worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (06/21/91)
It's strange. I'm getting just old enough to see history repeating
itself. There is a faction of people on The Net who loathe any sort
of intellectual property. They think all of the information out there
should be usable by anybody, free of charge. Witness the FSF/LPF
crowd, and also the vituperation that Ed Vielmetti has suffered now
that he doesn't want to do all the comp.archives work for free
anymore.
All of this reminds me of the Hippie Movement and New Left of the late
1960's. Their watchword was "Property is a crime!" And their
arguments were exactly the same: If we all stopped worrying about who
owned what and just did the productive things were doing *anyway*,
everybody would have more with less work. Which was quite true.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way in practice. The Hippie
Movement was financed by remittances from the hippies' parents, and
the world's only experiment in industrial socialism ("the Soviet
bloc") has just collapsed in poverty and despair. People don't work
unless there is something that they get out of it. Yes, you can get
volunteer effort (the FSF is a sterling example), but there is a
limit. Gnu Emacs was written by one person, but it's a "small"
program as programs go. The only ways to deliver incentives are via a
marketplace or via government grant. (You can imagine what the result
of leaving it up to the government would be like!)
Up until now, The Net has been like the Hippie Movement. We get a
great playground, while businesses and the government pay for it. The
trouble is that The Net is not just a plaything anymore. If we want
to have it become an "information infrastructure" for the country,
it's got to grow much, much larger than it is now, and it won't be
able to live as a parasite. It's got to go commercial, and that means
that people are going to have to pay for their usage.
So let's update our prejudices, stop screaming that intellectual
property is a crime, and start building The Net of the future, where
people will provide the really useful services that can't now be done
because they're too difficult to do with volunteer labor.
Dale Worley Compass, Inc. worley@compass.com
--
Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000,
illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies
of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?
-- williamt@athena.Eng.Sun.COM src@scuzzy.in-berlin.de (Heiko Blume) (06/22/91)
worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) writes: >Up until now, The Net has been like the Hippie Movement. We get a >great playground, while businesses and the government pay for it. The >trouble is that The Net is not just a plaything anymore. If we want >to have it become an "information infrastructure" for the country, >it's got to grow much, much larger than it is now, and it won't be >able to live as a parasite. It's got to go commercial, and that means >that people are going to have to pay for their usage. well, not really commercial, but it must become self-financing. i received quite some flames when i started selling free software on tapes to finance my archive, but that's the way to go for individual's projects, since one won't get enough donations. keeping the net (news & mail) going, however, is surprisingly cheap if enough individuals get organized: i now pay ~$14 for a full news feed and mail plus local phone call charges. through a sort-of semi-commercial thing a 64Kbit isdn line to the german backbone will be installed soon. several project like that are currently active in germany and are in the process of conglomerating into a whole organizational unit. not bad for a bunch of (mostly) private people, eh? -- Heiko Blume <-+-> src@scuzzy.in-berlin.de <-+-> (+49 30) 691 88 93 [voice!] public UNIX source archive [HST V.42bis]: scuzzy Any ACU,f 38400 6919520 gin:--gin: nuucp sword: nuucp uucp scuzzy!/src/README /your/home
peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (06/25/91)
In article <WORLEY.91Jun21102706@sn1987a.compass.com> worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) writes: > Witness the FSF/LPF crowd... Watch it. There are lots of us who detest the GPV shenanigans but are in complete agreement with the LPF. Don't paint with too broad a brush, or you'll alienate many folks who would otherwise agree with you. Like me. -- Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180; Sugar Land, TX 77487-5012; `-_-' "Have you hugged your wolf, today?"
worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) (06/26/91)
In article <BR5CC=G@xds13.ferranti.com> peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > Witness the FSF/LPF crowd... Watch it. There are lots of us who detest the GPV shenanigans but are in complete agreement with the LPF. Don't paint with too broad a brush, or you'll alienate many folks who would otherwise agree with you. First, what's "GPV"? Well, from where I sit (Boston, the epicenter of Gnu-ism), the activists in FSF seem to be the same as the activists in LPF, i.e., old wine in new bottles. Maybe there are people who support the LPF's objections to certain aspects of the current intellectual property laws but aren't against intellectual property entirely. But I've never heard one speak! (Until now.) That's what makes me extremely leery of supporting LPF, even though I agree with some of its causes -- I don't want to advance Stallman's software socialism, which I consider much more dangerous than user interface copyrights. Dale
hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall) (06/27/91)
In article <WORLEY.91Jun26105721@sn1987a.compass.com> worley@compass.com (Dale Worley) writes: [...] >Well, from where I sit (Boston, the epicenter of Gnu-ism), the >activists in FSF seem to be the same as the activists in LPF, i.e., >old wine in new bottles. Maybe there are people who support the LPF's >objections to certain aspects of the current intellectual property >laws but aren't against intellectual property entirely. But I've >never heard one speak! (Until now.) Don't know what this has to do with comp.archives.admin, nor why I was just reading this group, but there are plenty of LPF'ers who are not at all in the FSF camp. Witness Richard Gabriel, technical director of Lucid, Inc. (A Common LISP house; Sun Common LISP is really Lucid), Guy Steele of Thinking Machines (author of _Common LISP, the Language_ and a central designer of Common LISP), and Patrick Henry Winston, Director of the MIT AI Lab (but also an author of the proprietary San Marco LISP Explorer that Gold Hill markets). Also, I think the new LPF president is a very well-known "mainstream" software guy, with long ties to the Defense industry and other things that FSF wouldn't like. - Marty ------------------------------------------------------ hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu, hall%aplcen@jhunix.bitnet, ..uunet!aplcen!hall (setf (need-p 'disclaimer) NIL)
gjc@mitech.com (George J. Carrette) (06/27/91)
In article <1991Jun26.171330.3590@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu>, hall@aplcen.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall) writes: > Also, I think the new LPF president > is a very well-known "mainstream" software guy, with long ties to the > Defense industry and other things that FSF wouldn't like. Sounds like you are trying to paint FSF people as your typical left-leaning america-last kind of guys. What do you base that on? Given what I know of RMS's work on defense-industry funded projects I very much doubt that any anti-defense-industry posture in FSF, if it exists at all, would be influenced from the top-down.