Re: [tlug] Tux is now in Tokyo ! who wants to get it ?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2009-09-08 12:41 +0900 (Tue), Edward Middleton wrote:

> Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >
> > Have you noticed how people on YouTube prefer to complain about the
> > Warner Media Group's aggressive enforcement of copyright rather than
> > support the huge number of indies who produce art that ranges from
> > nausea-inducing to as good as anything WMG distributes?
> > ...
> > I.e., they want software at price zero far more than they want source.
> 
> I think it is more they don't want to keep paying for it.  Most people
> have grown up in either the MS or Mac software treadmill.

Or the Warner treadmill. I've spent thousands of dollars over the
past five years or so building up a collection of over 300 movies.
However, they're all on DVD, and if I want to watch any of these in
high definition I'm being asked to pay for the same movie again, at an
even higher price, to get a copy on Blu-Ray. I find this particularly
frustrating because those who didn't support the industry, and instead
just downloaded the movies from the Internet, are the ones who now don't
have to pay twice. The economics are set up to provide incentives to
pirate even for those who don't mind paying for content.

On 2009-09-08 14:25 +0900 (Tue), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Besides not wanting to pay, they don't want to *think*, especially not
> if that would lead to the understanding that there's good reason why
> they should have to pay.

Yup. I thought about it, and paid, and look where it got me.

> I'm just saying that the "free software" movement is mostly about free
> beer and hacker privilege.... it's very rarely about being able to
> repair the mess yourself.

That is certainly not the case in the corporate world, which supplies a
large amount (perhaps the majority) of developer-hours put in to free
software. There are plenty of companies out there putting significant
amounts of work into free software specifically for risk managment
purposes: when you have developers of a piece of free software in house,
you *can* fix it yourself, rather than just go back to the vendor and
hope for the best. These tend to be smaller companies, of course,
because they incentives are different in larger businesses, where making
sure you can't be blamed when a product fails is usually more important
than making sure a product doesn't fail.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com