In today's news
Posted By matt on September 6, 2003
I hate Gilbert Gottfried. Hopefully the history channel will stop the “Tactical to Practical” ads with him in it soon.
In the news (culled from /.)
The RIAA wants to link pornography to Peer 2 Peer systems
Of course. They can't get people excited about anyone being able to download any song without paying royalties. But, this is the US, which means that as soon as you can come up with something that is “damaging to children” this becomes less about profit margins and more about “Can't someone please think about the children!”.
Like porn is damaging to children. I mean, in theory it might be damaging to the fabric of society – kids begin to think outside their normal Judeo-Christian upbringing and if they start to question sexual mores, what comes next? Additionally, kids might start to expect more than straight missionary. Tragic, isn't it?
Microsoft thinks possible Asian OS collaboration is unfair
Japan, Korea and China may develop an “alternative” Operating System, probably based on something like Linux, and freely available.
Microsoft thinks that this is unfair, because competition should take place in a free market, and let the market determine the winner.
The thing is, this is not a free market; Operating Systems are a market where, by all accounts, one player has over 90% control of said market. With that type of control, there can be no free corporate competition – no corporation can compete; they will be bought out or fail. This leaves two options:
1.) Governmental intervention to break up the monopolist (and we all see how effective that was).
2.) Competition from a company with a differing business model, or from a group with no business model at all. The latter constitutes the whole Free Software/Open Source/Linux movement. They can compete because they cannot be bought; at least not all of them. The former ends up being the Linux distribution companies, like RedHat, which really sell integration services for their software, or other companies like IBM, who make money off hardware, not software.
3.) Competition from a government agency. This works because the corporation cannot buy them, because the software is developed with taxpayer dollars. This is a hard sell in the US, because of the general feeling that a company's taxes shouldn't go to create competition for itself, and the idea that the public shouldn't fund development efforts which compete with free market products. However, this is kind of a silly argument. Indeed, more sinister things are done: taxes fund medical research projects at universities which are then auctioned off to the highest bidding prescription drug company, researched more, then sold back to the public at barely affordable prices. In comparison to that, a government agency saying that they're going to use tax dollars to develop a piece of software that is going to be released freely to the public doesn't bother me much.
Indeed, for Microsoft to be calling this “unfair” leads to a bit of free association. Hmm… pot.. kettle.. black…
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