. And the world is a better place.
"Productivity" is a quantifiable metric. Either you pay programmers to duplicate effort or you don't. In the latter case, productivity is higher by definition, and no amount of adjectives is going to change that fact.
I see little evidence that open source leads to a reduction in duplicate effort.
The freedom to combine with another program _temporarily_ while you bootstrap something better improves productivity significantly.
And the world before GCC had a great many commercial compilers. Many of the crap. GCC replaced almost all the crap ones, so that only free compilers and a few commercial compilers that were good enough to offer something over GCC existed.
That's not what I'm talking about. Free software doesn't just kill duplicate effort. Free software kills the original effort that is there to be duplicated. You're saying "well all the unproductive leeches will go do something else". What actually happens is all the productive people go and do something else too.
If you fix the price of automobiles at zero, you don't get an automobile revolution that puts horse breeders out of business. You get an artificially created dark age while you wait a few extra decades for hobbyists to create the model t.
Another example are companies which rely on other things besides per-copy licensing; Red Hat is a good example.
If there were no copyright for film, you'd still have films being made for various reasons (hobbyists, educational, propaganda, vanity, advertising, etc.) but there's no way you'd see stuff like Avatar get financed.
Reasonable analogies do have limits that it pays not to overextend them. Software itself has more direct and inarguable benefits then film: the software equivalents of Avatar save lives in our world and many of them wouldn't exist in RMS's utopia.
Ultimately I think this is just a bad analogy.
Once more you're making a distinction that seems meaningless to me. How does one kill "original effort" and what on earth would it mean to do so? My guess is that you mean that it kills off the profits gotten from the rights to software that has already been written; in which case I can only suggest you google "rent seeking" for the thoughts of smart economists on the issue.
Using free software means that fewer people need to be paid to develop software. And over time the market will put them to work doing something else. (Note carefully that I'm avoiding loaded terms like "leeches" which you seem to be so enthused about using.) That's just macro economics 101. Do you really disagree?
OK, you lost me. How exactly the possibility of rendering your software proprietary enhanced in any way at all productivity in software ?
Just a warning : I don't accept metrics based on how much money you extract from others, or how much people work behind a keyboard. What matters is how the lives of the people actually improved thanks to proprietary software.
My guess is not much at all. If I recall correctly, the most crucial innovations where mostly public research work.
You can. You don't have to unless external forces constrain you to.
Socially, an expectation is being created that useful software is without monetary charge. I would like the readers to extrapolate from this what happens as more users expect gratis software.
If I was running a business, I would use 100% gratis software unless a really compelling reason otherwise was presented. As a software engineer, I usually recommend gratis software for most things... it works great! Why should I pay Microsoft/Oracle/etc when gratis software works so well? This means that non-gratis software companies (and their developers) are simply not receiving my dollars.
Unfortunately us, we as software developers have to pay the bills, and gratis software is, well, gratis.
Arguably, we can assume that software developers will continue to invent new and shinier things, useful to all, which people will pay for. But "past performance is no predictor of future performance", as stock prospectuses like saying, and I believe that to be a great statement about our industry. Who could have predicted the fall in 15 years of mainframes in 1970 [1]?
I think that a viable business model for AGPL3 software still needs to come into fruition besides consulting/SaaS.
Let's personalize this: I own a Macbook Pro, and have paid $0.00 for software on it; I use it probably 80% of the time I'm at home doing all sorts of geeky things. I feel bad for Mac app developers, but I don't need what they sell: gratis software does it for me. I've only paid for 2 pieces of app software on my personal computers in the last decade(not counting games - maybe I should?):
- Microsoft Office for Mac (prior Mac) - Quicken (Once)
Plus OSX 10.6, 10.4, and Windows 7.
Until I come into a stiff requirement for a piece of proprietary software, I have no plans to change the 'use gratis/GPL software' model. It's worked well so far!
I've bought about 4 (cheap) apps on the iPod, in contrast - the GPL is effectively banned, iirc.
Of course, the GPL has caused some wonderful shared goods to come into being: gcc, emacs, Linux, etc. But those hard-working very smart developers don't receive money from me in general[2], because it's more financially efficient to use software gratis. I release my small amounts of public software under the AGPL3, because I believe in building a better world together, instead of grabbing each other's resources. But I think that we need to figure out a better way to make our bills get paid.
To summarize: Someone around here referenced the idea of a post-scarcity world. I think common software is becoming a post-scarcity world, and I don't know how common app developers are going to survive and keep developing on those common apps.
[1] probably a few visionaries, but besides them... :-) [2] modulo donations or swag
I wonder when we will cross the post-scarcity point on housing. Considering that about 50% of my monthly expenses goes to rent, I think reducing the cost of housing is where most of my mental energies should be devoted. My partial solution is "Commodity Housing", i.e., housing so abundant that what you pay is close to the maintainance costs, which I estimate would be on the order of $50-60/month (excluding electric/gas, water/sewage and garbage disposal expenses which most of us already pay for separately).
I can't seem to figure out why, when there is so much land in the U.S. [1], the rents are still so crushingly high [2]? I only have a partial answer in rent controls [3] and zoning laws.
[1] http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population...
[2] http://shine.yahoo.com/green/simple-life-in-manhattan-a-90-s...
http://financiallyfit.yahoo.com/finance/article-113345-10728...
[3] http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/elizabeth-lesly-stevens/sm...
@pnathan: I reposted this above, hoping it gets more visibility. Once again thanks for the rent reminder.
So places like where I live (semi-rural northwest) are incentivized to make it difficult to expand. I like urban apartments/condos/flats, I think those are a good solution, but as a culture, outside of the urban areas, people like houses.
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.
Note that I am not disagreeing with you, I just suppose that RMS may not be completely wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era is a non-fiction book by American economist Jeremy Rifkin, published in 1995 by Putnam Publishing Group.[1]
In 1995, Rifkin contended that worldwide unemployment would increase as information technology eliminates tens of millions of jobs in the manufacturing, agricultural and service sectors. He traced the devastating impact of automation on blue-collar, retail and wholesale employees. While a small elite of corporate managers and knowledge workers reap the benefits of the high-tech world economy, the American middle class continues to shrink and the workplace becomes ever more stressful.
As the market economy and public sector decline, Rifkin predicted the growth of a third sector—voluntary and community-based service organizations—that will create new jobs with government support to rebuild decaying neighborhoods and provide social services. To finance this enterprise, he advocated scaling down the military budget, enacting a value added tax on nonessential goods and services and redirecting federal and state funds to provide a "social wage" in lieu of welfare payments to third-sector workers.[1]
Moving on to new technologies just puts more people out of work with nothing to replace their old jobs.
Additionally, technology is neutral regarding human nature. As we grow older, we are less comfortable with shifting around and there are attachments that make it more difficult.
Sure, it's great to be rootless and fancy-free when you're in your 20s, but when you hit 40 or 50, you have to start thinking about how it's all going to end.
Technology is not about putting a few people out of "work", but about freeing people from it altogether.
The idea that we no longer need as much labor to sustain ourselves is nothing new. But it appears that we're completely willing to convert the surplus into improvements in quality of living. What we at one point might consider a creature comfort, we gradually elevate to the level of necessity. Cars, air conditioning, 2 day weekends. You name it.
In a rational world, that should be "because of... continuous productivity gains". I admit that the way you phrase the situation is how most people today view it but just as much it is a statement akin to "despite digging deeper and deeper, we keep getting closer to China"...
I understand that the real picture may somehow be different... For example, gains in healthcare may keep more people at work who else wouldn't be able to work. And an elaborate society also allows women to work, increasing the workforce. So I see this is not a black/white issue.
The argument is simply that the more things X people can do, the less things there are for a remaining Y people to do. When workers are more productive, total societal demands can be met with fewer workers.
Seems intuitively obvious. X factory produces N widgets. If it is can suddenly produce with half the workers, it will fire the others and get profit.
It has been argued that in these situations, demand will magically double or jobs will be magically found for these laid-off widget makers. Whatever their long pedigree, it seems to me these arguments only seem plausible because we've trained to believe them. A look at the present world seems to indicate that "what you'd expect without the propaganda" is happening - the laid-off widget makers of all sorts are thrown on the scrap heap with crocodile tears from the finance managers running things.
[1] http://persquaremile.com/2011/01/18/if-the-worlds-population....
[2] http://shine.yahoo.com/green/simple-life-in-manhattan-a-90-s....
http://financiallyfit.yahoo.com/finance/article-113345-10728....
[3] http://www.baycitizen.org/columns/elizabeth-lesly-stevens/sm....
Location still matters, or else there would be no such thing as startup hubs like silicon valley. I'm thinking more along the lines of...why is that outside of downtown SFO, most buildings are at most 2 stories high? Is it just due to prevailing zoning laws and rent controls or is there something more? There is obviously great demand for housing as indicated by the extremely high rents in this area, so why not just replicate the downtown high rises further south?
By the way this is what I found on a plaque next to the Golden Gate. The biggest faction opposed to building the bridge were the landlords in SFO, who feared that once the bridge was built, it would greatly lower the rents they could collect.
Relax regulations, clean out zoning, remove market controls, employ people on the black market, do the construction not-for-profit and you might be able to slash the cost by half or maybe two thirds, probably not more. (There is a finite amount of people willing to pay to live in such a high rise, but let's assume demand really is huge.)
In particular, even at that lower construction cost it won't be worth it for anyone to build if the rent is to be comparable to maintenance costs, whether through supply/demand or otherwise. This will be the case until you can put up high rises at a total cost of about $900-1200 per unit (roughly 15-20 times the monthly payment), no matter how many you can put up.
My intuition suggests that the rents being so damn high is yet another case of the 1%, already rich, screwing the rest of us to maintain their cash flow. However, as the late John McCarthy cautioned, "he who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense" [1]. So, I'll need to do my arithmetic before jumping to this conclusion. Once I'm finished, I'll post an "Ask HN" question on this issue.
[1] Progress and its Sustainability, by John McCarthy
Mixing open and proprietary, while perhaps not in line with RMS's views, is still a great way to make money, and you can even do it with the GPL in many circumstances. (Not always though.) In the gaming industry, I find philosophically pleasing the approach of Carmack and some indie companies who make a credible commitment to open sourcing the software (not necessarily the art assets) at a certain date in the future while making money on it at release.
Edit: I also want to add that copycat fears are generally out of proportion. Copycats usually don't win, as in displace the original's dominance. (What usually happens though is the original starts copycatting others to keep a safe, steady income flow, and possibly to crush newcomers if the thing being copycatted isn't sufficiently novel. You're not going to get big by copycatting, though you might get a modest sustaining profit.)
Using a proprietary license for businesses means that you can punish them for refusing to use GPL'd software by making them pay more. When they accept the GPL, then you reward them with a lower price (but not free, you can charge for GPL software too ;-) ) hopefully encouraging more GPL'd software to be released into the world.
The point is to reduce how much proprietary software there is and increase how much free software there is and multi-licensing uses a carrot and a stick based on pricing to do that.
One reasonable strategy is to adopt one of the fascist GPL variants (like AGPL3) and then offer a commercial license alongside it.
* Drastically increased enterprise adoption because influencers w/o purchasing authority can download and do their own pilot deployments.
* Free testing, with drastically decreased expectations of release quality (it's open source, what do you expect? &c).
* The ability to market on the warm-fuzzy of "open source", which warm-fuzzy also includes the pragmatic issue of "what if you go out of business" (you still have the source).
I think the reality of a lot of open source projects, particularly in the enterprise, is that the vast majority of the real code is written by a small affiliated core team.
Different economics means much less competition and much greater co-operation. Even if there are perfect copycats selling overnight, they're hitting a different market than yours. They may going after a local market or one based on a particular language
I have a challenge for you. Make the last Metallica album in your home without making copy. How long do you think it will take you? How about Photoshop?
If you find it's difficult, it's because the original is what costs money, not the duplicate.
I also find it interesting that you can't see the value in bits that "cost nothing to copy".
Yet, with currency, it's just ink and paper (physically worth considerably less) that represents much more in value. I'm not sure why this concept is so difficult to grasp when we've already been using it for many years before digital content.
"The Anonymous protests for the most part work by having a lot of people send a lot of commands to a website, that it can’t handle so many requests. This is equivalent of a crowd of people going to the door of a building and having a protest on the street. It’s basically legitimate. And when people object to this, let’s look at who they are and what they do. Usually they are people who are doing much worse things"
So he's saying that DDoS attacks are legitimate, and anyone who doesn't think they are is up to no good?
Does he suggest software must be free?
We know he doesn't say the must be free in cost. Does he say they need to be free as in speech? I've never heard him say that. I don't think of him as telling others what they must do.
I feel like a lot of the polarization around what he says comes from misunderstanding. This feels like one of them.
Yes.
Then think of him as telling others that they mustn't limit others
If you mean must as in, it should be illegal to do otherwise, I'm not sure. I don't think so, but given that he casts the conversation in terms of human rights, I can't entirely tell.
But if you mean must as in, does he really think all software, without exception, should be free? Absolutely. I think that's clear from the linked article alone.
I think the difference between must and should is significant.
I would imagine they would stay safely (maybe even years) behind the cutting edge. But common availability of the source code would make it easier to share information that may be able to speed up acceptance testing or flag up issues.
You could argue it's actually more dangerous for an airport to rely on software that is opaque, for all they know there is some edge condition in there by accident (or on purpose) that could cause mayhem.
I am going to assume however that ATC software source code is rigoursly audited by a trusted partner of the airports using it.
That's close to how I feel about patterns as well.