368 karma · joined November 26, 2008
I wonder what the girl would have said if her boyfriend broke his promise to not publish some private photos of her, and shared these with his friends (and with others on a public website). That's obviously a gift economy but would she have found the argument convincing in such a case?
OK, suppose your girlfriend agrees to have you take some rather private photos of her under the condition that you will never make these available to someone else. (Or the other way 'round if you're a girl) One day you break up and you're sharing these photos. Does she has the right to stop you distributing them?
According to your logic, she has not. After all, you're just sharing among friends. And it's not as if she's loosing income of something like that.
Following the authors logic, your girlfriend has the right to stop you distributing them. For you made a promise before she agreed -- you basically entered a contract.
His point is that he offered copies of his work under certain conditions (called copyright). In other words, he expected everybody who agreed to the contract not to copy and redistribute his work. He expects them to hold their promise, their site of the contract.
Nobody's is forced or required to enter the contract and make this promise. You're free to make your own music and share it. Or used someone's music who doesn't expect you to make a similar promise.
However, violating your promise (ie. changing the conditions of the contract) is clearly immoral.
Or would you want to be the victim of somebody who changes the contract conditions after the deal was made? Or would you want to be lied to, or have your friends break their promises?
If the answer is 'No', then copying stuff without a license is clearly immoral.
Sure, his analogies fail at some point, just like most analogies. But that doesn't make his point invalid. Or yours valid, for that matter.
The problem still remains that his time is scarce -- no matter how easy it is to copy the media he uses to distribute his work. And that's what copyright is about: Not the scarcity of the media, but the scarcity of the time needed to create the master.
Or can you snap your fingers and have beautifully designed, perfectly written, and bug free software appear on your hard drive?
But they simply didn't bother or they were unable to cooperate due to their egos.
They got what they deserve.
Well, I'd be interested in one of the following apps: a desktop wiki, an email client, a contact management app, a feed reader, a music player, a scalable image editor, a layout app, a recording app, a guitar effect app, a GIT client, and probably some more.
Of course, for each of these, there's some free app somewhere. But each of these free ones have something I don't like.
I admit, my willingness-to-pay is quite low. That's partially due to some free apps being available. The better reason, however, is that installing proprietary apps sucks under Linux. I also fear, the regular distro updates will break apps I've payed for.
In other words: If there's a way to conveniently download an app from a store or homepage, and to get security and "distro upgrade" updates (maybe, by registering the app automatically with APT during installation), my willingness-to-pay would be quite a bit higher!
> The key differentiating factor for _most_ people who use it is that it's free (as in beer).
How do you know? Any empirical studies I'm not aware of? Or just the Biased Sample fallacy?
> It's hard to see how you can ask people to pay for software now in the hope that it will eventually be good.
Dunno. There's a lot of applications that were not 'good' when they were first released. People still bought it.
But some moral systems are consequentialistic [1] and for its proponents, the means are justified by the ends. A free market could be seen as a means to reach the moral end. Thus, they are often mixed up.
However, I think the transaction costs of crowd-sourcing articles are too high. People have better things to do then finding topics to fund. It already didn't work for open source projects.
My favorite solution is still the club model as described here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678801
I've read this in several variations for years. But I've never seen a reference.
Is this just a myth or can anyone point to real research which provides evidence for the claim?
Example: In an unstable sociaty, many less well off people are likely to spend more of their income for guns and other means for protection. Therefore, they spend less for other goods, such as software. Consequently, people being rich due to selling software own quite a bit of their wealth to social stabiliy.
The argument basically says "what is, ought to be, too!" But there's no logical relation between 'is' and 'ought' and this has been known for over 250 years. [1]
From Wikipedia: "Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from."
Some examples:
* 4 rights constitute Free Software, not 3 or 2 or 1 but 4.
* Free Software is equivalent to Civil Freedom and Human Rights.
* Distributing software without any of these 4 rights makes the act unethical, immoral and evil.
* All software should be Free Software.
Doubt any of these and you are no true believer of the Free Software Movement.
Imaging you're a reader with US$ 1000 per year to spend on books: how do spend it if there's a large supply of book offers like these?
A common rationalization, but I believe, it's a straw men argument. For who's really interested in "creativity"? Maybe you and a few more others, but hardly the majority.
For example: Let's assume, there's been a law ten years ago that allowded anybody to redistribute a published movie. Is it conceivable to think anybody would have invested money to make a movie since then? Only a small minority, maybe.
The majority of movies, however, would have never been produced. We wouldn't have seen neither the Spiderman series, nor Lord of the rings, nor most other movies that were popular on the file sharing networks.
In reality, these movies were made and millions of people worldwide spend money to see them. That looks like proof, millions of people wanted to see them! The majority of people don't care whether a work is "creative".
It's not the job of the media industries to foster "truely creative" works. The industry's job is financing, filtering, and informing about creative works. Therefore, the "creative" argument is a straw men argument.
It still lacks a good-enought variety of (proprietary) third-party applications and games.
This is what most of the younger power users care about -- and they are the ones who learn computer usage most easily. But there's no compelling reason for them to try or to switch to Linux.
What blocks the supply of third-party applications is the lack of a default decentral installer on the major Linux distributions. APT just doens't cut it. In a recent review of using a Macbook, former GNOME Quality Control lead, Luis Villa, wrote [1]:
"...installing new software [on a Mac] is insanely nice. Yes, apt and yum are nice, but I don’t find out about software that way. I find out about software by reading something on the web (for me usually a blog post, but for others a news article) and from there installation on mac is a click, download, and drag away. That is it. That is insanely great."
I do find new software like that, too, but APT wasn't made for this use case. As a result, I stopped reading reviews of Linux applications. Most of the time, it's a hassle to get the dicussed software installed, for they are often not available in Ubuntu's repositories or it's an old version.
I also stopped buying or reading Linux magazines or journals for this reason.
So, even if there are new great applications out there, the word spreads slowly. As a result, Linux appears to be boring and to lack behind the other two OSes. It's simply more fun to use Windows or MacOS for a power user.
And if the majority of power users don't switch, the less literate users are not going to be convinenced to switch, either. Neither more advertising nor having Linux pre-installed will change that, in my opinion.
[1]: http://tieguy.org/blog/2009/12/23/continued-notes-on-the-mac...
Your examples make no sense: Windows still exists and most games are played one or twice. Sure, old versions are not available, anymore, but who want to run them, anyway? The same holds true for old versions of free software: They may be still available somewhere but who wants to run them, anyway?
While you're talking about dieing software, what about creating software? Can you "guarantee" that a particular free software will be created if a large number of people want it? I think not.
Proprietary software, on the other hand, comes close to a guarantee if there's a chance of it being in demand.
This is why sociaty needs both -- and why Mister Stallman is wrong to say, only "free" software should exist.
To say it's not, sometimes, would contradict this assumption and make it invalid. So, it would indeed kill him.
[1] Strickly speaking, he's OK with non-GPL software as long as it's "free" according to his definition of "free".
The reason why there's no system to license 'The Final Countdown' is probably that it wouldn't pay. I mean, come on! How many people would really watch a guys video unboxing his laptop? This is a nice for his handful of friends but the majority doesn't care, at all.
Even if you combine all the long-tail stuff, it's probably not worth the effort. IIRC Youtube is even unable to find advertisers for all this low-value long-tail stuff.
So, what will happen if this laptop guy uses some CC music? Nothing, I'd say. His friends will have forgotten it in a minute unless the track is really exceptional. And even if it's exceptional, that's one track in a few thousand.
Thus, the impact on stricly-licensed content will be very close to zero.
But I believe, some sort of middleman will remain in the digital world.
Their value proposition is reducing transaction costs -- the costs associated with finding content that's worth to be produced, promoting it, distributing it to a place near you, and managing all monetary transactions.
Yes, distribution is a no-brainer in the digital world. All other points, however, remain valid.
And as far as I know, concerts and tours are expenses for lesser known bands, not money makers. In general, planning a tour is a very risky business. Today, a band may recoup some of the expense by selling physical stuff (CDs or merchandising). In the digital world, only merchandising remains.
On a side note, producers are currently struck in the world of physical copies because there's no reliable copyright enforcement method. Otherwise, they would have embraced it years ago. It's simply less expensive to make digital copies (and therefore generates higher profit if prices stay the same).
Under the premise of the OP, buying music would be as convenient as getting a illegal copy, I'd say.
Determine value is incredibly hard, thus many people use other attributes as a signal of value: Sometimes it's appearance, sometimes scarcity, sometimes hearsay, and rather often price. Therefore, if a product category had a price of zero, it will be considered less valuable when looking at the market as a whole.
However, that doesn't hold for every individual. For example, I still use quite a lot of Open Source software and it's free as in beer. That doesn't mean it has no value to me. If it had no value, I simply wouldn't use it.
By analogy, most music is already valueless to most people and has ever been. They wouldn't listen to it whatever the price. Nevertheless, some music will remain valuable to some people, whatever the price.
Well, I wouldn't be bet on that.
Maybe, the author of this piece would do so, and maybe quite a few others. But some would switch to something completely different while the majority would simply pay for the content -- just like they did before it was possible to make illegal copies.
Free (whether in beer or speech) is not the only criterion for making buying decisions.
Mr. Stallman repeatedly called proprietary software "unethical" and "immoral", words we usually use to describe theft, rape and murder. If you assume the premise to be true, forbidding proprietary software by law is a rational conclusion. Then, it's just a matter of political power.
From an interview with Mr. Stallman [1]:
"We have a paradoxical situation where one particular area of business [...] uses a particular business practice that's based on subjugating the public, based on dividing and conquering. Well, when there's a business practice that conflicts with an important value like freedom and community, prohibit it."
And further:
(Interviewer): "Should, should all software be free?" (Mr. Stallman): "Yes."
From a different interview [2]:
"Non-free software is basically antisocial, it subjugates it users, and it should not exist."
[1] http://www.pigdog.org/interviews/stallman/interview_with_sta... [2] http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4795
In the long run, it would affect what sort of contributors and users GNOME would have -- people from the Open Source camp who think proprietary software is a nuisance but not "immoral" or "evil" as Mr. Stallman suggests. Or people from the Free Software camp who think all proprietary software is "immoral" and "evil" and should thus be forbidden by law.
Of course, it would also be a blow for the Free Software community if a major project decides to stop supporting/promoting its political goals.
In the short run, of course, only a few words on the GNOME homepage would have to be changed.
Making marketing decisions is basically the same thing as making any decision: You need to determine your goal, identify barriers you need to overcome in order to reach that goal, and then execute.
The difference to technical decision is identifying the barriers. With technical problems, the relevant cause of the barrier, namely the object or software, is under your control and easy to alter. It's also easy to measure the effects of any change. Thus, identifying barriers is rather easy.
With promotional decisions, the cause of the barrier is basically the market, that is: some group of people. They are not under your control, altering their behavior is usually very hard, and measurement is an art form since you often don't know who they are. Therefore, identifying the relevant barriers is often a mix of experience, intuition, and guesswork.
Of course, there are lists of common barriers (ie. causes why people don't buy or buy elsewhere) and for each of them, there are common methods to overcome (or answer) these.
For example, a game is a typical experience good: you can only judge the value after having played (and payed for) the game. Thus, mistrust is a likely barrier to overcome. Typical answers are offering a trial, a demo or a guarantee, setting the price to zero, etc. -- the "low commitment" route. A different route could be using "high-reward" signals: promoting the (high) production costs, setting a rather high price, producing high-quality in-game videos, buying TV time for ads, offering trials to only selected journalists, etc.
As you can see from the example, money may be a necessary ingredient, sometimes lots of it. Thus, promotion is also a function of the price (or rather, the revenue model).
However, since you seem to go the "low commitment" route, already, your central problem will be "selection": Why play your game instead of one of the million others?
A common answer is "relating" or "bounding" -- appeal to something a target audience wants to be (or thinks it is). For example, Listerine's 'Always a bridesmaid, never a bride' appealed to what the audience wanted to be (namely someone's wife). Marlboro's 'Come to Marlboro country' appealed to freedom and independence. So, another ingredient is creativity, so to say.
If you have that, your promotion only needs to communicate this particular trait. The rest is finding out what people do, view or read who should be interested in this particular trait and go for it.
Then, you really just need time and effort to promote your product successfully.
Hope this helps.
First, you assume to know why visitors bounce (the "website wasn't what they were looking for"). That's quite a jump since bounce rates are about behaviour, not the causes leading to that behaviour.
For example, let's say I'm a bad writer and designer. My page may be absolutely the one a visitor was looking for, but due to my bad writing and design, the visitor thinks it's the wrong one. People scan web pages, they don't read them.
As another example, let's say I'm shopping for a new mobile and your page sells mobiles. I may bounce not because I'm one the wrong page, but because your price is easy to find and it's completely over-the-top in my opinion.
Second, there's also the problem of defining and measuring bounces.
Third, the conversion rate is, to some degree, a relative measure. Any number, say 10%, is meaningless unless you have an idea what's usual (for webpages similar to yours). Therefore, it doesn't matter what base it uses as long as everybody uses the same base.
Overall, I believe bounce rates are rather useless compared to other measures.