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To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (1008)	2/14/1999 5:23:00 AM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

Money is triangular not orthogonal. You mean normal to their aims don't you? :) Money goes from my customer's wallet to mine to the government. That is three sided so its a triangle. They all work for the gov't as spies* so its a completed triangle, not an open sided one. * 65% of Canada's gross national product is the civil service so that is no exaggeration. 38% of Canada's foreign exchange comes from mining and related products. 65% of all goods an services bought last year in North America were computer hardware, software and data processing related. Therefore it would appear that making mining software for the government is the business to be in. EC<:-}

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (1008)	2/14/1999 11:48:00 AM
From: g_m10	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

Mitch, I probably didn't make myself clear. I was ticked off by the fact that RH distributes inferior software only because for the best one RH would have to pay small fee to the developers. At the same time Young from RH feeds and cloth his family off Linux, so does other "fathers" of free movement. "They would claim that money is completely orthogonal", but they do live off that money. They didn't refused to take them and I don't blame them for that. They need some means to live and to do what they like to do. So why this same rights are denied to other people? This is what I called hypocrisy. Hope it clarifies. I am not sure how government got into the picture though. <G>

To: Mitch Blevins who wrote (1008)	2/17/1999 2:03:00 AM
From: JC Jaros	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

The reality is, that some of the shackle-makers were hurt by the end of slavery, and others adapted to making other metal products. Excellent analogy. Do you honestly believe that the total demand for programming skills will drastically lower if we remove the legal restrictions on the use and redistirubtion of programs? If it does lower, then so be it... that's free enterprise. Creating an artificial legal construct to increase demand for a certain product is as silly and harmful as government subsidies for wheat farmers _not_ to grow wheat. Excuse me while I publish a tangent... I've been giving a good deal of thought to US Code Title 17 (copyright law) lately, and particularly to the direction that recorded music is going. I come from a background in music distribution, as well as music creation but more importantly, I bought a small number of DIMD shares awhile back <g>. -- It looks to me that it is a certainty that music retail is about to have it's greedy head handed to it on a platinum platter by the Internet, and the ongoing liberation of information. The music industry probably wishes that it never ventured out of vinyl, but the cat is out of the bag. MP3 will put enough of a dent in the music business as to cause total carnage in the current distribution structure. The thing that I keep boggling on is how the very nature of music consumerism will change. There may not be a better 'Cathedral' model than music. It has a very rich 'Cathedral' history that has had a good 500 year run, the last 50 of which has been driven by the Oz magic of radio and pop culture mass merchandising. We have been conditioned to consume packaged music. The software industry has to now, piggybacked on this model. Breaking into a 'Bazaar' music model, music will not suffer, musicians will not suffer. On the contrary, music will expand exponentially and musicians will be better employed. Suffering occurs at the monopoly choke points, which in music is the major labels. The same can be said about software. The Cathedral model of music and software are about to suffer a similar fate of decommoditization. Copyright protection is quickly becoming decreasingly relevant as the monetary value of that which it is protecting declines. Services and branding then becomes dominant in place of product royalties. Intellectual property values are sinking. The mandate will simply not exist to prop those values up through vigorous copyright enforcement. There is no basis constitutionally or in common law to do so. It is already an artificial legal construct that the music and software industries are insisting that the U.S. government vigorously enforce worldwide on their behalf. The intellectual property lobbyists ironically; both Microsoft and the major record labels, employ business models that use 'plagiarism' as an ENGINE for their corporate success. Upload Microsoft. Download MCA. Break the choke points. Promote the Bazaar. Decommoditize the 'product'. Collaborate, create and release. -JCJ (open content)