Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 23:09:12 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1018213068.da8dcb@mired.org> Cc: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com>, Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix Message-ID: <3CAAAA98.E9D7EBE6@mindspring.com> References: <20020402113404.A52321@lpt.ens.fr> <3CA9854E.A4D86CC4@mindspring.com> <20020402123254.H49279@lpt.ens.fr> <009301c1da83$9fa73170$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15530.6987.977637.574551@guru.mired.org>
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Mike Meyer wrote: > There's no money in that, so why should anyone do it? In particular, > in an industry dominated by a company that gained that position by > shipping buggy products and making money on upgrades, there's no > incentive to do anything else. The people who do this are barriers to forward progress in the art and science of computer science. I really don't care how much money is involved. Not all companies operate this way, thankfully, but enough do these days that the future is seriously endangered by this (no other word for it) sociopathic behaviour. What we ereally need is tort reform, so that it's not possible to do this type of thing, and remain profitable. The two biggest things I would suggest are: 1) Remove all copyright and patent protections for software. Provide protection for software in the form of a seperate protection mechanism. My suggestion would be the one I've been suggesting for a decade now, the "S-Patent", where protection is granted for a much shorted period of time (e.g. 2-4 years), and is based on source code escrow, held by an archive to be made public after the term of the protection expires (e.g. publication by the Library of Congress or the U.S. PTO). 2) Imply in law a hold harmless for code placed in the public domain, so that licenses are not required to obtain this protection for authors. This would mean that a company couldn't put out crap, and then sit on their butts, never doing anything to improve their code. > The end result is that the only people interested in shipping a > bug-free product - as opposed to one that they can get people to buy - > are the people who aren't trying to sell the product. This isn't necessarily true. When I personally am paid to write code, then I try to ensure that I will never have to write that code again, since doing so will be a waste of my caluable time, and thus interfere with the achievement of my 10, 20, 50, 80, 100, and 200 year plans. The best way to do this is to write the stuff right in the first place, and map the entire problem space, such that any changes that become necessary in the future fit within the framework that is established by the initial code. > No, what makes a product successful is selling lots of copies. Being > crashfree doesn't do that *nearly* as well as convincing people that > there isn't an alternative. Right. It is cheaper to be anticompetitive than it is to be competitive. To be anticompetitive, you only have to violate antitrust and/or racketerring laws... to be competitive, you have to actually create something of higher value than what your compatition is shipping. > Last time I checked, Linux had more desktops than the Mac. Still a > small minority, though. I'd believe installs, but not desktops... ;^). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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