Paul Graham has lost the plot • Hacker News Board

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#161

Post by sophacles » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #138

sophacles wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, go to any mid-sized town or bigger, there is at least one recording studio, making decent or good recordings for bands that never hit the "*AA lottery", but make decent money (either in the form of door fees and schwag, some even enough to live on) giving away CDs at shows to keep people coming to the next show. Even more that do the same thing, but keep a day job and do music for the love of it. For every band y…

Every band I've ever gone to see sells CDs at their shows, and they're mostly the kinds of bands you describe. > keep a day job "Producing less of it" because they can't earn enough to do it full time. There would be more people in that boat if, in my thought experiment, they earned absolutely nothing from their content. I don't think we'd actually ever reach that point, but just think about it as a 'what if'.

When you pay a door fee to see a show, you are paying for the content: a live band performing their songs.

Also: some bands sell CDs, some give them away, lately fewer are selling, but instead are giving away passes at download sites. Even those that sell the CDs give away at least half if not more of them, because they would rather people listen to them and come back for the next show, and tell their friends, making $3-10 per person per show, than make $10 on the CD one time.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#162

Post by scelerat » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

VMG wrote: post #65

babarock wrote: post #29

"What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." This sums up why I disagree with the author. People have been playing and composing music way before "selling records" was the way to make money. Just like people don't contribute to open source "for the joy of it". Very serious business is being done around open s…

The difference is that nobody stops you from making "Open-Source" films and music, and many people do. The masses however seem to prefer commercial films, music and software.

Just to supplement another response to this point... commercial entertainment does compete directly with free/amateur/semipro/fansourced material all the time.

I would argue that this is more of a danger to Big Content's bottom line. There are only 24 hours in a day. Youtube and reddit compete directly with Universal, Sony, and the New York Times for people's attention.

The fact is that entertaining videos and music are not only easier to distribute than ever, but also easier to produce. You don't need a degree or the backing of a large corporation to be funny, insightful or clever. IMO there is a lot of noise about piracy which masks this even larger "problem" for traditional media.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#163

Post by jes5199 » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

batista wrote: post #115

Graham draws a comparison between the ridiculous situation of a shop owner wanting to charge passers-by for smelling the delicious cooking smells coming from restaurant, and record companies going after people who’ve illegally downloaded music or movies. The supposed point of comparison is that ‘information is like air’ and can be freely transmitted, so it can’t be treated as the property of one party. If PG is makin…

even up to the acquisition, ViaWeb's source code wasn't that valuable. What was really valuable is the knowledge of the code that its developers have, and the relationships with the customers, the minds of the leaders who made the company successful, and the brand.

Plenty of companies get their source code leaked, and yet they keep on selling the software. The code itself is treated like a curiosity - some people play with it, but not many, and I've never heard of anyone building and selling a closed-source project once they obtained the source for it.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#164

Post by tikhonj » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #54

InclinedPlane wrote: post #27

I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…

Code creators can charge for their creations, though. They don't have to, but they can. And some significant portion of open contributors are paid for their contributions, if indirectly, by working as employees of organizations that contribute to or allow employees to work on those open source projects. If nobody could get paid for writing code, there would be less of it. No question.

Yes, if nobody could get paid for writing code, there would probably be less of it. (Barring some sort of post-scarcity economy, I guess.)

However, your original assumption does not flow from the premise--just because selling software becomes impossible does not mean programmers won't get paid. I recall reading somewhere (too lazy to find the source) that the majority of programmers work on bespoke, in-house software rather than consumer-facing proprietary software. Even if it is not a majority, it still shows that there are viable ways for programmers to get paid outside creating scarcity with copyright.

Just because people contributing to the kernel get paid does not mean they would not get paid without copyright. Companies like Google and Red Hat do not really rely on copyright for money.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#165

Post by batista » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

angersock wrote: post #137

batista wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author, and the content industry in general, are misunderstanding basic economics: Just because there is a cost to produce something does not mean that it has market value. And your are misunderstanding even more basic economics: being able to take something (or a copy of it) without paying, doesn't mean it doesn't have value either. Value is where there are people willing to pay. And people ARE willing to pay fo…

Market value is determined by scarcity and demand, right? Scarcity is finished for digital items. Sorry, but that train has left. This very much follows economics. (and stop conflating utility with market value...argh....)

Market value is determined by scarcity and demand, right? Scarcity is finished for digital items.

No, just demand.

You can simulate scarcity with access provision. Else you don't get to have an economy in the digital age.

People talk like this is something new, but it's not. Sun Records made Elvis's singles. Nothing even in that analog era prevented ANY OTHER COMPANY to reproduce and sell the same singles and not give Elvis a penny. Nothing, that is, except the copyright law.

This also holds for software licenses. If digital copying means "forget about copyright law" (a prerequisite to declare that "scarcity is finished") then why should anyone respect the GPL license any more than Metallica's copyright?

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#166

Post by icebraining » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:36 PM UTC

zasz wrote: post #89

angersock wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to the GCC folks, GIMP developers, Blender developers, Tremulous developers, Firefox developers, Mono developers, Rails developers, Python developers... (we all know GTK is a labor of love, 'cause you couldn't expect people to pay for it.)

Can you prove that those projects wouldn't be healthier if people were happy to pay money for them?

They could be healthier if we seized 20% of everyone's paychecks to fund them too, but that doesn't mean we should.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#167

Post by InclinedPlane » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:37 PM UTC

newsoundwave wrote: post #149

InclinedPlane wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache, Wordpress, nginx, node.js, coffeescript, ruby, rails, python, django, chromium, firefox, webkit, drupal, varnish, memcached, 7zip, postgresql, mongodb, php, clang, wine, dosbox, vlc, virtualbox, truecrypt, calibre, audacity, openoffice, cygwin, flac, ogg, perl, synergy ...

I'm both enjoying and cringing at all of these HNers indicating that Linux is the only major exception they can think of(thus open/free source is obviously a novelty), when many of our livelihoods likely depend on these products.

It just feels like fighting the same battles from 15 years ago. How long will it take? Before people stop trotting out the argument that "you gotta charge for everything! otherwise how does stuff get made eh?" It's old guys. It's been debunked a billion times over.

Open source ain't communism, nor is it doomed to failure. Even if you bind your hands to make it legally impossible for you to control the distribution of your work that doesn't mean that you can't make money off of it or that you must stop working.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#168

Post by icebraining » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:39 PM UTC

zasz wrote: post #78

InclinedPlane wrote: post #27

I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…

OP said that there would be less of it, not that it would be nonexistent. Linux is probably an exception, and not the rule, and it is such an exception that large companies are willing to subsidize it. I've been looking for some good sound editing software, and the only solution I could find that was good at altering tempo without creating weird artifacts was closed-source and proprietary. I've also rarely played any…

Asking musicians to produce music for nothing more than the sheer joy of it is exploiting them, and impolite

Don't fall for their mental trap: questioning copyright doesn't mean that: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...

besides. If someone gives you value, you ought to give value back.

And people shouldn't be dicks, doesn't mean we should make it a crime. Morality != Law.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#169

Post by davidw » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:39 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #158

davidw wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're actually charged much - more that they employ some experts who work on the software. It's pretty difficult to charge for goods that are not scarce.

I don't get the difference? The NSA hiring experts to work on SELinux extensions is the same as the NSA paying some experts for the SELinux extensions.

The scarce good in this case is the experts' time. In some cases, this works out well as a way to create open source software: if there's a big entity with lots of cash, who really needs that thing and can pay for it in its entirety. But what's being charged for is generally the developer's time, not the software. This is easy to see because, whereas the NSA may pay for SELinux, the next person down the line does not pay for it - they're getting it for free.

This has important implications in terms of the ability to spread the costs around. With proprietary software, it's possible to do so: charge 100 people $10 instead of charging one person $500 and letting the other 99 people copy it for free. You make more money, and in some cases, the market will clear when it wouldn't for the single-payer model.

I think this actually shows up fairly clearly in what's open source and what isn't: stuff that would be a one-off consulting job in any case may or may not be, stuff that's more consumer-oriented is more often proprietary, and stuff that's used by lots of developers as infrustructure is quite often open source.

Re: Paul Graham has lost the plot

#170

Post by tikhonj » Wed, Mar 21, 2012, 7:40 PM UTC

seunosewa wrote: post #39

InclinedPlane wrote: post #27

I'll just cherry pick this gem here: "What would happen if creators couldn’t charge for their creations? The same as if you couldn’t charge for lines of computer code: there’d be less of it." Spotted the massive, gaping flaw in the argument yet? It's 2012, if you make this argument then I am done with you. Linux is how old? How much of the internet runs on it? Done. Edit: Wow, really? Why is this still a necessary ar…

Where would Linux be without Windows and Mac OS X to borrow ideas from?

Probably somewhere more efficient but with less useless (but admittedly cool looking :)) eye-candy.

The main reason common distributions have features similar to Windows and OS X is to make transitioning easier. Really serious people using e.g. Arch with XMonad are more efficient with very little Windows/OS X influence.

And hey, Linux could borrow those features even more easily if Windows or OS X were open source. Windows being open source would be complicated, but Apple is a hardware company and would work well enough with an open source OS at its heart.