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.)
{^_^}