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[ citation needed ] on both the declaration that he's been proven right and on your slapdash dismissal of that assertion. And, please, could you be more of a c
by olefoo 14y ago
[ citation needed ] on both the declaration that he's been proven right and on your slapdash dismissal of that assertion.
And, please, could you be more of a contributor and less like an aggressive drunk starting a bar fight?
- cgh 14y agoThis very story is a potential example. The mp3 patents in the US will expire in 2015. What "harm" has been done in that time? Fraunhofer made a pile of dough and that's about it. The open alternatives failed to catch on and my guess is that after 2015, mp3s will still be used as before. Very few users will know or care that the patents have expired. I guess you could say Stallman wasn't wrong exactly, just unnecessarily alarmist over this particular issue. I'm not saying software patents are benign, by the way - I'm only addressing mp3 here.
- nitrogen 14y agoWhat we lost was a competitive disadvantage for Linux distros and countless software and hardware products never released by independent developers. Failure lacks a marketing budget.
- cgh 14y agoI don't think desktop Linux's competitive disadvantage had much to do with mp3s, given its tremendous deficiencies elsewhere. I say this as someone who contributed to KDE back in the 3.x days and has been running Linux since 1997. But that's just an opinion - I guess it's possible a lot of people were put off by the hoops necessary to install an mp3 player, although to be honest I don't recall it being a problem for a good decade or so now.
- freehunter 14y agoIt's easy to look back and say "see, it didn't do any harm!" Predicting the future is much more difficult, and it's perfectly reasonable to look at past trends in that prediction. If Frauenhofer had stopped giving out licenses, would you still be making that argument? If they started patent trolling, what would you be saying? Calling someone out after the fact for warning about the potential for harm when the risk is very real based on what happened in the past just sounds like revisionism.
- tome 14y agoIt's very hard to say what Frauenhofer would have done if Vorbis didn't exist. Likely the situation would have been very different.
- aeturnum 14y agoThis section of the discussion has entirely been about hindsight, specifically that RS has always been right. On one hand, it's possible that mp3 could have become the defacto standard by being widely available, and then had the patent holders clamp down and raise prices. This didn't happen, and I don't think it was likely to happen. RS' writings always have two parts. First, he predicts what could happen if things keep going in the current direction. He's quite good at this, because he's a smart guy, and all of his predictions I'm familiar with reflect a future that I think is technically possible. Second, however, is the tone and gravity he assigns to the consequences and likelihood of those possible futures. I find those parts of his writing to be unreasonably pessimistic and actively harmful in avoiding real problems.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoIf mp3 was compatible with free software then Mozila would have pushed for the audio tag sooner and one big reason to use Flash would disappear. Who knows what knock on effects that might have had? Chrome and Mozilla could have had WebRTC happening years ago with a patent royalty free H.264, or a family of codecs that evolved from it, rather than waste their time (and a quarter of a billion dollars) on trying to break the codec monopolies. Less Flash, less IE, less Windows, more competition. What's not to like? edit: or flip it the other way. If browsers or the web were patented, how many consumers would celebrate the day those patents expired? None, because all the good things that flowed from them not being patented would never have happened. "So Microsoft made a few more millions" they'd say, I mean its not like browsing the web ever became a big deal.
- laureny 14y ago> I guess you could say Stallman wasn't wrong exactly, just unnecessarily alarmist over this particular issue. He's unnecessarily alarmist on all the issues he cares about. And because of that, he's bound to be right once in a while, but since it's impossible to determine when to listen to him, he's as accurate as a coin toss.
- tjr 14y agoWhat harm then is there in software patents at all? They eventually expire.
- cgh 14y agoPlease re-read my comment. I never said software patents are benign, in fact I said exactly the opposite.
- tjr 14y agoI'm trying to understand what it is you find non-harmful about the MP3 patent that is harmful about other software patents. You say the MP3 patent really did no harm; what harm did it not do? And of the harm that it did not do, what harm do other software patents do?
- cgh 14y agoThere are varying degrees of harm. The fact that equally effective free alternatives to mp3 never caught on makes this obvious. My point was that Stallman is not right 100% of the time, as the above poster asserted.