They really aren't, you're just trying to be a hipster and jump ahead of everyone else to where you think they're heading.

What's a hipster? I see the term thrown around quite a lot, but I still haven't figured out what it refers to.

I don't particularly care for for jumping ahead. In fact I think that most likely things are heading to some place I'm not going to like, so I'm in no rush of getting there first.

OSS doesn't have anything to do with marketing though. That's just how Google does things.

OSS usually earns money through support and custom solutions.

Opinions about Google are starting to change.

On my part, I was never particularly crazy about them. I use the search engine, have an unused gmail account and that's about it. Right now I'm seriously starting to ponder how to avoid them as much as possible.

Unfortunately they have the one more or less decent phone OS left, so now I'm pondering if it's possible to get an Android phone devoid of anything Google related.

The insanity of the software patents seems to be finally blowing up in an extremely public way.

I really hope that the lawsuits against Apple result in very harmful for them consequences, ideally something ridiculous like forcing them to pull iPhones and iPads from the shelves.

Why? Because if that happens, there's no way it will stand. It will be discussed all over the world, and everybody will agree it's a crappy state of affairs. Maybe then some sanity can be introduced by eliminating them.

That might be a bit too optimistic, but still this is a perfect example of what's wrong with the system. At least it'll make a good explanation of why software patents are a bad idea, and should be kept out of the places that don't yet have them.

It won't cost Linux the desktop for the same reason why having to choose between Google Talk, AIM and MSN doesn't do that to the Windows desktop: those things aren't really significant and not new either.

Evolution vs Thunderbird doesn't matter, as they're pretty much equivalent for most purposes. Besides, a lot of people use gmail and don't really care about either. Then it's not like Thunderbird doesn't run on Windows, creating exactly the same choice.

Libre Office vs OpenOffice doesn't really matter at this point in time either, as the differences are tiny, and the file format is standard anyway. Long term there'll probably be a clear winner. I'm betting for Libre Office because that's what Ubuntu is shipping right now, and Oracle is a hulking behemoth.

But, there's a bigger thing here, and it's that all such discussions are ultimately pointless. The OSS world is fluid and distributed. No matter how much somebody might pontificate at great length about the need for unity, nobody is obligated to care.

Libre Office for instance, appeared for a good reason, and I doubt very much the developers that work on it will suddenly "see the light" and go back to trying to submit patches to Oracle, just because some guy wrote an article saying it "might cost Linux the desktop". I'd say that most developers don't really care. At least when I contribute patches to Linux software I don't do it because of some world domination long term goal.

I think what is needed is open standards. So long I can use whatever I like to do my work, why would I need to care about what the rest of the world uses?

"peanuts" is relative to what is needed, and what the donor can give, as well as the actual value of the contribution.

For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation intend to create social change. $100K to say, 200 schools would indeed be peanuts because it wouldn't change much of anything.

With Microsoft it's mostly that they can donate any amount they like. After all, they set the price on their software, and it's what they donate. Plus that kind of donation is mostly an investment. I've never heard of MS donating on anything that didn't imply more usage of MS tech.

As far as Bletchley Park is concerned: I've been there. It looks pretty good, and most of the restoration work seems complete and have been in a large part done by volunteers. So the main costs are that of maintenance, and for that $100K is a pretty good amount.

Pity it went to such a pointless use, though.

It was just a set of offprints -- meaning it's not the manuscript or an unique copy of something.

I'd much rather they used the money to maintain the buildings and recreate the hardware.

Then there's the weirdness of obsessing so much about a bunch of papers left by somebody who pioneered the digital computer. I think he'd be much better honored with high resolution, digital files.

Except the post is wrong, the article isn't about Oracle damaging the OSS community, it's about them damaging Java.

Releasing a JVM with a serious bug doesn't damage the OSS community. In fact it's an excellent way to give it more influence. Issues like these provide plenty incentive to fork.

The worst case for Oracle would be it goes the way it happened with XFree86: every distribution ships the Apache version, and everybody stops caring about the original project's existence.

I must be imagining working in a company that mostly works on GPL2 and GPL3 software.

Nothing in the GPL3 makes making money harder than the GPL2 does.

So I'll develop for a closed platform where I have the potential to keep my kids fed and invest in their college. And the community isn't openly hostile to the idea of me being successful.

That's perfect, I'll continue releasing GPL3 released software for precisely the same reason.

You see, I get my payment either via code or money. I get code if you comply with the GPL and release your improvements. I get money if you're unhappy with that and negotiate a different deal with me. You finding a way around the GPL2 that lets you technically comply while escaping its intent is a negative for me, so I have absolutely no reason to let that loophole stand. That's why I now license everything under the (A)GPL3.

Then I found about the terms, and lost all interest.

With the kind of crap included in TOS the only way I would get one is if they paid me for it.

As far as I'm concerned, if she wants herself to be addressed as "Lady Ada", then that's her real name for me. In fact I've never heard of Limor Fried before, while I have heard of Lady Ada. If she's forced to go by what it says in her documentation, I'm not going to know who is that

From what I hear in many places just using a different name is an acceptable way of changing it.

This isn't my real name either, so after hearing this I'm obviously not going to be on google+

Why a non-story? I have the data already, since I bought the game. The source code was what I was missing to be able to make some improvements I've been thinking of.

This is exactly what I wanted, and I didn't expect anything more than that.

If you're the same guy who keeps posting about this on the wolfire blog, just do a favour and stop complaining. If you don't see this as an opportunity for some improvements, then perhaps you're not really able to do any, and what you really want is free of charge game, but that was never promised in the first place.

On my part, all I wanted is the source, I got it, so I'm happy.

The outcome of the humble bundle couldn't have been better IMO, and I'll gladly contribute to any future initiatives of the sort.

I'm not going to reply to your whole post, because this conversation is tiring me, and it's now MORE than obviously you're never going to even attempt to support your initial statement no matter how long this goes on.

Disappointing. I was looking forwards to more of those "The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You" ;-)

Did you at least get that I don't pirate and that I actually do pay for stuff I like?

That is complete nonsense.

Explain why then.

Software isn't a physical product. More bits don't weigh more or take more to manufacture. If you did a full version already, you don't save money by stripping features, you spend it.

You missed the point. You said it was suicide, I said if it was suicide, then after 25 years of it they'd probably be dead and they aren't. You then wrote this response which has absolutely nothing to do with your initial statement (that DRM is suicide.)

I said "Fighting your own customer base is suicidal". There are degrees of that, some worse than others. The Mac guy did an extreme version, Games Workshop seems to be intent on achieving the same result in another way, and the rest are for the most part just screwing up enough to lose money.

Not only can you not debate, you can't even keep a single thread of conversation in your brain longer than 5 minutes, apparently. You're the enemy of rational thought and civil debate.

Heh, how dramatic.

Please take your own advice and reply to the whole post, then.

Nooooo, you said that Wikipedia said that it's the most pirated game of 2008. It's possible for it to simultaneously:
1) Be defeating casual piracy efforts with DRM
2) Be the most pirated game of 2008
Those two things aren't mutually-exclusive. Once again, you've shown absolutely nothing.

How come they aren't? What is your definition of "casual piracy"?

Mine is that you can easily grab it from BitTorrent. That's how the vast majority of it works.

Because DRM systems are often made less restrictive after the title is released; I can think of a dozen games where this has happened. It has nothing to do with the success of the DRM system, it only has to do with the vast majority of the game income coming in the first few months of sales.

So again, if it was working perfectly fine, why change it? To reduce the amount of DRM you need to pay programmers to do the work, make a new release, get it through QA, get it to various distribution points, etc. It's very real work and it costs money. So why on earth would they do it, if things were perfectly fine in the state it was released?

No it's not. The only way I can think of that it's easier is that the download size is smaller... other than that, it's exactly the same.

I already gave you an example: I have a "send by bluetooth" option on my phone, for any song. If somebody says "I want that one!" it's all of 5 seconds to start a transfer to their phone/laptop.

Game piracy is more involved, you need a suitable network, or to burn a CD, or to find a flash drive, or some such thing. In comparison, music piracy is so easy I can send songs to any random person anywhere. I could do it while standing in a train in the underground. No wifi, no wires, no messing with networking.

And it's also small enough to be emailed.

Wha-huh? Are you talking about the composer of the video game soundtrack? You lost me.

My mistake. Should have been "Really music artists are probably nervous as heck at the prospect of their music not selling"

It takes more than 10% additional effort to produce a version for another platform. I hate to break this to you, buddy, but we're in a world where game makers are contemplating not even making *Windows* versions in favor of consoles... I recall (and I'm not going to cite this, because you're an idiot) the makers of Modern Warfare 2 saying that even with the reduced feature-set, and piracy completely aside, the Windows version of the game barely broke even.

Wait, wait. They removed functionality and are suprised it's not selling? Well, duh.

"Dedicated server support is removed, eliminating the ability for mods or user-created maps to be incorporated. This removal has created anger among many PC gamers." -- well there you have the reason it didn't sell.

As a PC user, I don't want a crippled console game, I want a fully featured PC game.

Also, reduced feature sets in software don't actually save money. You have to code the feature anyway, it costs you extra money to make sure it can be left out and everything works without it. Software removes features for market segmentation, not because it somehow makes things cheaper.

If you think the law is not moral, then work to change the law. Don't just break it!

I'm sorry, do you have problems with reading comprehension? I never spoke of breaking the law. I repeat:

1. I buy games without DRM.
2. I don't buy those that have it (but don't pirate them).
3. I work to change the law, by for instance belonging to the Pirate Party and donating to the EFF, among other things.

Need me to repeat it another time?

Yeah, but they're already doing that... so you're really saying nothing!

Well, count me as one that's not satisfied then.

The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You!
Maybe it'll sink in this time.

Nope, you're not getting it.

The world doesn't revolve around me, but I can't possibly be the only person on the planet with this philosophy.

I belong to a set of people, "people who don't buy games with DRM". A game with DRM loses sales to people who belong to that set.

Yes, but you haven't shown that's what the game industry is doing. I under-fucking-stand your fucking assertion here, what I want is proof that the games industry actually is alienating 20% of their customers to combat 10% loss. Because the "Look In A Fucking Gaming Store" law says that ain't happening, and you've provided jack to back it up. And conversation is going in circles.

Well, your own example of Modern Warfare 2: Company pisses off potential customers by not including dedicated servers. People decide not to buy.

It's worked over the last 25 years. EA's had copy protection/DRM for at least that long. If it's so "suicidal," when does the death actually happen? Again, evidence suggests you're wrong.

No, it hasn't, it's been completely pointless for the last 25 years, because anybody who wanted to pirate the game did anyway. Piracy existed back when I was in primary school, and still exists now. Various anti-copy mechanisms didn't stop anything back then, and still don't. DRM is pointless.

Steam DRM works *towards* my interests, by letting me download my titles from any computer I'm sitting at at any particular time. It also doesn't negatively affect any of the other things you've mentioned. So... again, you're demonstrably wrong.

Well, this "humble pack" I posted about in the beginning, I downloaded as plain tar.gz files, linked from a website. No Steam required. Why would I want Steam, when I can do the same thing without any extra software? All I need is a web browser.

I can back them up freely, and not worry about Wolfire going bankrupt or bought out some years later. Those games will keep working so long I have a compatible computer, and with Linux that's not very hard.

You though, better hope there's no backwards incompatible Steam 2.0, and that Valve is still in business if you ever want to play an old game.

I played "One Must Fall 2097" recently. That game is from 1994, or 16 years ago. If I buy something today, I ensure I'll be able to play it in 2026.

The point is that EA hates their customers, so of course their DRM is customer-hating DRM. It's not a good example.

Well, your own MW2 example then. Do they hate their customers too?

How would what? Your question doesn't make sense. What are you asking?

Reduce casual piracy. How is it supposed to be doing that, given the miserable failure that it is? I give Spore as an example as how it's completely failing to do that.

Ok, so these three points translate as:
1) Not relevant to my point
2) Not relevant to my point (also incorrect)
3) Not relevant to my point

1. Why? It clearly failed to prevent any piracy.
2. Why? What do you mean it's not trivial? Go look on the pirate bay. Download, install a while later. My grandma could do it.
3. Why? Isn't it supposed to be preventing something? Given that it was the "most pirated game of the year" it clearly didn't do what it was supposed to.

You can doubt all you want, but EA hasn't gotten rid of DRM on any of their titles.

They did do some changes. Spore got the activation limit bumped, then released on Steam without the original DRM. Now I wonder, why would they relax those restrictions, if it wasn't losing them sales?

The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You

So? All I'm saying, I'm a potential customer, and one that they lost due to DRM. Can't be the only one. So any company doing it has to have in mind that it's going to lose them some sales.

Well, the difference is music "is contained in small files that are useful on their own." That's the fucking difference. You typed it in the same paragraph where you asked what the difference was, idiot.

Well, exactly. Music is much, much easier to pirate. So by all logic, un-DRMed music should be suicide. But hey, what you know, it's selling, and stores are dropping the DRM.

The cost of producing a song (the smallest unit of "music") is orders of magnitude less than the cost of producing an entire video game (the smallest unit of "video game"). That *is* the difference. The economics are all out-of-whack from that alone.

I don't think that has much to do with it. Making music is very risky. Record companies drive a hard bargain and many popular artists end up not earning much, or in debt. Really music artists are probably nervous as heck at the prospect of their game not selling.

Ok then let's go by Wolfire's numbers-- 10% is still massive loss. Christ. Am I debating with a kindergartner or something?

I disagree with the "massive" part. The numbers normally discussed suggest a 90% loss or something equally gigantic. This is peanuts in comparison. And again, the stats show that if you want 10% more, make a Mac version.

See what they have in common? BOTH OF THEM ARE IN VIOLATION OF THE FUCKING LAW YOU FUCKING DOUCHE.

I'm sorry, the "THE FUCKING LAW" argument never impressed me much. Some things are legal and shouldn't be, and some aren't and should be. Repeat after me: law doesn't equal morality.

Not that it's my argument anyway, but that point seemed to be worth making.

Whatever the percentage of A compared to B is, you're arguing in favor of assholes who have zero respect for the time and effort of game creators.

No, I'm arguing a very simple thing: ignore the assholes, and make your customers happy, because you know, those are the ones that actually pay you the money, and may choose not to.

Your argument, in short, is: "hey games industry, FUCK YOU."

No, it's "hey games industry, make games without DRM and I will buy them"

I'm NEVER going to agree with that, whether the number in A is 100%, 10% or 0.01%.

Then you have no business sense. Every retail business has to contend with things like product breakage, employees stealing the product, etc. The sane ones recognize that pissing off 20% of the customer base to stop 10% loss doesn't make financial sense, so while they do work against it, they avoid going completely nuts and having military security on the premises.

The same thing here. Too much DRM, and it annoys customers who decide not to buy, tell everybody around why they didn't, and in extreme cases file lawsuits. Things like that aren't a good way of earning money. Fighting your own customer base is suicidal.

If you don't like the law, then try to change the law.

On that already. Proud member of the Pirate Party.

My main interest is in reducing the length of copyright, opposing software patents, and opposing a piracy tax.

But you don't just go around breaking it at a whim because it's hard to get caught. Seriously, the rest of us are trying to run a fucking civilization here.

Please quote the part where I said I pirate anything. Hell, I even plugged a product on sale here because I liked the terms. And yes, I bought it.

If you think it's the "no sale" part of my "conditions" post, then that's not it. "No sale" means precisely that, no sale. I don't pirate it. I simply don't buy it, and spend my money on the DRM-less indie developers.

Then explain Slashdot. Are you brand-new here?

What's to explain? There are lots of people here. Some smart, some completely inane. More or less like everywhere else.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. You haven't acknowledged that it's possible to have DRM and not annoy customers. Of course, since you have an apparent IQ of 75, I guess I wouldn't have expected you to examine the problem from all angles.

It's not possible by definition. DRM always involves working against the owner's interest, by making duplication, reinstalling, running without a CD, internet access, etc difficult. The backlash against DRM is precisely because it's so damned inconvenient.

Yes, but Spore is an EA game. EA.

What does EA have to do with it? Without DRM it's still the same game, made by EA. Just runs with less trouble.

Ok, let's try this one more time:
The World Does Not Fucking Revolve Around You

Holy crap! I didn't realize!

Look, you came in here promising to prove a point. That point was this:
I'm saying companies would make more money if they spent less time on DRM, and more time on making their customers happy.

My evidence is the whole deal with Spore and the blog post from somebody who actually releases software.

Look, I now understand that you know nothing. You're just trying to defend the completely indefensible position that ripping-off people's work is perfectly ok.

Er, no. I repeat, I do not pirate anything. I do not buy games with DRM.

It's not my position that piracy is fine and dandy. It is my position that piracy is a relatively speaking small problem, not worth making such a huge deal of.

Please, just die in a fire. Said on behalf of everybody with a credit in a video game. Die in a fucking fire.

Haha, no. I stand by my opinion and will keep pushing it, whether you like it or not. Deal with it.