On 5/15/2010 8:07 PM, somebody wrote:
> "Orchid XP v8"<voi### [at] devnull>  wrote in message
> news:4bec5247$1@news.povray.org...
>> Warp wrote:
>>
>>>    When did that happen?
>>
>> Ah... 2005? Maybe? I'm not completely sure.
>>
>>> It either happened a decade ago, or the clerk was
>>> really incompetent.
>>
>> It was definitely after 2000.
>>
>>>    Most people don't see anything wrong in copying commercial software.
>>> Not even if their attitude is put into doubt from a moral and ethical
>>> point of view.
>>>
>>>    What really grinds my gears with that kind of attitude is that it's
>>> honest, paying customers who are paying for the software these people
>>> are copying for free. These people may make up excuses in their minds
>>> that they are just "stealing from a big rich company", when in fact what
>>> they are doing is taking advantage of people who actually pay for the
>>> software (and keep the "big rich company" alive).
>>>
>>>    I buy software (mostly games, as everything else is open source), and
>>> part of that money I have earned and use to buy this software goes into
>>> paying for the people who steal the software. They are abusing *my* hard
>>> earned money. And that pisses me off.
>>
>> Yeah, I dislike illegally copying anything. Like, given the choice
>> between copying one of my dad's CDs or just buying one for myself, I'd
>> rather go buy myself one.
>>
>> It still makes me slightly nervous that I have an illegal copy of
>> Borland TurboPascal 5.5 for DOS. I mean, as if Borland is going to
>> *care* any more...
>
> Probably not, as it sold out its compiler tools to Embarcadero and got
> bought out itself. I hardly need to buy software anymore except for a few,
> and Delphi used to be one of them. For all else, there are free and OS
> alternatives. I do think, however, programmers have shot themselves in the
> foot with the free software movement. No other professional segment is
> foolish enough to give away their work for free.
>
Yeah. It makes much more sense to do what all those "paid" people do, 
which is publish something like a simple 2-3 function API for $200, 
which some hobbyist can't fracking afford to buy 20 libraries, just to 
do stuff that, yes, would take time to work out, but a) they would get 
screwed over anyway, due to patents, if they published their own, and b) 
would take, due to bad documentation, a lot of time to work out how to 
manage. If you honestly don't think that is an issue, consider that I am 
not talking about like.. buying a full application. I am talking about 
someone writing 20 lines of fracking code, which just happen to be very 
obscure, then selling it for $200, because they know that anyone else 
trying to do it would take weeks, or months, trying to either 
experiment, or hunt down what *vague* documentation exists on how to 
actually use the feature of the OS in question.

In other words, we are talking about the equivalent of the guy that 
invented the paper clip deciding to sell them at $200 a copy, instead of 
2 cents. What is foolish is an industry which, at this point, costs you 
20% of your profits, ***just*** to fend off "possible" litigation over 
patents, with 10,000 more vague, imprecise, and possibly infringed in 
the future, patents coming out **each day**. So, you had to pay out 20%, 
the next guy, in 10 years, 30%, the next, in 20 years, 40%, etc., all 
because they are vague, don't require a "physical" object to prove them, 
are not properly reviewed, and there are already so many of the damn 
things that it would take you 5 years to just search them all, if you 
did **nothing else**, including write the software you intended to, but 
had to do patent searches on *first*.

The FOSS people have even come up with a solution to this BS, straight 
out of the cold war, "Mutually assured bankruptcy". If you plan to 
patent everything in sight, we will start patenting everything it sight 
too, and when its all over, we will see how many companies, including 
ours, still exist, when we someone gets stupid, and we fire off all of 
the patent nukes."

If we had had patents back during the original colonies, or earlier, it 
wouldn't be Microsoft we would be complaining about, it would be 
something like "East India Company", and the mess of patents involved 
would, maybe, have made both world wars less likely, since those would 
have undermines business, but we would be damn lucky if we where not 
hearing headlines like, "5/16/2010: East India sues Hudson Bay over 
Babbage patents, ENIAC project put on hold.", if we where **lucky**.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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