Disqus - Latest Comments for mlinksva

Re: Europeans Obstruct Oracle/Sun Deal

mlinksva — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:26:46 -0000

MySQL has been forked, and not just by anybody -- the two most prominent forks, MariaDB and Drizzle, are from MySQL's founder and one of the preeminent developers, respectively. See http://lwn.net/Articles/329626/

Presumably the EU's objection is based on protecting SAP, IBM and other direct competitors to Oracle, not the interests of businesses using MySQL and derivatives. Just a guess.

Re: ALERT: Vulnerability Discovered in Adobe Acrobat and Reader

mlinksva — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:37:56 -0000

Good time to mention http://pdfreaders.org -- there are great alternatives to Acrobat.

Re: CC0: Waiving Copyrights

mlinksva — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:24:12 -0000

http://creativecommons.org/about/cc0 is the most important link to understand CC0.

Thanks for the post!

Re: Copyright and Coase

mlinksva — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:05:38 -0000

What copyright regime would best deal with the problem of transaction costs, while ensuring sufficient incentives to create?

One that paid attention to the much less defined "sufficient" part of the question.

Re: “I pledge to be a servant to our President…”

mlinksva — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:10:47 -0000

That would miss the pledge to be of service to bicep 1, Barack and bicep 2, Obama, at 3:19.

The baybee at 1:02 and a few other places looks like an alien.

Re: The Patent System is a Hashtable without a Hash Function

mlinksva — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:43:23 -0000

Regardless of lookup costs, there's a more fundamental problem with

"The patent system acts like a problem cache, storing the solutions to specific problems for later recall."

First there is the implication that solutions would not be stored (ie every time a problem is faced a solution would have to be found anew by the entity facing the problem) in absence of a patent system, which seems absurd.

Second, there is the implication that the content of patents (which are after all what is stored and looked up by the system) contain solutions in a form actually useful to people who have problems, which also seems absurd, though admittedly I know nothing about pharma development practice.

So, in any field, does the patent system actually serve as a solution lookup mechanism for practitioners (and not merely for the purpose of finding out whether a potential solution is patented!)?

Re: Van Lindberg on “Intellectual Property”

mlinksva — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:40:36 -0000

"markets produce insufficient creative expression"

The pro-copyright argument in a nutshell. A scary one for libertarians to be making.

Re: The U.S. Bureau of Fabulous Bitches - Three Big Problems: The Future of CC

mlinksva — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:16:55 -0000

Hi Tim, great commentary.

Re (1), realistically NC is not going away soon nor is uncertainty about its precise meaning, so I mean quite literally that people concerned would do better to find, use, and promote stuff that doesn't have the restriction. Wikimedia Commons is the example to follow -- they aren't letting NC hold them back -- rather they are ignoring all NC licensed content, or more to the point, exploiting Free content. There are lots of compelling reasons to avoid NC, well explained at Freedom Defined and in different contexts by/to the OER and Open Access communities -- imprecise definition is not one of those compelling reasons.

Re (2) I think better support for provenance is very important, but I'm not sure offering of liability insurance is. FLOSS seems to have gotten pretty far without much of it, and the really risk averse can always get a traditional agreement. I (and I suspect a large class of users) would benefit from a little better indication that the person offering a license is who they say they are and know what they're doing. Currently I look for things like a history of offering stuff under a public license, some kind of consistent and real sounding personality, and in the best of worlds, an explicit statement about why they are licensing the way that they are.

(3) is going to exist no matter what -- I don't think highly customized licensing a la Noank is a reaction to CC at all -- it is just a niche that CC isn't positioned to cover. In the realm of open content licenses, CC has been a force for non-proliferation and even for rolling back proliferation -- a whole bunch of open content licenses were invented within a couple years of 2000. I suspect without an organization like CC, the field would be very messy right now.

I think you missed one problem, which is curation/discovery/marketing. Here again, Wikimedia Commons leads the way, but is the tip of the iceberg. One major step forward would be for Last.fm to support a CC-only (or Free only :)) mode, or for Jamendo to blow up.

Did I just make the world a little safer for Fabitches? I sure hope so!

Mike

Re: Free Software vs. the Tax Man

mlinksva — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:45:00 -0000

One place, in reply to one of your posts.

Richard, that sure would be a chuckle, but awfully hard to accomplish -- gifts with individual recipients aren't much like free software.

Re: An additional view to “Copyright or the Right-to-eat”

mlinksva — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:56:08 -0000

"what does this reveal if people are not willing to pay for art anymore?"

I don't think anyone is claiming that people are not willing to pay for art anymore. In some cases, many people are unwilling to pay for *digital copies* of art.

But even this is not universally true. See the recent Nine Inch Nails release, which grossed $1.6m in a week although it was available for free (and legally). Or digital fine artists who manage to sell installations at high prices that are little more than a digital copy, consumer electronics ... and authenticity.

Kelly's "True Fans" and "Better Than Free" are actually all about how people are willing to pay for art ... just not cheap digital copies.

Mike

p.s. I really enjoyed the panel and all of the passionate interest from everyone there.

Re: IT Policy at Princeton

mlinksva — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:52:14 -0000

Congratulations! I hope you'll still be able to blog on these topics at increasingly high traffic sites. :)

Re: Free Quasi-Socialist Culture?

mlinksva — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 18:21:52 -0000

Tim is right. People from across the political spectrum are involved in the free culture and related movements, but whatever their beliefs about the role of the state, they're doing the work of libertarian activists -- making production less amenable to regulation and taxation -- and moving the understanding of democracy and equality away from the tyranny of the majority and coercive redistribution and toward openness to participation and access to nonrivalrous goods. This largely explains why I, a libertarian for around 20 years, have been involved in some way in these movements for around 15 and have worked for Creative Commons for nearly 5.

Re: “The End of Censorship” — The book I never finished

mlinksva — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:02:58 -0000

Importantly, content controls can be broadly defined to not only include the regulation of “objectionable” content (whatever that might include), but also the promotion of so-called “public interest” content or other media quality objectives.

Presumably content controls aimed at limiting use of copyrighted material fall under "other media quality objectives" and will suffer the same fate as other controls described here.

Re: Technology Advice

mlinksva — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 15:03:10 -0000

It would be ok if it said .msi rather than .exe.

It's unfortunate developers are still shipping executable installers.

Re: Citizendium Turns One. Point Still Unclear

mlinksva — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:13:00 -0000

Citizendium's point is quite clear to me and Shirky explains it well if unflatteringly. I'm pretty skeptical of CZ's point, but I wouldn't say it's a solution in search of a problem -- although Wikipedia works great, 100x better than one who had never encountered similar would intuit -- it is not without problems. I doubt CZ's approach will constitute an improvement, but it is well worth trying out, and cheap to do so. Even total failures provide useful lessons, and I doubt CZ will be an utter failure, except when held up against Wikipedia.

Another public source of website ranking and traffic data: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikipedia.org+citizendium.org/?metric=uv

Re: The Empirical Case for Copyright

mlinksva — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:25:47 -0000

Tim's reply says it all, but "alternative business models" is a pet peeve of mine, so...

That is the failure of “alternatives business models” to emerge except as experiments or exceptions.

Most touted "alternative business models" are irrelevant -- they attempt to figure out how to still directly pay creators for their copyable creations. In some cases looking for business models is wrongheaded -- many will create for zero financial gain or even pay to create. In others the "business model" is not "alternative" at all, it just doesn't involve paying for copies. Personal appearance payments have, are, and will constitute the primary earnings of many artists, including in some of the countries mentioned.

Re: Users, Generate Some Content on Peer Production / Copyright

mlinksva — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 01:20:54 -0000

I haven't watched either of these but from the description the PFF event is not about peer production. Note "Posted" rather than "Generated".

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Shuttleworth Speaks at Google

mlinksva — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:13:05 -0000

Tim, you're completely right, I misread. The outside version need not even be private, just stale, which is the case with many distros. It's great that Ubuntu is trying to avoid this problem, though I wonder how they'll do so with their "long term support" versions.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Shuttleworth Speaks at Google

mlinksva — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 17:03:16 -0000

That quote sounds archaic. The norm is for the public to have (read) access to the same revision control system developers use. I can't think of a significant free software project that only occasionally releases a tarball off the top of my head.

I did listen to some of the video and found a couple things interesting:

* Focus on preinstallation (very welcome), but only outside the U.S. Shuttleworth claimed that in the U.S. PC market margins are too tight to support anything other than Windows installation (one person who complains after mistakenly ordering Linux eats up the margin from 10 customers he said). This sounds bogus to me. a) are margins really thinner in the U.S. PC market than elsewhere? b) it would seem easy to segreate linux orders, e.g., only available through linux.dell.com (which does exist, but only leads to a few (desktop) systems available with Linux, or at least without Windows).

* Claim toward the end that once open source reaches feature parity with proprietary software, the former's superior innovativeness becomes readily apparent, and the Linux desktop is reaching that stage.

Re: Inside the Windows Bureaucracy

mlinksva — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:04:26 -0000

Vista ... supports a wider range of hardware

You mean 2006 vintage x86 hardware.

Not that it changes your point, which I wholly agree with.

Re: The Community Shrugged

mlinksva — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:34:05 -0000

SCO is dying a slow death, but I don't know that the open source community had much of anything to do with it. Certainly it was up in arms, but I doubt SCO's strategy of selling a dead end product and suing IBM would've worked out anyway. I'd love to be wrong.

Re: The Community Shrugged

mlinksva — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:27:41 -0000

I also don't really understand how the community can effectively go on strike against Novell. How much of an impact has the community had on SCO? Microsoft is the one who should fear the community in this case. If they push too hard there will be a reinvigorated campaign to replace Windows and Office anywhere and everywhere, and this time the free software stack is ready.

However, I think Braden misses the crucial sentence in Marti's post:

In the eyes of both legal scholars and informants, the GPL's strength stems not necessarily from its legality, but from the public collective opinion of community members.

I suspect "collective opinion of community members" is a woeful understatement. That, and many multi-billion $ businesses built with the assumption that the GPL, Linux and other GPL'd software are legally sound.

Re: Reed This

mlinksva — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 09:47:07 -0000

Wow, I am deeply embarrassed for Sachs, and for SciAm's editors.

You should know about http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink<br>

Re: Songbird

mlinksva — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 16:00:01 -0000

Lewis, I don't know about CD ripping specifically, but an open ended extension mechanism does have the advantage of allowing extension creators to add features the company could not, e.g., circumventing DRM or other lock-in.

David, Songbird may compete with the iTunes player directly, but it is the web that competes with the iTunes store. It is the web that I'm betting on. Songbird simply takes advantage of the web as no other media player does. Perhaps that will remain a geek-only thing forever, I am hardly one to judge.

"Skins" and MySpace also send chills down my spine, but apparently the general population likes them. :)

Re: The Reluctant Libertarian

mlinksva — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:07:37 -0000

My main disappointment with Benkler's book (unjustified, I simply want a different book than the one he wrote) is that it isn't much about the economics of peer production. The subject badly needs treatment from economists in addition to legal scholars, ideology aside.