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We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

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Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#221

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #212
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The claims define what a patent covers. And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works. And you're confusing the value of the market wit…

In the antitrust sense, the standard set upthread, market power requires pricing power, which inn turn requires that there is both some market demand and inefficient competition from market substitutes (which need not be identical) to constrain the monopolists ability to set prices and extract rents.

Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#222

Post by johnsu »

MrTonyD wrote: post #82
gaius wrote: post #6

Apple's OS X, which wouldn't be what it is if Linux hadn't already been the leading nix OS.* Well that isn't true. NeXTStep was built on the 68k from 4.3BSD which originated on the VAX. It has no lineage in common with Linux, and in fact pre-dates it. And OSX now is by far the most popular workstation Unix. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg

Well, since I worked on the team moving NeXTstep to the i386 family at NeXT, I can say with certainty that Linux played no role at all. We had copies of ATT UNIX and BSD UNIX which had portions already running on Intel (so we didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel.) There was some discussion about which UNIX we should be using on Intel in order to move it all to Mach - but the easy path was to build on some ear…

"open source" didn't exist during the time period you're talking about.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#223

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dragonwriter wrote: post #211
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it. And in the patent case it doesn't .

Sure it does; there's no pricing (and therefore market) power if the mechanism, however novel and eligible for protection, has alternatives with equal utility.

> Sure it does; there's no pricing (and therefore market) power if the mechanism, however novel and eligible for protection, has alternatives with equal utility.

That's kind of the point. A patent by its nature has zero value without market power.

Contrast this with actual property. If you have wheat or copper, you have no market power, it's a pure commodity market, but people will still pay you something for it.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#224

Post by jsprogrammer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #202
jsprogrammer wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain where I must contradict the parent post.

Then thank you for agreeing with me?

It just seems like, if someone is being paid to program, as in your example, the BLS would count them as such.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#225

Post by pasxizeis »

scrollaway wrote: post #216
microDude wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sir, have some interesting stories to tell.

After browsing that user's comment history, it certainly seems like he's trying very hard to have some interesting stories to tell. Make of that what you will.

I second that.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#226

Post by Grishnakh »

vacri wrote: post #201
Grishnakh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So many years ago, nobody expected anything to take the place of AOL. Of Yahoo. Of MySpace. Those giants have fallen because someone decided to do something. Oh please, this is a terrible comparison. AOL was constantly mocked by general internet users, and finally died simply because it became obsolete thanks to other ISPs, web services like Gmail, etc. All of which are big companies. Yahoo died (it's dead now, but…

> MySpace died (again, another zombie) because of the rise of Facebook, which again, is another huge company. Well... now it's a huge company. It's not like Facebook was a pre-existing massive corporation that decided to pivot and 'do this social media thing'.

Fair enough, but they were a profit-seeking company, and a centralized, proprietary one at that. It wasn't some kind of open-source service that you can download and run on your own server that conquered MySpace; it was a company that started small (serving only college students at first) and hired employees and grew.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#227

Post by dragonwriter »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #221
dragonwriter wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the antitrust sense, the standard set upthread, market power requires pricing power, which inn turn requires that there is both some market demand and inefficient competition from market substitutes (which need not be identical) to constrain the monopolists ability to set prices and extract rents.

Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.

Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#228

Post by bbcbasic »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #52
bad_user wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Users' biggest concern is that the software helps them achieve what they want to do. There are two problems with this assertion: (1) users often don't know what they want to do or what they'll want to do in the future and (2) users don't have the education to understand the freedoms provided by open source / free software or lack thereof. The situation is similar with automobiles. Until now at least people had the…

> An open-source software on the other hand might not be maintained in 10 years from now, but people (like a government agency) can always fund further development, if they really, really need it alive. Open source never dies. Government agencies aren't even the interesting example. The argument we usually get is that not everybody is going to be a programmer. Which, OK, sure, but maybe 10-20% of people are going to…

3 hours is an optimistic estimate. I'd double that a few times.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#229

Post by simonh »

Grishnakh wrote: post #167
simonh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relatively easily. Really. Your solution is for ordinary non technical people to become development managers and hire someone they don't know to do something they don't understand at their own financial risk.

How can they not understand it? If the consultant does his job, the software will work. Any idiot user can tell if the software actually runs or not. People hire mechanics to fix stuff all the time, even though they don't really understand how their cars work. They do know when their cars aren't working though. You're trying to convince me that ordinary people are utterly incapable of hiring experts to perform servic…

How do they know how much work the change will take? How will they know what a reasonable fee is for completing it? How can they verify the solution's quality beyond a limited demo in controlled circumstances? Even if the payment was kept in escrow by a third party, how can they be sure they draft the requirements for payment in such a way that they can avoid a technically valid but practically useless end product? They would be completely at the mercy of an unscrupulous developer.

Re: We won the battle for Linux, but we're losing the battle for freedom

#230

Post by simonh »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #194
simonh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solaris was a much bigger deal than Linux well into the OSX era. In fact if Linux had never happened Solaris would probably still be around and we'd be arguing about how much OS X owes to Solaris and whether it matters that SunOS predated NEXT but Solaris didn't.

The computer labs at my uni were Solaris workstations almost everyone hated them. I completed most of our assigned work using Linux on my home pc (along with a heap of other students in my class) this was in late 90's. Everyone was buzzing about Linux. The general attitude was 'Why would you run Solaris when you could just run Linux' Maybe in other segments Solaris was a 'big deal' but for students and developers Lin…

You are absolutely correct, Linux was a game changer. It deserves it's success. No argument there at all. That's not what we're talking about though. I don't believe Linux's success had any appreciable benefits for OS X. Linux came along far too late in the day to play that role.
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