5 ms·

another way to frame the "entitlement to free stuff" is to consider the real costs of duplicating and copying digital assets: there are essentially negligible (

another way to frame the "entitlement to free stuff" is to consider the real costs of duplicating and copying digital assets: there are essentially negligible (and less than marginal) though I suppose this is a little difference between 'static' digital assets that we don't expect will change, like digital art, or games, or mp3 and so on... and 'runtime software' which we expect will have to continuously adapt, be improved, and will need to get updated. though this is a fine line. why should only a few select group get to capture the enormous productivity boon enabled by digital copying? that I ask this question doesn't mean I hate capitalism, I think that there are things it's great at, and things at which capitalism sucks. digital assets are exactly where capitalism becomes the worst, whereas material assets are exactly where capitalism is at its best.

Knee_Pain 3y ago
but you are still not entitled to anyone's source code unless you are a user of the program. do you want to pay RH's contract and distribute their code for free? well, find someone to host a VPS that will receive petabytes of traffic each month then. you will soon find out, it's really not that "free"
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
  - Knee_Pain 3y ago
    You are just substituting one for another. Find enough people to chime in a dollar to fund a VPS? Find enough people to form a high bandwidth bittorrent mesh? Potato potato, good luck serving the global market with a bittorrent version of dnf update
    - tenebrisalietum 3y ago
      Debian? Doesn't distribute using bittorrent but they're pretty global and what they're doing seems to be working.
      - dralley 3y ago
        Their CDN bills are paid (or rather sponsored by) Fastly, and they have a mirror network hosted by universities and other third parties. No third party is going to donate resources to RHEL the way they might for Debian, though. I'll add that those CDN bills are not at all insubstantial. But still peanuts compared to the actual development costs.
MBCook 3y ago
You’re ignoring the creation costs and only focusing on the distribution costs. The creation costs are the issue here. Red Hat didn’t change things because their CDN bill went up.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  but how long should we pay for digital assets that have already been created? to pay for stuff already made is not an economically productive activity. it doesn't create any more value. and this is even worse over digital assets; also, this is why I was observing a distinction between digital goods which won't change (most media expressions) and software which needs updating I consider this an open problem; but I have a minority view, as I always get downvoted when stating this position. as I see this, the current hollywood strike is consequence of failure to acknowledge what I'm saying. and it'll keep getting worse. the problems in academic publishing are also an expression of this things I keep saying. I'm starting to get tired of saying this shit. not only do things not change, but they keep getting worse. I suppose property over [blank] asserts itself over the digital to the decrement of most and the advantage of few. I see it slipping away... what could have been. what we could have had with the internet as we seem to chose (and I'm dragged along) to a world where everything is a service subscription and a few lucky ones collect rent forever; I guess they already do and always have, but now they will also do it over digital assets. capturing for themselves the technologically provided boons of the digital and internet technology
  - babarock 3y ago
    > but how long should we pay for digital assets that have already been created? That's a mis-characterization of what's going on here. Red Hat makes RHEL. Then it (used to) goes *the extra step* of debranding RHEL, removing trademarks, and publishing it to git.centos.org. Red Hat is not (and cannot) prevent you from getting your hands on digital assets. It just stopped going out of their way to provide you an easy (almost) 1-click way to clone their product for free. You want to create a clone of RHEL? Sure the upstreams are all available, do it.
    - 3y ago

Knee_Pain 3y ago

but you are still not entitled to anyone's source code unless you are a user of the program. do you want to pay RH's contract and distribute their code for free? well, find someone to host a VPS that will receive petabytes of traffic each month then. you will soon find out, it's really not that "free"

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent
- Knee_Pain 3y ago
  You are just substituting one for another. Find enough people to chime in a dollar to fund a VPS? Find enough people to form a high bandwidth bittorrent mesh? Potato potato, good luck serving the global market with a bittorrent version of dnf update
  - tenebrisalietum 3y ago
    Debian? Doesn't distribute using bittorrent but they're pretty global and what they're doing seems to be working.
    - dralley 3y ago
      Their CDN bills are paid (or rather sponsored by) Fastly, and they have a mirror network hosted by universities and other third parties. No third party is going to donate resources to RHEL the way they might for Debian, though. I'll add that those CDN bills are not at all insubstantial. But still peanuts compared to the actual development costs.

MBCook 3y ago

You’re ignoring the creation costs and only focusing on the distribution costs. The creation costs are the issue here. Red Hat didn’t change things because their CDN bill went up.

BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
but how long should we pay for digital assets that have already been created? to pay for stuff already made is not an economically productive activity. it doesn't create any more value. and this is even worse over digital assets; also, this is why I was observing a distinction between digital goods which won't change (most media expressions) and software which needs updating I consider this an open problem; but I have a minority view, as I always get downvoted when stating this position. as I see this, the current hollywood strike is consequence of failure to acknowledge what I'm saying. and it'll keep getting worse. the problems in academic publishing are also an expression of this things I keep saying. I'm starting to get tired of saying this shit. not only do things not change, but they keep getting worse. I suppose property over [blank] asserts itself over the digital to the decrement of most and the advantage of few. I see it slipping away... what could have been. what we could have had with the internet as we seem to chose (and I'm dragged along) to a world where everything is a service subscription and a few lucky ones collect rent forever; I guess they already do and always have, but now they will also do it over digital assets. capturing for themselves the technologically provided boons of the digital and internet technology
- babarock 3y ago
  > but how long should we pay for digital assets that have already been created? That's a mis-characterization of what's going on here. Red Hat makes RHEL. Then it (used to) goes *the extra step* of debranding RHEL, removing trademarks, and publishing it to git.centos.org. Red Hat is not (and cannot) prevent you from getting your hands on digital assets. It just stopped going out of their way to provide you an easy (almost) 1-click way to clone their product for free. You want to create a clone of RHEL? Sure the upstreams are all available, do it.
  - 3y ago