Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?

On Jul 13, 12:16 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
That's not necessarily true. Your day job might not be paying enough,
and yet it's the best you can get, and so you need to supplement it with a
second or third job. If programming software is a part of your skillset,
then there's no reason not to consider writing software for profit as one
of those second or third jobs.

Hire out your programming expertise then. There is always work for
people with a talent for coding.

Depends on your definition of "coercive and extortionate", I suppose.

My definition isn't unreasonable. It includes things like one party
interfering with a consensual transaction between a second party and a
third party, especially if there's a financial motive such as
preventing competition. (In this instance, the second party is letting
the third party examine an object the second party (legitimately)
possesses, and construct a duplicate of that object with their own raw
materials and time and on their own dime.)

Take
the computer game industry, for example. Most games are one-shot deals.
You won't have enterprises buying support contracts. You won't have users
paying for support. You won't even have users expecting continuous updates
over the next few years of the product. There are some exceptions to this
(Blizzard, for example, semi-regularly releases updates to their game
Diablo), but most games are play-once-and-then-forget-about-forever.

Well I can see a few options here that don't involve coercive
activities and can still make you money.
* Make it a multiplayer game. Give the game away. Open a pay service
for online play; playing through your service requires access to your
servers and that in turn costs you bandwidth and electricity and the
like; you can certainly meter this access and make money this way. Of
course, if third parties can't create compatible servers then you are
doing something anticompetitive and sneaky!
* Make a game for your own enjoyment. Your own future enjoyment of the
game is the "payment".
* Say you have a great game idea but need financing to create the
game. If enough money is pledged you'll make the game and give it
away. If not enough is pledged by a certain date you'll return the
money already received and won't make the game. This amounts to being
paid up front to write the code, so you don't lose money if it's
easily copied once it's released.
* Make arcade machines that are coin-operated, and to which only you
have the key to the coin-box. If the game's not otherwise available
it's admittedly a bit morally dodgy, but even if it is you'll make
money from machines in places where people have to sit around and wait
for a particular time or a number to come up, like airports and movie
theatre lobbies and suchlike. People often forget to bring their
Nintendo DS or a book or something ... and then you've got some of
their pocket change.
* Demo it to rich people until you sell one copy for a bazillion
bucks. Retire. Don't care if the rich guy then spreads copies around.
Some people have piles of money and nothing better to do with it than
be the first ever to do/have something.
* Give the game away. If it's any good, and especially if the source
code is publicly visible, you might get job offers. Even if game
companies no longer made any money selling copies of games this
wouldn't change, since someone might want a game made with particular
features and not have the skills themselves but have the money to hire
someone to make it for them; and since your proven skills with Java or
whatever are likely of broader use than just game making.
* Use the game as a loss leader to sell something else. A special case
of this is to sell access to one online service for multiplayer gaming
with this game; the game creates the whole market for such online
services, and you start one of them. As the game's maker you may be
able to make a better one more cheaply than a competitor could without
a lot of study of your game's code. More generally, the game might
become popular and you could sell related T-shirts, stuffed game-
character animals or game-character action figures, and other such
physical goods. The game could also contain paid product placements --
e.g. you could make a GTA clone and get Coke and Pepsi to bid for
which one's logo gets on a big billboard and all the vending machines
in the game world or something.
* There's the outright adware/spyware route too, but that's evil, not
to mention stupid since people will just strip that crap out and
spread the "cleaned" version around, and it will outcompete your
original.
* Make copies and sell them! If you don't do anything coercive,
obviously sooner or later other people will make copies and sell them,
and more will give copies away. Some will still prefer to buy from the
trusted original source, or to subsidize the possibility of addons or
new games from a proven good game-maker. Red Hat sells copies of Linux
on CD for $60 a pop, and makes money at it, even though anyone else
can do the same, one company started selling copies of Red Hat's
distro for $30 a pop, and lots of places have free downloads of Fedora
Core. Admittedly not a game, but it still proves you can make money
without restricting others from making copies and giving them away or
selling them.

Different games take different approaches to restricting access to the
software.

I hate all gratuitous restrictions on access. If I can pay the
marginal cost of reproduction of something I see no reason I should
not be permitted to have one if I want it, and a grave moral wrong in
withholding access to something for someone who can pay its marginal
cost. Worse, this type of thing involves by its very nature intrusions
and breaches of privacy, because party 1 is trying to impede certain
consensial transactions between parties 2 and 3, not merely to set the
terms of transactions between party 1 (themselves) and other parties.
The only way to do this effectively is to spy on parties 2 and 3 and
then intrude on them when they try to conduct a transaction you don't
like. If done in person, that's called eavesdropping, break-and-enter,
and assault where I come from.

If you really want to control access, you should not furnish copies at
all. Put your game on a server and charge for access to it. Secure the
server against being hacked. Without hacking, all someone can do is
play the game through the interface. Give away a thin client (most
likely a browser applet) which isn't of any use without what's on the
server. Just don't expect many users unless the game is very, very
good or membership is cheap and one fixed-sized payment buys you a
lifetime of access.

Some uses virtual device drivers that take over your CD drive to
try to differentiate between original CDs and copied ones; others have you
enter a serial number which is then verified online

Evil and rude. VXDs being installed without the system administrator's
explicit knowledge and consent ought to be downright illegal, because
they can easily corrupt and crash the OS. Sony recently got into a
world of legal hurt over exactly this sort of BS, namely the infamous
XCP rootkit CDs. Gratuitously requiring a net connection is nearly as
bad, and makes the software stink of spyware. More generally, all such
schemes add a bug-prone component whose very INTENT is to make the
software gratuitously fail sometimes, and any bug in which is sure to
do so. Worse everyone reporting such bugs gets treated with scorn and
suspicion. Treating your customers like criminals and their hardware
and OS configuration like your personal property is a sure way to lose
friends and influence people!

It was recently fashionable to demonize Microsoft, such that a lot of
accusations thrown their way was unfair. I think that trend has died a
little bit, but I still see the occasional blogs with one entry saying
"Vista sucks" and followed by another entry saying "I've never tried Vista
and I never will".

This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Vista sucks, and I've
never tried Vista and I never will.

Seriously. It does suck.

First of all, anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
experiencing.

No, it makes more sense to regard them as emotionless, cold-blooded
sociopaths, since that is what all large corporations are. With IQs in
the mid-to-upper forties, seeing as they're almost invariably less
than the sum of their parts.

Note that I didn't anthropomorphize Microsoft in the original post
anyway. I said they couldn't compete and decided to try to use their
money to buy laws to effectively outlaw competing with Microsoft. This
much is provable fact (they can't compete -> observe Linux server-side
market share eating Windows alive; ditto Apache vs. IIS and JSP vs.
ASP; law-buying, well, just look, the campaign donations are a matter
of public record. No I don't know the URL offhand.)

I think a much more accurate model is to think of corporations as a
perfectly rational utilitarian whose sole metric is profit.

This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things. Your
"perfectly rational utilitarian" has an IQ inversely proportional to
the CEO's annual salary. I doubt they actually are perfectly rational.
A rational RIAA would embrace music sharing and monetize music some
new way. In practise, companies often show some degree of dominance by
the will of one or a few people exhibiting all the usual human
foibles. Cartels more so than individual companies; they can be
downright schizophrenic and for obvious reasons. Ultimately however
they often lust for power and control, and obviously so, regardless of
whether this is rational.

They also lack a key element of sanity -- satiability. Corporations
are, by and large, insatiable. The more they have the more they want.
It's not enough to have 47% of the market, 400 full-time paid
employees with full benefits, and enough money coming in to pay the
salaries and expenses; they want 57% of the market and to expand to
500 employees and rake in money faster than they spend it, so they can
panel the CEO's office in oak and he can cut down from three days
working a week to two and spend another day a week playing golf at
expensive Augusta.

There's no good vs evil, moral vs immoral issues to enter into the consideration of a
coporation's "mind". It's solely about what action can maximize profits.

Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
droves? In fact, the guys that do this stuff are not doing it for the
benefit of the company's long term profits. They do it to get short
term profits or show decreased expenses in their own department, so
they get promoted and more stock options, so they can buy when the
next product is shipping and the stock jumps, sell right after, and
retire, leaving someone else holding the bag when the customer neglect
comes back to bite the company in the ***.

Companies show some tendency to maximize short-term revenues, about
three or four months out (roughly one fiscal quarter, which cannot be
coincidence), and damn the long term consequences of their behavior.
They act like spoiled children that have not learned empathy, more
than anything else -- little sociopaths with no more than a vague
sense of any time scale beyond a few months, and impulsively grasping
for shiny baubles and smacking at anything they don't like.

(I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).

I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that plugin.

To address the patents issue in particular, because of the way patent law
is set up, if you're a big company, you are essentially forced to horde up
on so called "defensive patents". It's a like a cold war, where none of
the big corporations sue each other, for fear of getting sued in return.

And they like it just fine that way, since they can all nuke any small
upstart that threatens to horn in on their turf, especially one that
looks like it won't play by the unspoken rules of the existing cartel.

You know the sort of unspoken rules they have. Like that they will
spend no money fixing bugs except security holes. Or they will all
outsource their support simultaneously and anyone who reneges by
keeping support local to grow its market share by not pissing off its
customers as much as its rivals will get punished in some way. There's
all kinds of collusion like this, though nothing easy to prove.

That's the way the rules were set up, and Microsoft (and other
corporations, like IBM, Sun, etc.) are just playing the smart strategy
according to those rules. Again, it's fallacious to think in terms of
"evil corporations hate our freedom, that's why they patent everything"
versus "acquiring patents is the action with the highest utility at this
point".

Either way, such patents do more harm than good. I think all so-called
IP law does more harm than good, save perhaps trademark law.

On the other hand, I know some people who had pirated Windows XP, but
are going to pay for Windows Vista simply because Vista is too much of a
pain to pirate.

Fools -- they already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay
for a downgrade?

[snip some creative ideas for making money; I've no comments or arguments
against that]

They prove copyright law unnecessary to "promoting the progress of
science and the useful arts", which in my opinion leaves it at the
mercy of the First Amendment protecting freedom of speech and of the
press.


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