I wrote this after the 'PG has lost the plot' thread. I didn't like the title, but the content was fairly good. People really seem to have trouble visualizing "that which is not seen":-)
Bravo and bingo. These are the exactly the frustrations I tend to feel as an unpaid, open-source coder.
And the next level of the phenomenon is that the entire software industry has shifted its business model to avoid having to compete with piracy or open-source. There are now, to my knowledge, two major for-profit companies building their own PC operating systems: Microsoft and Apple. There are four or five building mobile operating systems: Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Google, (maybe) Symbian. The number of for-profit IDEs and programming platforms is still mostly healthy, but much, much smaller than it once was.
"That which is not seen"? That is, the effect of this privative of profits on the real world? Almost whole fields have shifted over into the domain of unpaid, spare-time open source work. Thousands, millions of man-hours are expended for no salary and no equity.
Think what would happen if all the open-source programmers (paid and unpaid) went on strike. Now you're realizing the economic value of open-source code that goes completely uncaptured by its producers.
Yes, the result is that less gets done, because everyone has to find day-jobs, and that the software industry has changed almost entirely from product business models to service business models.
Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to your web-service? You say that your contacts and relationships are what really makes your web-app worth something, but frankly, that's a load of crap. I'm sure there are some starving Chinese coders who would love to steal your code and your data, bring up their own web-service identical to yours (but in Chinese), get a few million users, and then translate theirs back into English for North American and European usage.
The "relationships and business expertise" excuse sounds much like what everyone said when America sent its manufacturing overseas: "We'll do all the high-value services and design and development work here." Well, no, the manufacturing was itself high-value and the other high-value points in the supply chain eventually followed it, and we're China's bitch now.
There is an imperative to enable value-creators to capture some portion of the value they create as cash. Otherwise the entire foundation of not only capitalism but all possible market economies breaks down into mush.
I think it might be instructive to think of what the world was like before the idea of letting people who create intellectual products maintain some ownership of (and therefore be more able to make a living from) their work:
- Serfdom was still legal in most of Western Europe.
- Professional artists occupied the same social rung as prostitutes.
- An intellectual professional's primary option for making a living off his (that pronoun being sufficient for the era) work was patronage.
- The vast bulk of intellectual output served the primary purpose of glorifying the political and religious Powers that Be.
Of course that doesn't imply that the current copyright and patent law isn't enormously out of hand, or that it doesn't largely function to the detriment of creative professionals thanks to the grotesque ways in which it has been amended over the past three or so centuries. But the basic idea is admirable, and it can and should be salvaged.
I can play this game too: you know what the software industry was like before Microsoft and Apple? EVERYTHING was open source. When you bought a program (if they didn't throw it in for free with the bloody expensive hardware) you ALWAYS got source code. People still sell open source software; I've never understood why people think that commercial software is incompatible with open source. It isn't.
Everything was open source, but "everything" wasn't much. There was no VisiCalc, no WordStar, no Sierra adventures. Bill Gates's packaged software business model allowed a lot of new software to be created.
your own statement explains why it was like that: because software was just a small commodity passed along the real stuff (the hardware). Not much of an industry there...
??? What utopian world did you live in? Before Microsoft and Apple was before the Internet. Open Source was a dream, everything was proprietary, software engineers were just Coders.
What does it even mean to say "When you bought a program..." in the context of Open Source? Of course if you paid for it, it isn't open source.
The very GNU GPL itself explicitly allows code licensed under it to be sold for money. What makes you think that code transferred for money cannot possibly be Free?
Everyone always says this, but the majority of the community is very much against you making money on it and will destroy any chances if you making any sort of profit by releasing the source for free (which is allowed under the license).
What times you are talking about? Professional creators - like composers, poets, etc. - existed long before Berne Convention. Of course, then conditions were different than they are now - J.S. Bach had to write a new cantata every week as the condition of his employment, and also teach Latin and singing to the young. Of course, what was good enough for J.S. Bach is definitely can not be good enough for a person named something like "Jay-Z" or "50 Cent", as the latters' art is much more valuable for the society than Bach's.
As for serving Powers That Be - most of the creative people do it right now, only Powers changed. Some time ago, most disposable income was in the hands of aristocracy and later rich merchants. So they were served. Now due to huge technological advances pretty much everybody has disposable income - so artists cater to everybody. Some of them still cater only to the richest, of course - everybody has his niche. But except for the distribution of the disposable income, not much changed.
Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to your web-service?
This exactly.
It's easy for a community oriented around mostly around things like webapps, SaaS, enterprisey stuff to hop on the anti-IP bandwagon. It just so happens that there's no convenient ways of pirating their software.
It doesn't "just so happen". SaaS and web-apps arose deliberately on the marketplaces as a way of producing software that could not be pirated without actually getting past firewalls and cracking private servers.
Nothing would happen if somebody stole their software. Exactly nothing. You think if you somehow copied Zuckerberg's hard disk in 2004, you'd have the billion-dollar business now? No, you'd have a pile of 8-year-old useless code. The code doesn't matter, the people building the company and writing that code to accomodate specific (and rapidly changing) needs matter.
As to 2, If you code, it's a very hot job market out there right now.
You make a lot of what seem like handwavey notions that OSS coders should get paid or go on strike or something like that without really convincing why.
Most professional coders know what they use daily has some strong OSS roots (then there are other branches which have little involvement there). A subset of them do work on them.
The fact people make stuff in the evening that happens to be OSS is often a sign of they like to program not some economic crime.
OS kernels. Linus used to work for Transmeta (sorry if I misspelled the name) as a chips-and-assembly guy before they got enough charity funding to put him on full-time Linux kernel coding, remember? He started the kernel when he as a Master's student in Finland, too. It took until the late 2000s (after having started in 1992 or so) for the creator of Linux to be put on full-time payroll working on Linux.
>As to 2, If you code, it's a very hot job market out there right now.
It's a very hot job market but very, very specialized. I cannot tell you how many things I've applied to and never heard back, gotten interviews with and been turned down for having the wrong skills (ie: C, C++, Java, Scala instead of Ruby on Rails, HTML+CSS, iPhone, Android), been turned down from for no given reason whatsoever, been turned down from because I had admitted to applying to PhD programs (and that was simply the coolest company I ever loved interviewing with that turned me down like this, and a HN-featured start-up too!), and just generally not had offers forthcoming.
Honest to God, if you'd like to see my resume so you can tell me what the fuck's wrong with me that's creating this pattern, I'll send it to you, have at it.
Oh, and then there's the companies with broken jobs websites. There's nothing I hate more than trying to apply for a job I'd love and finding myself facing a page that says, "Oops, an unexpected error has occurred!"
Just a data point for you to consider - US and China have roughly equal manufacturing output now, despite US being in recession last years and China having 4 times more people. That is if we compare whole population, if we compare manufacturing sector it is 10 times difference in employees. So US workers right now are on average about 10 times more productive than Chinese workers (note I do not mean to imply anything bad about China or Chinese people - it's just statistical facts that do not reflect on anybody personally :). I would not describe this situation as "we're China's bitch" just yet.
Prooflink: http://www.manufacturingdigital.com/news_archive/tags/us/chi...
Of course, China would improve. I hope so would US.
Then imagine the Indians, or the Germans, or (to a much lesser extent) the Israelis. The point is, what if someone says, "My comparative advantage will be that I steal your code and localize it for people who don't speak your language"? Baidu is Chinese Google, Wallah is Israeli Yahoo. Once you've got web designs out in public, or important algorithms like PageRank in published research papers, these supposed "trade secrets" to running a web-service are actually dead easy to copy/steal.
The only reason Google doesn't feel the pain from Baidu is that Google never depended on China as their primary market. While we're talking about the Chinese versus other nationalities, by the way, the Chinese currently share the attribute of many rising superpowers (including, in its day, the USA): complete disrespect for "intellectual property" as subordinate to actual production.
Baidu and Wallah did not "steal code" from Google and Yahoo. You can argue they "stole" ideas of search and portal, but that would imply there's ownership of these concepts and it belongs to Google and Yahoo - which is wrong on both counts, both ideas existed long before their implementations by current kings of the hill, and nobody owns them.
If you think copying Google is "dead easy", you're well on the way to become a multi-millionaire. I've tried recently a number of emerging search engines, and none of them is as good as Google, despite the fact that copying PageRank is supposed to be dead easy. On the other hand, I'm sure Google's understanding of Chineese or Hebrew or Russian is not perfect and specialized engines can do much better (I know about Yandex on Russian market, but I'm sure there are more).
There's a place on these markets for much more than one player, so treating everybody being in the same search engine market as Google as "stealing intellectual property" makes zero sense. It's like treating everyone that makes smartphones as "stealing Apple's intellectual property". Maybe some hardcore Apple fanboys think that way, but this is not useful for anybody but them and Apple, certainly not for the consumers or for the public.
As for "respect for intellectual property", I don't see why Chinese should necessarily respect artificial mental constructs that were erected by Western politicians in order to produce some utilitarian value. These things are defined as utilitarian, the only reason that is being argued of why somebody can use the idea and somebody else can not is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". If Chinese do not agree that this would promote Progress and useful Arts for them, why they should feel obligation to respect it?
>As for "respect for intellectual property", I don't see why Chinese should necessarily respect artificial mental constructs that were erected by Western politicians in order to produce some utilitarian value.
I don't either. But you've missed my fundamental claim: lacking any kind of "intellectual property" enforcement, pretty much nothing stops people from treating the code for web-services the exact same way they treat the code for video games or office suites: avast ye maties!
I didn't miss it - I actually addressed it in another comment. While stealing your website code would be unpleasant, it doesn't really matter that much. First, backend website code is not protected by copyright because it's not published - only the design is. Second, do you really think Facebook became Facebook because they found right magic color and right column widths to be successful, and if only you could use the same design you would be billionaire? This is obviously nonsense - Facebook success is composed of many factors, design being very very minor part.
As for DDG, I used it for a month to test, and unfortunately had to go back to Google - for my loads, its quality proved to be inadequate, Google found what I needed in more cases than they did. It may be because usually I search for very easy and obvious stuff. I would like to say my coworkers "why, you still use Google? Man, it's so 2000s... It's 2012 now, use something that's not ancient!" Unfortunately, it's not the time yet that I could do that.
But wouldn't you need to distribute for copyright protection to kick in? Copyright is exclusive right to distribute. If you just stole the code and keep it, you can be liable to various crimes, but I don't see how copyright infringement can be one of them.
