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? How would I afford a house into which to put my table? How would I live? If the food, table, house and all that is simply given to me, why should I bother to develop clever video drivers if it won't improve my life? "Nothing works" is a very succinct summation of every Communistic or purely socialistic government that the world has ever tried. Capitalism is, indeed, bad. It's just that it's better than ANY other system that has EVER been tried. Even Communist China has discovered this fact. They're moving, remarkably rapidly, towards a strongly capitalistic society and the people are living better than ever before as a result. (Remember, a sweatshop job is better than no job at all if it pays more than you can get with no job at all even if it does not meet some do-gooder's idea of "minimum wage.")
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.
{^_^}