Re: Java and avoiding software piracy?
"Twisted" <twisted0n3@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1184387301.232166.3430@d55g2000hsg.googlegroups.com...
On Jul 13, 12:16 pm, "Oliver Wong" <ow...@castortech.com> wrote:
That's not necessarily true. Your day job might not be paying
enough,
and yet it's the best you can get, and so you need to supplement it
with a
second or third job. If programming software is a part of your
skillset,
then there's no reason not to consider writing software for profit as
one
of those second or third jobs.
Hire out your programming expertise then. There is always work for
people with a talent for coding.
Yes, that's exactly what I was suggesting, and seems to run counter to
your "let's give all software away for free" philosophy.
Depends on your definition of "coercive and extortionate", I suppose.
My definition isn't unreasonable. It includes things like one party
interfering with a consensual transaction between a second party and a
third party, especially if there's a financial motive such as
preventing competition. (In this instance, the second party is letting
the third party examine an object the second party (legitimately)
possesses, and construct a duplicate of that object with their own raw
materials and time and on their own dime.)
It's the *other* stuff that your definition includes which worries me.
Stuff like charging money for the right to use a specific software
program, for example.
Take
the computer game industry, for example. Most games are one-shot deals.
You won't have enterprises buying support contracts. You won't have
users
paying for support. You won't even have users expecting continuous
updates
over the next few years of the product. There are some exceptions to
this
(Blizzard, for example, semi-regularly releases updates to their game
Diablo), but most games are play-once-and-then-forget-about-forever.
Well I can see a few options here that don't involve coercive
activities and can still make you money.
* Make it a multiplayer game. Give the game away. Open a pay service
for online play; playing through your service requires access to your
servers and that in turn costs you bandwidth and electricity and the
like; you can certainly meter this access and make money this way. Of
course, if third parties can't create compatible servers then you are
doing something anticompetitive and sneaky!
The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.
* Make a game for your own enjoyment. Your own future enjoyment of the
game is the "payment".
The success rate for this business model seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.
* Say you have a great game idea but need financing to create the
game. If enough money is pledged you'll make the game and give it
away. If not enough is pledged by a certain date you'll return the
money already received and won't make the game. This amounts to being
paid up front to write the code, so you don't lose money if it's
easily copied once it's released.
The success rate for this business models seems to be much lower than
the traditional model.
And so on... hopefully, you see the pattern here. Recall once again
that businesses are about making money, and given two business models, one
which is more successful than the other, it seems to make sense that most
businesses would pick the more successful one.
I mean, it's great that you're able to come up with alternative
business models. But the business people aren't really *looking* for
alternative business models. They're plenty happy with the model they
currently have (the one of selling games with copy protection). *You're*
the one who's unhappy with that model, and I'm not sure you have enough
clout to sway the entire game industry.
You could try voting with your wallet and boycotting games with
copyprotection. But for what it's worth, there exists games out there for
which I consider the copyprotection scheme sufficiently unobtrusive that
they have a minimal impact on my purchasing decision. Therefore, I am
likely in the foreseeable future to continue buying games that have copy
protection on them. And I suspect there is a significant market who will
continue to do so as well.
I wanted to highlight one particular business model you mentioned:
* Demo it to rich people until you sell one copy for a bazillion
bucks. Retire. Don't care if the rich guy then spreads copies around.
Some people have piles of money and nothing better to do with it than
be the first ever to do/have something.
This business model is laughably ridiculous. It's comparable to having
"Win the lottery" as your retirement plan. By including this within your
list, you've weakened the credibility of the rest of the list. IMHO,
anyway. Go for quality of ideas, not quantity.
Different games take different approaches to restricting access to the
software.
I hate all gratuitous restrictions on access. If I can pay the
marginal cost of reproduction of something I see no reason I should
not be permitted to have one if I want it, and a grave moral wrong in
withholding access to something for someone who can pay its marginal
cost.
Everybody has a different code of ethics and moral compass. To me, if
someone tells me "I'll only let you have A if you promise not to do B",
and you say "Fine", and then take the A, and then later go ahead and do B,
you have committed a "grave moral wrong" in my eyes:
"I'll only tell you this secret piece of information (which happens to
take the form of a series of zeros and ones) if you promise not to tell
anyone else."
"Ok, I promise."
"Here it is (binaries for a video game)."
"(torrents it and shares it with the world)."
"Hey, what give? You promised you wouldn't tell anyone else my
secret."
"Information wants to be free! You're oppressing me!"
[...]
It was recently fashionable to demonize Microsoft, such that a lot of
accusations thrown their way was unfair. I think that trend has died a
little bit, but I still see the occasional blogs with one entry saying
"Vista sucks" and followed by another entry saying "I've never tried
Vista
and I never will".
This probably has a lot to do with the fact that Vista sucks, and I've
never tried Vista and I never will.
Seriously. It does suck.
Maybe it was too subtle, but the implied question was "How could you
possibly make an informed decision about whether a piece of software sucks
or not without having actually ever tried it?"
First of all, anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
experiencing.
No, it makes more sense to regard them as emotionless, cold-blooded
sociopaths, since that is what all large corporations are.
You use the keyword "No", but you seem to be agreeing with me. What do
you *really* mean?
[...]
I said they couldn't compete and decided to try to use their
money to buy laws to effectively outlaw competing with Microsoft. This
much is provable fact (they can't compete -> observe Linux server-side
market share eating Windows alive; ditto Apache vs. IIS and JSP vs.
ASP;
Your evidence doesn't support your assertion: "Compete" doesn't mean
"Win". Maybe they are simply competing and losing.
I think a much more accurate model is to think of corporations as a
perfectly rational utilitarian whose sole metric is profit.
This fails to explain Arthur Andersen and Enron, Worldcom, Sony's
brain-dead rootkit shenanigans, and lots of other things.
It wasn't intended to explain those things. But if you want an easy to
grasp explanation: the corporations don't have perfect information. You
can be perfectly rational, but make the in-hindsight-wrong-decision if you
don't have perfect information.
Your
"perfectly rational utilitarian" has an IQ inversely proportional to
the CEO's annual salary. I doubt they actually are perfectly rational.
Note that I didn't say they were perfectly rational. I said that
thinking of corporations as "a perfectly rational utilitarian" is a "much
more accurate model" than an emotional anthromorphic entity who bases its
decision mostly on rage, envy, fear, etc.
A rational RIAA would embrace music sharing and monetize music some
new way.
I suspect it's actually vastly more complicated than that, but I'm too
lazy to explain all the details right now, so I won't be surprised if you
continue to believe this.
In practise, companies often show some degree of dominance by
the will of one or a few people exhibiting all the usual human
foibles. Cartels more so than individual companies; they can be
downright schizophrenic and for obvious reasons. Ultimately however
they often lust for power and control, and obviously so, regardless of
whether this is rational.
I think you have a different definition of rational than I do. If they
lust for power and control (or to phrase it more formally, if their metric
is power and control), then doing whatever you can to maximize power and
control is the most rational thing a utilitarian can do.
The problem, I think, is that you're applying your metrics to the
actions of another entity with a different set of metrics, and they aren't
maximize their score in your game, and so you suspect they must be
irrational, when actually they may be maximizing their score in their own
game.
[...]
There's no good vs evil, moral vs immoral issues to enter into the
consideration of a
coporation's "mind". It's solely about what action can maximize
profits.
Explain irrational decisions like outsourcing all of your support to
Brokenenglishstan, with the result being customers abandon you in
droves?
(1) Profits exceed costs.
(2) Imperfect information.
In fact, the guys that do this stuff are not doing it for the
benefit of the company's long term profits. They do it to get short
term profits or show decreased expenses in their own department, so
they get promoted and more stock options, so they can buy when the
next product is shipping and the stock jumps, sell right after, and
retire, leaving someone else holding the bag when the customer neglect
comes back to bite the company in the butt.
Are you implying that this is irrational behaviour, given the metrics
that the companies are applying to themselves?
Companies show some tendency to maximize short-term revenues, about
three or four months out (roughly one fiscal quarter, which cannot be
coincidence), and damn the long term consequences of their behavior.
Again, are you implying that this is irrational behaviour, given the
metrics that the companies are applying to themselves?
They act like spoiled children that have not learned empathy, more
than anything else -- little sociopaths with no more than a vague
sense of any time scale beyond a few months, and impulsively grasping
for shiny baubles and smacking at anything they don't like.
Recall my warning:
<quote>
anthropophormizing corporations is dangerous, because it
then becomes extremely tempting to assign emotions to them (e.g. fear,
jealousy, envy, anger, etc.) and then to try to make predictions about
their future behaviour based on what emotions they are supposedly
experiencing.
</quote>
(I see a lot of banners citing IIS is better than Apache, for example).
I don't. Must be Firefox's adblock. You really should get that plugin.
You seem to be under the assumption that I do not wish to see such
advertisements. On the contrary, this particular ad allowed me to be more
informed about the real world than you. ;)
[...]
On the other hand, I know some people who had pirated Windows XP,
but
are going to pay for Windows Vista simply because Vista is too much of
a
pain to pirate.
Fools -- they already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay
for a downgrade?
Your question is based on false premise, and thus is nonsensical.
Here's the information I'm guessing you want:
My friends already have a free copy of XP and are willing to pay to
replace it with Vista.
- Oliver