Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!...@cs.vu.nl From: a...@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Money and the MINIX Centre Message-ID: <7218@star.cs.vu.nl> Date: 2 Aug 90 13:09:50 GMT Sender: n...@cs.vu.nl Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam Lines: 112 Posted: Thu Aug 2 14:09:50 1990 From: a...@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: MINIX Centre References: Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: world Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam Keywords: Now the second point: money. There has been an enormous discussion about the morality of making money from other people's work. As a university researcher, I find this a bit strange because I am constantly publishing papers full of ideas which other people can, and sometimes do,' adopt to create or enhance their products, which they sell for money. Nobody around here finds that peculiar. What strikes me as odd is that Richard Stallman has somehow convinced people that the morally correct way to deal with a valuable and expensive- to-produce-item (software) is to give it away free. The underlying idea for the whole discussion seems to be that this is a good and proper way to run society. I look at this from a different angle. A number of years ago, an experiment was set up with two groups of people, similar in general background, age composition, educational background, and other variables. In group A, people were expected to contribute to the general welfare of the group without getting any direct return. In group B, the making of money was permitted. Although the final report has not yet been filed, according to many knowledgeable observers, the West Germans (group B) seem to be doing a lot better than the East Germans (group A). In this newsgroup, it almost seems the events of 1989 haven't happened, and that capitalism is regarded as fundamentally evil. Since I was a grad student at Berkeley some years ago, I am well aware of this view, but I don't think it has the worldwide appeal it had in, say, the 1960s. The MINIX Centre and NLMUG and other groups seem to me to providing a useful service. They are putting together all the P-H MINIX stuff (for which they have written permission from P-H), as well as useful things from the net and offering it as a package to people who can buy it if they want it. If they were told they couldn't make a profit on it, they wouldn't do it and it wouldn't happen. I don't see how the world would be a better place by forcing them to sell at cost, and thus inevitably having them close up shop. People who post things knowing that 25000 people will get them, and another 1,000,000 could easily get them if they wanted to, can hardly complain that they are personally being ripped off because somebody has noticed that there are a lot of people without USENET access who are prepared (fully of their own free will) to pay somebody to do all the dirty work of selecting the useful stuff from the net and packaging it in a convenient form. If they are charging too much, somebody else will sneak in and undercut them. Competition and the existence of alternatives will keep things reasonable. My conclusion is that capitalism is the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried (to paraphrase Winston Churchill). I don't see socialism (i.e., FSF) as occupying the high moral ground here, not to mention the fact that it is hardly workable on a large scale. I think the proper moral position should be to give people value for their money. The idea that information should somehow be free is just nonsense. A substantial fraction of the economy is based on selling information. There is one remaining issue and that is the narrow legal one of whether or not the information posted to USENET is copyrighted and what that implies. I am not a lawyer, but I have talked to some, and it is my understanding that "literary works" originating in countries that have ratified the Berne Convention (including the U.S. as of 1989), a copyright notice is not required to establish copyright. However, the fact that you own the copyright does not automatically mean that it is a criminal offence for someone else to reproduce your copyrighted material. What it does mean is that if you can show that you have been damaged by someone's doing this, you can file a civil suit to collect damages. If you were planning to market product X, and for fun you post it to USENET, and the MINIX Centre puts it in their package, and because they have done this, you are unable to sell it, you could sue them for the money their action has cost you. But be prepared to prove how much you would have made had they not infringed on your copyright. And be prepared to explain to the judge or jury why you thought that giving the work free to the 1,000,000 people on USENET would not have affected your sales, whereas the MINIX Centre's sale of 1000 copies was fatal to your business. To make this point more concrete, William Stallings has written several books that are closely modeled on my books. Closely to the point that he has plagiarized a number of figures absolutely verbatim from me (and also from James Martin, ISO, and others). He has also taken end-of-chapter exercises and other things. And he has done this consistently over multiple books over a period of years. This is apparently the way he works. Prentice-Hall's lawyers are well-aware of this, and there is no question at all about the factual copyright infringement. The issue that comes up is how much money P-H has lost due to the infringement. If an author asks permission to use a P-H figure in his book, P-H generally will agree and ask for a small fee, so we could sue for nonpayment of P-H's usual fees and almost certainly win, but the cost of the lawsuit has to be considered too. My point is that the courts do not view copyright as an absolute. They see it very much a question of whether the owner has suffered financial damage by the infringement, and how much. Even if the MINIX Centre's copying was a technical infringement, I think the fact that the copyright owner made the information available to a very large group for free and did not have any clear plans for selling it would weigh very heavily against him in any suit. Not to mention the fact that all the MINIX Centre was really doing was providing non-USENET people the same information they would have had if they had gotten onto the net (and paid the phone company instead of the MINIX Centre for arranging the access to the information). Whether the phone company's making a profit by arranging access to USENET information is any different conceptually than the MINIX Centre's making a profit by arranging access to the same information is an interesting question which I will leave to the Business School's Ethics Squad. Andy Tanenbaum (a...@cs.vu.nl)
Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!ames!haven! uvaarpa!murdoch!astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f From: g...@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Money and the MINIX Centre Message-ID: <1990Aug2.184038.10871@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Date: 2 Aug 90 18:40:38 GMT References: <7218@star.cs.vu.nl> Sender: n...@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia Lines: 50 Posted: Thu Aug 2 19:40:38 1990 In article <7...@star.cs.vu.nl> a...@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >Now the second point: money. There has been an enormous discussion >about the morality of making money from other people's work. As a >university researcher, I find this a bit strange because I am constantly >publishing papers full of ideas which other people can, and sometimes do,' >adopt to create or enhance their products, which they sell for money. >Nobody around here finds that peculiar. > >What strikes me as odd is that Richard Stallman has somehow convinced >people that the morally correct way to deal with a valuable and expensive- >to-produce-item (software) is to give it away free. Actually, you and rms are closer than you think. You are allowed to charge whatever you can get for distributing FSF programs. You are allowed to charge whatever you can get for supporting FSF programs. You just can't stop your customers from giving away the supported, patched versions. If someone wanted to do what the Minix Centre does for GNU stuff, it's totally legal. And someone does: Cygnus Support, run by the guy who wrote g++. In the final analysis, the only difference between GNU and you is that you get a tiny royalty payment from Prentis-Hall for each copy of Minix sold, and Minix owners can only give away Minix to a small number of friends instead of all their friends. Which system is better? Well, some of the stuff in Minix was written by random people who received no royalties. Seems that they don't mind that they were not paid royalties for their work. > I don't see socialism (i.e., FSF) as occupying the high moral ground > here, not to mention the fact that it is hardly workable on a large > scale. Given that the FSF encourages people to make money off their stuff in certain ways, calling them "socialists" is very simplistic. Perhaps this is the result of the Ronald Raygun era -- "Gee, they sure look funny, they must be commie scum!" I hope P-H decides to sue that asshole who's stealing your work, btw. And I also hope that someday I'll be able to get a copy of the Amoeba source without having to fork over big bucks, so I can just read it. Knowing you, there will be some method, and I'm glad you make the effort. But if the FSF were handling it, I'd be able to ftp it today. (Please don't see this as a flame, I do appreciate your liberal stand concerning copyrights and Minix.) -- "In fact you should not be involved in IRC." -- Phil Howard
Path: gmdzi!unido!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!ast From: a...@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Money and the MINIX Centre Message-ID: <7231@star.cs.vu.nl> Date: 3 Aug 90 11:58:04 GMT References: <7218@star.cs.vu.nl> <1990Aug2.184038.10871@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Sender: n...@cs.vu.nl Organization: Fac. Wiskunde & Informatica, VU, Amsterdam Lines: 16 Posted: Fri Aug 3 12:58:04 1990 In article <1990Aug2.184038.10...@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> g...@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes: >And I also hope that someday I'll be able to get a copy of the Amoeba >source without having to fork over big bucks, so I can just read it. >Knowing you, there will be some method, and I'm glad you make the >effort. It will be available in source form by license (not by ftp) by the end of this year. A university source license for an unlimited number of machines on one campus will certainly be well under $1000. For comparison purposes, I believe the current AT&T "free" license is something like $1200, and if you want Berkeley stuff, add another few hundred. We hope to sell it to commercial companies at a fair market price, to generate some money to hire more people to work on it. Andy Tanenbaum (a...@cs.vu.nl)