[tlug] [ot] paywalls for fixing bugs, was: Sun X4150 BIOS and ILOM update

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Christian Horn writes:
 > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:41:25PM +0900, Pier Fumagalli wrote:
 > > 
 > > [ paywall in front of a firmware that fixes bugs ]
 > 
 > This is how far we have come in the world..
 > What will be next?

Realistically, companies will use any strategy whose probability of
being legal passes a certain threshold to extract higher payments, and
users whose need exceeds the price will pay.  This is fundamentally a
good thing!

If you think the price is unnecessarily high for marginal usage, use
FLOSS.  (This costs you nothing, since you already do.)  If you care
about people who don't like that price, teach them to use FLOSS, and
if they can't (RMS propaganda notwithstanding, not every user need
causes a developer to itch), help develop software to meet their
needs.  As long as we're free to do that, does it really make sense to
bitch about companies that supply software that does things that ours
can't do?

What companies do is an entirely different issue from what governments
do.  Although I disagree with the absolutists, people who argue for
abolition of patent in software and business methods (at least) are on
very strong ground, because patent interferes with our freedom to
develop and use FLOSS.

An interesting example I ran into yesterday was ... not on this box.
Google for "The Factoring Dead", that should bring it up.  Look for
the slide entitled "If you are ... Blackberry".  (BTW, in that
presentation "ECC" is not an Ei-kaiwa school that Beat Takeshi shills
for.)


Steve