Read the article you linked - it's not the charge that he's opposing as such, but the ability to modify the software that is the key to Free Software. Whilst it's also prominently distributed at nominal charge, it's not the primary motivation to Open Source & Free Software.Originally Posted by indigo0086
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Mats
Compilers can produce warnings - make the compiler programmers happy: Use them!
Please don't PM me for help - and no, I don't do help over instant messengers.
Well that's not the only resource that you can hear Stallman's "Philosophy". There are others where he believes software is just an electronic version of software and therefore should not be charged for (I've heard the philosophy juxtaposed to the idea that math is free [I was confused a bit when I first heard that]). And not to mention his claims that microsoft are "The great satan". He's quite a character.
I like Linus a bit more, he's a little more chill.
True. The HD media DRM had the force of the media industry behind it. They could dictate terms to computer manufacturers because they have an alternative platform. The gaming industry doesn't really have an alternative (they could go console-only, but the losses would be too great). They probably don't have the power to push the TPM chip through.This scenario has caused more than one company to go out of business. Competition in teh software industry is too high for any company with their feces amalgamated to risk using the TPS reports, damn sorry again, TPM chips.
All the buzzt!
CornedBee
"There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
- Flon's Law
There is only one sure fire way to end piracy: Make it so there is no market for it. Of course there is no easy way to do that.
brilliant.
Closed systems offer no sure protection, but they make it harder and more expensive to create or use illegal material.
the chip is a good idea. And I would think twice before calling it ridiculous. Again, there are some domains where it may make sense. The ball is then passed to the software side... will they take advantage of it? No?
Scenario:
- Computers being sold with the chip aimed at offices.
- Software vendors provide their software versions as normal (Home, Professional, Enterprise, LLite, etc...). In the presence of the chip this software activates its security code and takes advantage of it. If no chip exists, softare behaves normally.
Far fetched? Only if we consider the chip is patented and probably the maker would request huge amounts of money from software vendors. But not so much if the necessary technology is made available by someone in a garage...
I know for a fact many companies would love a way to stop the introduction of illegal software in their offices.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
Where I did my internship last year they could monitor everything that was being installed. Dont know with which software it was done anyhow, a person who was in charge of software distribution etc would get a warning message as soon as someone installed some software (software that was not in some kind of list that contained all the legally purchased software from that part of the company/office).
It's not a way to stop piracy but it sure was a good way of controlling it in an office environment.I still remember the day I installed some free text editor -textpad I think- and 30 minutes (and a reboot - it was on a windows xp) later this guy jumps into the office yelling at me that Notepad is by default on the windows xp installation so "why bother installing another text editor", the guy probably never heard of syntax highlighting etc, but still it proved that the system really worked.
Probably worked by having some script being run at startup and communicating with the AD (since that was also the way they pushed new software onto the systems). Again, its probably easy to just have the script not run on startup or something, but then again, a random poll from some server would still be able to do this.
Bottomline: every system either has a flaw that can be used to go around it.... be it programatically and by using the correct way around it, or by spending enough time on the way to go around it... reminds me of the chinese wall ... you can try to bust it at any random spot, o try to find the weak spot which might take longer, or walk around it which might even take longer.
Last edited by GanglyLamb; 05-27-2008 at 02:01 PM.
I'm glad work doesn't check my computer that closely. I have a lot of free (legally) software that makes my job easier. I have absolutely no problem with finding a tool and installing it when I need to. The only sucky part is when the software needs admin rights to do the install
At my internship we have admin rights to our computersand we have free reign to install any legal software which we deem necessary.
I don't seem to recall anywhere where I didn't have admin rights. However, if some work environment is ran on *nix machines, it would make a lot of sense to not provide employees with that level of access.
Meanwhile, not allowing the installation of any software is perhaps a little too extreme, but each company is free to employ their own strategies, being that gargantuous measures may indeed make sense in some environments. But in those a certain level of freedom is allowed, pirated software tends to spread like bush fire.
Originally Posted by brewbuck:
Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.
I think the industry could make up some of the money by discontinuing fruitless research into anti-piracy algos and systems that end up being broke in a day or so. What a waste of money.
Whoever sold the game and software companies on this copy protection stuff is going to the bank laughing all the way. It does not prevent people from copying the software and it costs a fortune to put on the disc. The only people that copy protection actually works for are those who don't illegally copy software in the first place which means the company using the copy protection has gained nothing.
So take the thousands spent on copy protection and invest it into research and development. Copy protection is utterly pointless since it can be thwarted at any time.
I work for the stateAt my internship we have admin rights to our computers
I couldnt do my job without admin rights. None of the software I write could install for testing. I agree about wastign money on copy protection, unfortunatelyteh peole makign the big decisions don't understand the technology, btu they read an article in wired magazine and now think they are 'teh 1337 haxor'.I'm glad work doesn't check my computer that closely. I have a lot of free (legally) software that makes my job easier. I have absolutely no problem with finding a tool and installing it when I need to. The only sucky part is when the software needs admin rights to do the install
Last edited by abachler; 05-27-2008 at 08:15 PM.
Why would the OS matter? It's not like you're logging in to some sort of server as root for your working OS, right?
Last edited by robwhit; 05-27-2008 at 09:12 PM.
The point is that in *nix systems you can do most necessary things without root access, while in Windows most of the things need it.
Not sure about it, but I guess that's what he meant...
"The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore
