Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?

On Jul 16, 2:37 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hire out your programming expertise then. There is always work for
people with a talent for coding.

Yes, that's exactly what I was suggesting, and seems to run counter to
your "let's give all software away for free" philosophy.

Nope. I don't have a problem with saying "I'll code this for you if
you pay me thus-and-such". It's trying to control the downstream use
of the code once published that bothers me.

It's the *other* stuff that your definition includes which worries me.
Stuff like charging money for the right to use a specific software
program, for example.

Let's see. If I use a specific software program where a copy is
installed on my machine, what are the actual burdens I place on others
in so doing?
* The copy must be furnished. Its marginal cost is close to zero
unless it's trillions of bytes in size, however.
* Running it consumes electricity, which must be provided. OK; let the
hydro company bill me for my usage.
* If it involves network activity, bandwidth is needed. OK; let my ISP
bill me too.

I don't see any way in which the software's author is incrementally
burdened by my usage, given that he isn't the direct source of my
copy.

If the software is on his server and I access this server to use it,
then I use his bandwidth and he has every right to charge me for the
privilege; I've never objected to that. In that case I'm burdening his
network connectivity with my usage.

So let's see. I don't object to him charging me for a copy if I want
to get one directly from him. I don't object to him charging me to use
servers or other hardware he owns or bandwidth he paid for. I do
object to being told what I can or cannot do with a copy once I've
gotten it.

It's true, if anyone can make more copies and spread them around, sell
them or give them away, the market will tend to force the price for
copies down to zero. This kind of thing happens all the time; it's
called "competition". Makers of all sorts of other products have to
put up with competitors producing identical or fully-substitutable
products and undercutting their price.

Red Hat sells software without restricting others from making and
selling or giving away copies, and it manages to prosper just fine.

And insisting on downstream control of use ultimately leads to Big
Brotherish evils. Dongles and similar coercive devices; spyware-like
behavior (MS WGA anyone?); and of course simple denial of access to
the poor, who may be able to furnish the marginal cost of a copy for
their own use but cannot pay the grossly inflated price the software
company asks, which is generally hundreds to thousands of times the
marginal cost.

In no other area besides software and entertainment, except maybe big
pharma and gene-engineered crops, do we see manufacturers collecting
margins of 99.9% on product sales. Even patent-infested areas like the
auto industry get by with thin margins of a percent or so at every
step of the supply chain, from retail/dealership up to manufacturer.
Computer hardware included.

All of those industries have to pay R&D costs somehow, and only those
few I've mentioned do it by creating monopoly lock-in somehow and then
charging thousands of times marginal cost for each physical item.

The worst effects are on the poor, of course. People in poor countries
have rampant HIV-infection rates and are unable to afford the hugely
inflated prices for medication that could save their lives and manage
infections chronically. So they die and die. Farmers get screwed by
big agribusinesses that use pricing and seed-propagating policies and
so-called "terminator genes" to force them into virtual indentureship
where they could buy one load of seed and then be largely self-
sufficient. This can't help but make food less available to the poor
worldwide, beyond harming the generally not-very-wealthy farmers
themselves. In the developed, urban parts of the world, the effects
are certainly still there -- students find software, textbooks, and
other things priced way above marginal cost. So do the instructors,
who pass the pinch on to the students in the form of hefty tuition
fees, and end up not making much money themselves. Student debt is
skyrocketing, and young-adult debt, and a lot of that debt is
basically the Microsofts and McGraw-Hills of the world demanding their
huge margins. They have a hell of a racket going. You can't possibly
not have noticed Microsoft and Bill Gates laughing all the way to the
bank for the past ten plus years.

Closed, paywall-blocked access to the outputs of academic research
have a giant, hidden cost we don't even see or notice. How much faster
would our progress be; how many more problems in e.g. the third world,
or climate management, would have been solved or better-mitigated by
now if the wheels of research in academia had been greased with wide-
open access to more general participation? How many would-be Einsteins
out there are shut out of contributing substantially to the system
because the barrier to entry is too high?

All of these show areas that have "cartelized", where the incumbents
(existing academics, publishers, software makers, etc.) inflate prices
well above costs and create barriers to entry (often not just price-
barriers, but regulatory ones where they can lobby such into
existence) to keep out upstarts and maintain an exclusive club of some
sort.

Actually, one of those groups doesn't seem to be laughing all the way
to the bank. Academics just seem to be stuck in a vicious cycle of
paying through the nose to reach a position of being able to
contribute, and then feeling the need to charge exorbitant amounts for
access to their own research just to cover those expenses once they
can. Which makes the next generation have the same problem, and the
next. It's a few large publishing companies that are raking it in in
this case, rather than the academics, who are stuck on a treadmill
jammed on "super-fast" in order that the publishing companies can
protect their massive profits.

All of this impoverishes the world, culturally, scientifically, and
financially, while enriching a few megacorporations and their
executives. Most of those who try to force exorbitant per-copy pricing
on fundamentally non-scarce goods are just trying to recoup the costs
to them that resulted from bigger fish doing the same thing; the money
they get goes up the chain and accumulates in the pockets of the Bill
Gateses of the world.

It's the next big robber-baron crisis after the big railroad baron
problems of a century or so ago. They're sucking the economy dry, and
forcing most smaller vendors and makers to be intermediaries in
funneling them money, all to line their own pockets. This obviously
isn't sustainable; soon nobody will be able to afford their overpriced
crap. We're already seeing it. Jobs offshoring; prices skyrocketing;
costs of living going up while real wages plummet and unemployment
soars domestically. Either they all go bankrupt when everyone else
does and can no longer pay them, or (more likely) there's some kind of
revolt. Aristocracies bleeding the peasants dry have a bad habit,
historically speaking, of getting beheaded one day. These will be no
exception, if it keeps on the way it has been.

Except for one thing: the Internet makes the machinery for funneling
the money, so-called "intellectual property" laws, largely
unenforceable, and one large emerging world power, China, is showing
little interest in strongly enforcing international "intellectual
property" treaties and laws. So instead, either the system just fails
without violent revolution, or China ascends to world superpower while
the US becomes a has-been like the British Empire did about a century
ago, eventually out-prospering everyone else -- the way the early-
twentieth-century US did, at least until the debut of Steamboat
Willie, and Disney's buying of perpetual copyright extensions from
Congress ever since.

The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.

Risk's a part of the game. There's always less of it if you cheat, or
use coercion to make your market position unassailable, but that
benefits nobody else. Lack of risk encourages lack of innovation, and
folding most of your money into aggressive marketing, aggressive legal
actions to shut down would-be competitors, and aggressive lobbying to
get more ways of competing outlawed, not to mention encouraging lazy
lack of bug-fixing or other improvements. Seen Microsoft Windoze
lately? How long has Explorer has the bug that scrolls all your open
windows to the top spontaneously from time to time? Or the one where
dropped files don't always go where you dropped them but sometimes to
the bottom of the folder instead? They've had 12 years now to fix
that, since Windows 95 debuted Explorer and these bugs, and they've
done nothing.

And so on... hopefully, you see the pattern here. Recall once again
that businesses are about making money, and given two business models, one
which is more successful than the other, it seems to make sense that most
businesses would pick the more successful one.

Recall once again that businesses are not ENTITLED to a profit; nor
even to recoup their R&D costs and break even. A "can't lose" business
model is a sure sign that someone is cheating, or the game itself is
rigged somehow. Even in a non-zero-sum game, the existence of a "can't
lose" strategy for one party means that everyone else, other
businesses and consumers alike, "must lose" as the "can't lose" guys
take over and grab an ever bigger share of the pie. Why else would
America's GDP be growing but America's poor actually getting poorer
(after quite a while of getting less poor, relative to cost of
living)? Because the system is increasingly being shaped by a few big
players that "can't lose" to funnel all wealth to them and make it
harder and harder for anyone else to accumulate any.

When I was a child, people saved and invested. When I was a young
adult, people lived paycheque to paycheque and "got by" until they
could retire, but sometimes lost their jobs, couldn't find new ones,
and wound up poor, or committed suicide, or killed everyone in their
family and THEN committed suicide. Now, people are deeply in debt by
the time they enter the workforce, if they can find a job at all of
course, and a lot more wind up poor, or commit suicide...

Who's robbing everyone? GDP is growing, but the wealth is not being
spread. The rising tide isn't floating all the boats. Someone's shaped
it into a monster tidal wave that raises theirs and smashes all the
others. A few rich white men, mostly CEOs and the odd shrub or two,
from the looks of it.

I mean, it's great that you're able to come up with alternative
business models. But the business people aren't really *looking* for
alternative business models.

That's because they've been handed a nice government-granted and
enforced monopoly gravy train. Why would they look, when they can just
sit there doing little useful and rake in the cash anyway? This is not
however a system that is good for society!

You really need to check out http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
-- it can explain a lot of this stuff better than I probably can.

They're plenty happy with the model they
currently have (the one of selling games with copy protection). *You're*
the one who's unhappy with that model, and I'm not sure you have enough
clout to sway the entire game industry.

Everyone except the top executives in the game industry has reason to
be unhappy with that model. It benefits the few at the expense of
everyone else. As such it is doomed in the long term.

Everybody has a different code of ethics and moral compass. To me, if
someone tells me "I'll only let you have A if you promise not to do B",
and you say "Fine", and then take the A, and then later go ahead and do B,
you have committed a "grave moral wrong" in my eyes

It's called "breach of contract". There's no need for this "copyright"
BS, or any of the rest of it, since we have contract law anyway. Of
course, contract law is somewhat weaker. If I breach the contract and
give someone a copy, that someone is not bound by any contract and
whatever it is is now freed. And mass-market transactions can't
generally require every customer read and sign something; that's OK
for rare, big-ticket purchases like cars and houses but nobody's doing
that for every CD they buy at HMV. This is exactly as it should be;
businesses can not easily bludgeon their way to riches with a business
model based more on inflating their prices massively and suing
everyone in sight and have to actually innovate to succeed that way.

Maybe it was too subtle, but the implied question was "How could you
possibly make an informed decision about whether a piece of software sucks
or not without having actually ever tried it?"

Everything experts have written about Vista indicates that it's a
steaming turd-pile. A huge multi-gigabyte steaming turd-pile that
reeks of Microsoft greed and corruption, and even of media company
greed and corruption. Why does the Vista feature list seem to be what
you'd expect if the RIAA and MPAA were the paying customers rather
than the Vista user-base? That is very interesting don't you think? It
smacks of the rich-old-white-men's club members protecting their own,
at everyone else's expense, from such annoying things as "competition"
and "we, the people, now also find it self-evident that information,
costing next to nothing, should be essentially free". The fact is, at
last count 100,000,000 Americans (more than 1/5 the population) have
decided to engage in mass civil disobedience. That isn't a few
scofflaws or "organized crime" or even terrorism. That is the biggest
revolt against government policy since the Vietnam peace protests and
civil rights riots. In this case (and probably the war), corporate-
bought policy.

I don't remember anything in the Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, or Bill of Rights about corporations getting votes and
legislative power. (Yet the DMCA combined with dongles or other
software lockouts effectively gives them the power to make law.) I do
remember at least one of those having something to say about the
peoples' need sometimes to revolt against aristocratically-imposed
serfdom in various forms. That time has come again, and this time
there might not even be any bloodshed, unless there's a serious
attempt by the government to clamp down with violent force. In that
case, obviously, there WILL be trouble.

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;

Your evidence doesn't support your assertion: "Compete" doesn't mean
"Win". Maybe they are simply competing and losing.

Given the shoddy quality of e.g. IIS, do you really think they are
trying to "compete" in any arena that doesn't involve either lawyers
or lobbyists?

This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things.

It wasn't intended to explain those things. But if you want an easy to
grasp explanation: the corporations don't have perfect information. You
can be perfectly rational, but make the in-hindsight-wrong-decision if you
don't have perfect information.

These aren't "wrong" decisions, they are "brain-dead" decisions, which
anyone with a couple of neurons to rub together should have known
would backfire in some way. Pretexting scandals, private-info-leaks,
rootkits ... there seems to be another big scandal every fiscal
quarter and dozens of minor ones these days.

Companies used to have to compete in the market. Now they have gotten
a sense of "entitlement" to government largesse and access to
government muscle to forcibly get their way. Corporations pay* police
to gas protestors at peaceful anti-corporatism rallies. Corporations
pay* government for legislation that makes something the competition
is doing that they don't like illegal. Corporations pay* government
for a system of so-called "intellectual property rights" that are
based on the idea that by developing an idea they are somehow entitled
to profit from it. If they can't turn it into a marketable commodity,
they can at least wait until someone else does and then sue them to
extort billions from them (NTP v. RIM comes to mind here). In a
properly functioning system, corporations that can't turn "it" into a
marketable commodity go bankrupt, and another one that can succeeds,
and consumers and competent businesses all win, while businesses that
can't manage to quite do it quietly fold. You succeed by producing a
product that customers love and want and gain by using, and doing it
more efficiently than the competition.

In the system as it currently runs, you succeed by producing a product
that, while shoddy and actively hostile to customers, embodying in its
very essence your distrust of and contempt for your customers, is also
indispensible to these customers in some way, and of course is their
only realistic option because you bully would-be competitors into
failing, or simply have them all arrested or shot or something.

That isn't free-market capitalism. It's fascism of some kind, or maybe
even a weird quasi-communism, with fixed prices, theoretically
"private" providers of goods and services that are all state-supported
monopolies, and everyone has to buy from "the company store".

Note that I didn't say they were perfectly rational. I said that
thinking of corporations as "a perfectly rational utilitarian" is a "much
more accurate model" than an emotional anthromorphic entity who bases its
decision mostly on rage, envy, fear, etc.

What about insatiable greed, an arrogant (over)confidence that they
won't get caught, and utter contempt for the peons in the streets
crawling like ants at the base of their grotesquely expensive new
highrise headquarters offices?

Look at those towers and those huge penthouse corner offices for the
executives and tell me we're in a free-market capitalist democracy and
not some kind of crypto-plutocratic feudal society with an
identifiable aristocracy and identifiable peasants?

Somewhere along the line it all went pear-shaped, sometime after about
1960 or so. Maybe it was the Cold War. Maybe it was abandoning the
gold standard. I'm not a professional economist or historian; what do
I know? But I know enough to be able to see what goes on and smell the
stink when there is one.

A rational RIAA would embrace music sharing and monetize music some
new way.

I suspect it's actually vastly more complicated than that, but I'm too
lazy to explain all the details right now, so I won't be surprised if you
continue to believe this.

My guess is they'd continue to sell plastic discs, and regard
filesharing analogously to radio airplay -- it has promotional value.
People would still buy the discs, either to subsidize the artists (not
that the artists usually see a thin dime from CD sales, though that
could obviously be changed) or simply to have a physical disc and
jewel case with cover art, or an "authentic" copy, or whatever.

I think you have a different definition of rational than I do. If they
lust for power and control (or to phrase it more formally, if their metric
is power and control), then doing whatever you can to maximize power and
control is the most rational thing a utilitarian can do.

It's at the meta-level that their rationality is lacking. A human has
only limited ability to change their core drives and motivations
(which tend to primarily involve self-fueling, reproductive
opportunities, and not getting dead). A corporation in theory can have
whatever motivations some board of directors decides it should have,
and the board could decide that it will be a good citizen and become
very rich that way, but by and large, none of them do.

The problem, I think, is that you're applying your metrics to the
actions of another entity with a different set of metrics, and they aren't
maximize their score in your game, and so you suspect they must be
irrational, when actually they may be maximizing their score in their own
game.

If they consider all the top executives going to jail (Enron, etc.) to
be "maximizing their score" I rest my case regarding their rationality
at the meta-level.

Regardless, public policy should focus on the interests of society at
large, not narrow special interests. Of all the special interests out
there, compared to e.g. the disabled, or pregnant women, or the
elderly, or the poor, or the HIV-positive, or minorities, the super-
rich are pretty much the least deserving of special consideration by
the government; they provably can take care of themselves, and if you
crash their fortunes to 1/10 what they are now with some policy they
end up "merely" rich. If that happens, it's no skin off my nose. So
they have to settle for a 70' boat instead of an 80' boat, when most
people still have none and lots don't even have clean frigging
drinking water. :P

Of course, going too extreme that way leads to communism, a proven
dismal failure. Smoothly-functioning markets that are not easy to game
into an "I-can't-possibly-lose" position have historically done the
best job. Too bad they've been gutted and replaced with pale
imitations in recent decades.

Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
droves?

(1) Profits exceed costs.

Profits exceed costs means "it ain't broke" so "don't fix it".

(2) Imperfect information.

Anyone who doesn't know that outsourcing is bad for the job economy,
bad for the customer base, and eventually bad for your own bottom line
isn't suffering from "imperfect information" but from "I've lived in
this cave in the woods for the last 17 years and then despite by
woeful lack of qualifications I somehow managed to bag this high-
responsibility job that happens to make me a seven-figure annual
salary and somehow avoid being quickly fired for incompetence; lucky
me!".

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 ***.

Are you implying that this is irrational behaviour, given the metrics
that the companies are applying to themselves?

It's rational behavior by the executive that does it (although it is
not rational for society to set the rules such that this behavior is
rewarded); it's not self-maximizing for the corporation itself, which
feels the pain shortly after. In effect, the executive is a parasite
on the corporation that the corporation inexplicably permits to bleed
it. The corporation is behaving analogously to a person who allows a
mosquito to settle, drink, and possibly infect them with West Nile or
malaria or something rather than slap it off them.

Recall my warning:

<quote>
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.
</quote>

Why do my predictions about their behavior better fit observed reality
than yours, then?

(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.

You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see such
advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be more
informed about the real world than you. ;)

Ads? Informed? Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?! Ads do not
inform; they present biased or just outright-wrong "information" to
try to persuade you to buy something. If I want a web server some day
I will research what web server is better at that time, rather than
impulsively choose because of some slick piece of ad copy where the
company that makes one claims (of course) that the others all suck.

I expect in the foreseeable future that such research would reveal
Apache to be the superior choice, on price and reliability, though I
could be wrong.

Anyway, if I let an ad influence me, a glitzy, flickering, annoying,
obtrusive, noise-making, animated Flash ad (or worse, popup or other
browsing-obstructing BS) for IIS would instantly sell me on Apache!

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

Your question is based on false premise, and thus is nonsensical.

What false premise? That Vista is a downgrade?

Let's see. Vista takes the XP experience and makes the following
changes:
* Replaces Explorer, whose bugs we're familiar with, with a 3D
something-or-other that looks slick on TV demos but is worse to use
and
has bugs we'll need a whole nother 12 years to get used to and learn
how to work around.
* Adds more DRM BS than you can shake a stick at, all apparently
bought and paid for by Hollywood.
* Costs a fortune, when it's easy to get XP for free; it won't be as
easy to get Vista for free for quite a while.
* System requirements and resource usage jump by roughly an order of
magnitude.
* Oh, and you can now play DirectX 10 games -- all one of them, so if
you're a Halo 3 fan it's a must-buy despite the above.

Given your existing hardware, "upgrading" to Vista will mean out-of-
pocket expenses of a few hundred dollars and result in being able to
do less, more slowly, with more bugs and crashes than you currently
can, except that you can now play the latest Halo game. And now it has
much more "Big Brother Inside" to boot.

Contrast with XP, which was a significant reliability, stability, and
performance improvement over Win9X and especially the execrable WinME,
despite including the WinME features such as thumbnail views in
Explorer and System Restore, and the only onerous DRM BS it added was
product activation -- and THAT was highly controversial at the time,
but proved to be largely a non-hassle (for normal users and for
pirates). XP of course was the best Windows ever from Microsoft's
perspective too -- it sold tremendously well, raking in record
profits, and was still buggy enough to keep their pay-support a profit
center into the bargain.

The only thing I can think when I read or see anything about Vista is:
"What was Microsoft *thinking*?!"

Please check out http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
before making any more lengthy followups to this thread. Other readers
of this thread are encouraged to read (or at least skim) the material
there also. It won't bite, despite the pdf format of much of the
material there.

.