MIT license permits selling?
mpark
Posts: 1,306
The MIT license grants "the rights to use, copy,... and/or sell copies of the Software." Does that mean one can sell objects from the obex? That can't be right.
Comments
On the other hand, it doesn't give others the right to claim a copyrighted work as their own. It's like selling copies of free government information that you can download at no cost via the Internet and print yourself. You can sell it to anyone you can convince that it's worth your price. You have spent some time to find the information, even if it's easy to do. If you claim the information as your own, that's fraud and is a crime.
-Phil
I mean anyone can use anything in the OBEX for any reason with or without the author's consent...So really what is the difference.
But that is just my opinion.
Bean.
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There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. Make sure you don't cross it...
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If the OBEX were public domain, none of my stuff would be in there.
-Phil
The MIT license is close, but is there a better alternative out there?
-Phil
I don't like that I cannot refuse to let my object be used for a purpose that I don't agree with morally. For example a weapon.
Bean.
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There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. Make sure you don't cross it...
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You can add an amendment that the code is not to be used for any weapons of mass destruction but I am not a legal expert and do not know if this would hold up in court.
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My new unsecure propmod both 1x1 and full size arriving soon.
When it comes to protecting programs, forget it. Try to relax and enjoy your hobby.
Don
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·······
······· "What do you mean, it doesn't have any tubes?"
······· "No such thing as a dumb question" unless it's on the internet
Post Edited (mosquito56) : 5/14/2009 10:18:38 PM GMT
They have fixed the code and resolved all the legal issues since but you can get caught if sloppy.
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My new unsecure propmod both 1x1 and full size arriving soon.
-Phil
· Stealing my code and using it for a WMD is one thing. But doing it LEGALLY via the MIT License is quite another. At least in my mind.
· That's all I'm saying. But you are probably right, I should just relax and enjoy.
Bean.
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There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. Make sure you don't cross it...
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·· I feel your pain there.· I used to design Z80-based controllers for the local college students and was told several times that I should sell the plans and make·something off my work (I had been just donating my time and ideas to the college).· About a month after college had ended for the summer I saw just such an ad in the back of Popular Electronics and decided to order the plans and see what the guy had to offer.· Imagine my surprise when I got copies of everything I had made for the college kids.· In fact, the plans even came with a letter explaining that the 'kid' was trying to support his way through college by sharing what he 'learned' with others.· I actually knew the student and had mentored him outside the college for a long time.· It was after this that I stopped donating my time since at the time it seemed everyone else was making money off from what I was giving away for free.
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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering
The story (possibly urban myth) is that Don Galloway when visiting Japanese Universities, found that copies of his yet to be released software were widely used. He invented the dongle to protect his software... Well people even pirated his solution (the dongle) designed to protect his software.
Makes you think how our morality is so different regarding other peoples proprietary to our morality regarding their property. We’d never steal a man’s $100 cell phone but will go to amazing lengths to copy and crack his $10 000 of work on some new software.
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They've got this down to a science now. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
(And I always thought the "dongle" was named after a guy named "Don")
The best copy protection I've ever seen was a sticker on the
inside of the Apple ][noparse][[/noparse] DBase program that read:
"Copies of this program may be unreliable."
OBC
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Visit the: The Propeller Pages @ Warranty Void.
My first software for sale was a precision sheet metal CAD drawing system. It worked within the CAD system to quickly create all the punch-outs. The thing is still in use actually! After looking at dongles, install once from disk schemes, you name it... I settled on just encoding the users name, and my contact information. I added a little extra guilt in the help file and paper documentation.
I got a fair number of calls over the years! People would run the thing, eventually grow tired of not seeing their name, or hit the help file, and ring me up.
One guy knew his copy was bad, the company he worked for was kind of bad, and did I want to hear some good jokes or stories! Of course, I said "Yes!" and we proceeded to burn at least an hour of their phone time. I had a good time and consider that account paid in full!
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· I think alot has to do with one is a physical item that will cause the owner grief if I steal it. The other is information that the owner is not even going to notice if I steal it.
· Or another way to look at it....I would never pay $5,000 for autocad. So if I copy it from someone, autocad is not really out any money because I would have never purchased it. Sure I benfit from their work, but they are not "really" out any money.
· I'm not saying these views are right or moral, but this is how people (not me) think about it.
Bean.
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There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. Make sure you don't cross it...
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Here's an interesting idea:
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/05/13/self-serve-commercia.html
Self serve licensing?
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- True -> but there is a world of reg. hacks and patches to bypass them completely all the same ..
Regards,
John
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'Necessity is the mother of invention'
Those who can, do.Those who can’t, teach.
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My new unsecure propmod both 1x1 and full size arriving soon.
Need to upload large images or movies for use in the forum. you can do so at uploader.propmodule.com for free.
I use QuickBooks Online, and it works pretty well. I suspect that one day soon Microsoft Office will be an online app.
Bean.
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There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. Make sure you don't cross it...
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My new unsecure propmod both 1x1 and full size arriving soon.
Need to upload large images or movies for use in the forum. you can do so at uploader.propmodule.com for free.
My view on the whole piracy issue is that more people would purchase products instead of pirating them, if the products were resonably priced.
You mention software that costs $5,000 or even $10,000.
This is insane.
How much could this software have cost to code? $100,000? Maybe $250,000? Either way its insane to charge enough for a product that you fully
recoupe your costs in possibly single digit sales when you know your going to be selling hundreds or thousands of copies.
Software distribution costs next to nothing, a CD most likely costs around $0.50 to write and lable for these companies. The prices should reflect
the costs of production and not simply get away with price padding because they believe that this stuff will only be used by professionals and
professionals can afford it.
Companies simply charge whatever they feel they can get away with. This somewhat makes sense with actual physical products like hardware
(Although there are limits, such as Amazon.com charging 3x production cost for their Kindle line) because there are still large costs for each and
every item created.
Software only has a one-time hit for developement. The end price should reflect that.
>End of Rant
I think you estimate of how much it costs to produce software is low. A software architect will make maybe $100k per year. A reasonably sized project (such as Maya, Autocad, or any of those other large software projects) probably takes hundreds of man years to complete.
I think most software package are pretty reasonably priced. Many programs I find for sale in the $10-$50 range. Anti-virus and computer maintenance software is usually in the $100-$150 range but they have to keep constantly putting out updates it is not a one time cost.
Cad software gets pretty expensive in the $500-$5000 range but look what these programs can do. AutoCad can not only design an entire skyrise building but analyze all the stresses associated with a 747 crash into the building. Many of them have much cheaper limited versions also for those that do not need everything and student versions available at one 10th the cost. There is also a very limited number of people that are going to buy software like that they are not going to sell to 100,000,000 people they are going to sell to a couple thousand companies.
Adobe Photoshop is an extremely powerful photo manipulation tool. Sure it costs $700 but there are many spin offs that have been made available in the sub $100 range for the average person. Lets put this in contects. I have 4 lenses for my camera. The lenses are made up of glass, plastic, metal, and other inexpensive parts. my cheapest lense is $400 and my most expensive is $2000. Even though these are physical devices they are probably marked up over 400%. Why because profesional grade lenses require lot of design time and they do not sell as much as a cheap point and shoot. Even just filters for my lenses run $50 to $200 for a piece of coated plastic.
Your argument is like saying that it is perfectly fine for some company like Nikkon to spend millions to develop a 70-200 mm, f2.8 lense and then 2 months later have another company come along and copy nikkons design and sell it for $200. Sure nikon does not spend any money in making the other lens but it still hurts them forcing them to have to raise there price even more to compensate for loss in sale.
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My new unsecure propmod both 1x1 and full size arriving soon.
Need to upload large images or movies for use in the forum. you can do so at uploader.propmodule.com for free.
That is not always the case.
Regards,
John Twomey
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'Necessity is the mother of invention'
Those who can, do.Those who can’t, teach.
Let's look at a CAD application. Over time, advances in math and geometry combine to bring us geometry manupulation kernels that can solve lots of difficult problems. There are thousands and thousands of man hours invested in just that portion of the software alone. A typical kernel is a licensed thing, like Parasolid found in many CAD applications. That team is working each year to continue to advance the state of the art.
Good software that leverages something like that runs 3-12K for a very capable single user, floating seat.
The time savings realized to the buyer is many times the purchase price, and easily exceeds the annual maintenance price. Expect to pay 2.5K to 7.5K per year, per user to keep that kind of software up and running.
It is possible to just obtain a copy, one time, and not pay for ongoing development. This does limit working with others however. All depends on the business model in play.
Say that's a 10K purchase.
What has been purchased is the SUM of those dev teams over the course of what might easily be 10-20 real years, multiplied by the development team that can number in the hundreds. Given all those people have to eat over time, and that the software state is not inclusive due to the difficulty of the problems being worked on, 10K is a steal.
Factor in the time savings, and or capability improvement such a user would experience, and the 10K can pay off in as little as a few months. And it often does.
This is what I do for my day job, and have been doing it for 15 years. The state of CAD today is nothing short of amazing, compared to where we started with primitive wire frame modeling systems and high end UNIX workstations. Complex geometries can be realized and manupulated with good precision on an ordinary laptop computer today, where those same kinds of geometries were either impossible, or required a human team to produce, and if they were capable of producing those geometries, they took a good long time doing so.
It's quite easy to see some bits on a disk, and a nice GUI that makes applying the software to the problem easy and think the price is too high. Been there and done that.
Now, here's the ultimate justification for those prices.
Open Source software has a similar man hour investment. It's extremely valuable. The current body of open code is potent and it costs only a download and your learning time to utilize. I encourage everyone to do so. There isn't a better deal around.
Something like Microsoft Office at $400 is nuts. We can do word processing cold, and the availability of open code word processors demonstrates that. And I think the usual artificial price arguments apply, and I back that by using a lot of open code in my personal life. What that does is free dollars for buying things, like a Propeller, and being able to afford to do that and build skill and realize ideas.
No worries.
Now, show me the open code CAD program.
Can't do it?
The reason is that despite the number of man hours invested in open code being as large or larger than that invested in closed code over the years, the complexity of the geometry, plus the niche audience basically doesn't trigger that scratch an itch reflex to a degree that would make open development sustainable.
So then, expensive closed code software holds it's value because it really is actually adding value and is not some artificial thing, bundled and locked in like your typical Microsoft product is.
Just thought I would post up a counter point to the "this is insane" point. For some products out there, their costs are insane. Where there is good open code that does the same thing, I think it's quite easy to get there.
Where there isn't good open code doing the same thing, some analysis of how that code adds value to peoples work lives will show the kind of dynamic I just outlined. Those costs are real, the value is real.
Basically, the 10K is a steal, as is the annual maintenance cost of somewhere between 17 and 15 percent annually. Together, those costs deliver profit to the software developer, and keep the development team fed each year. CAD software can have up to 300 people working annually to advance the state of the art, and deal with issues along the way. It is not a trivial affair.
Now, the other unsaid thing is "if it costs so much, how are people expected to learn?". Go get after it. There are options for learning stuff and we all know what they are. I am totally for this. It's quite easy to buy the software when business is being done. Either the business is viable and serious enough to handle the purchase, or it isn't. For the student, you do what you have to do just like everybody else did.
Just remember doing so does set your value perception lower than it otherwise would be. Keep that sane, and there really are no worries.
BTW: I know people who buy this software, on a credit card for up to 20K, then turn around and make a very healthy six figures each year, applying it to real world engineering problems. Their mental skill is augmented by the ability to manipulate geometries, meaning they can sort out many problems per year, instead of just one. That's probably the most solid "is the stuff worth it?" metric there is.
Niche software problems either have an adacemic motivation, or a government one, or a private industry one. GIS, open source development tools (linux, etc), the life sciences, earth sciences, crypto, AI, visualization, etc... all are backed by government efforts, and or private industry collaboration to keep things open, and or lower cost. Hollywood studios are finding the same kinds of synergies, BTW. Lots of open development going on there.
Their solutions are varied enough to prevent "a product" from forming, so they work on bodies of code that can be manupulated and built on to get them where they need to go.
On the private industry side, CAD, Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics, CAM, Factory Simulation, Finanicals, Geological Exploration, and many others are niches, but strong, well defined ones. Products appear, and the smaller audience, combined with the high annual development costs required to factor in the latest research and computation techniques more or less set a high price.
That's just how it is. Hopefully, "that's insane" has a bit more context. And for what it's worth, I was there for many years too before learning just how some of this stuff comes into being.
One last thing:
Over time, things get kind of finished. That's where we are with many common things. Browsers, word processors, compilers of many kinds, command shell utilities, etc... That's where Open Code excels, because we take the finished and simply make it available for the greater good. Use it, love it, share it.
Some day, CAD and other tools may get more finished. Google sketch up is sort of what that will look like. Somebody will pay 10K a seat today because they need to do it now. 20 years in the future, kids will play with the tech for free.
Call it the great software cycle of life!
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Great points. I enjoyed reading your reply and I am enlightened by it. I see now how some niche software can somewhat justify the high prices.
One of the major items that I had in mind when I wrote my original rant post (but did not mention for some reason) was compilers.
By reading some of the info on the work of SX/B, I understand how hard of a process it can be.
I don't, however, understand why the prices are so high. A compiler is not a niche product. There maybe hundreds of man hours on it, but
companies build on past efforts instead of starting from scratch with every version. Why should a compiler cost hundreds of dollars for each
and every new version?
The same with anti-virus software. I've found that the leading antivirus packages out there are mostly bloatware that false triggers so much
your tempted to turn it off. Yet I have to pay an extremely high fee for the original (and somewhat useless) software and then pay monthly/yearly
fees as well.
The same goes for the gaming industry. Why are almost all games exactly $60? Why does a game that the company clearly just threw together
cost the same as something that took ten years to complete?
My whole point is that software charges an unusually inflated price for their products because we let them. They know they can get away with it.
If this changed, then priacy would be greatly reduced and they would experience more sales overall.
I may be wrong in this, and I would enjoy reading a well-thoughtout reply like Potatohead's explaining why.
They charge what the market will bear. It's very simple when you look at it from a supply and demand point of view.
CAD software is no different to games, but nobody in their right mind would pay 5K for a game whereas people recognise they can recoup the cost of their CAD software many times over.
If you have X dollars to recoup in development costs, you have to look at your profit curve and determine the price sweet spot when you balance "number of units shifted" vs "unit price".
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"VOOM"?!? Mate, this bird wouldn't "voom" if you put four million volts through it! 'E's bleedin' demised!