[HN Gopher] Steve Wozniak and Stuart Brand Discuss Control of IP...
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Steve Wozniak and Stuart Brand Discuss Control of IP (1984) [video]
Author : 1970-01-01
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-03-11 16:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gettyimages.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gettyimages.in)
| mikewarot wrote:
| I find it ironic that such a free and flowing discussion about
| the nature of IP itself becomes the IP of a corporation.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| The irony was not lost on me! This piece of "information" seems
| to be free to link, view, and enjoy (with a big watermark).
| legel wrote:
| Love your username, the beginning of Unix Time -- you're like
| our Jesus
| iteygib wrote:
| Paraphrasing, but I do agree with the "information should be free
| but someone's time should not be" statement. How to properly
| execute and balance that though is the hard part
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I do agree with the "information should be free but someone's
| time should not be" statement.
|
| While it is a nice idea ("information should be free"), I don't
| know that the statement is rooted in practical reality.
| Information doesn't have autonomy so needs to be created, it
| can have time value, it certainly has relevance value, or
| entertainment value, has quality value (signal > noise); all
| these things require effort to produce, maintain, curate,
| distribute.
|
| Leaving the practical constraints behind, I also struggle to
| see moral or ethical reasons for information to be free. Which
| information should be free? All information? Why?
| pjmorris wrote:
| "What does society need? It needs information that is truly
| available to its citizens--for example, programs that people
| can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what
| software owners typically deliver is a black box that we
| can't study or change. Society also needs freedom. When a
| program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part
| of their own lives."
|
| - Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M.
| Stallman
| dingnuts wrote:
| "But what software owners typically deliver is a black box
| that we can't study or change"
|
| I think a lot about how RMS's view on software freedom was
| warped by the highly intelligent and intellectual peer
| group that he must have been involved in at MIT.
|
| It strikes me as endearing, but naive, to believe that most
| people would be able to treat software as anything but a
| black box simply if the source code were available to them.
|
| Certainly, for most people using computers at MIT, when RMS
| was writing, this was true. But it is definitely not true
| that source code would have any use to most computer users
| (smart phone users, really) today. They simply would not
| have the ability to do anything with it.
| Ardon wrote:
| It doesn't really need to be them doing the studying,
| making the code viewable allows end-users to choose who
| to trust or to get second opinions, instead of only
| having the word of the company producing the software.
|
| One or multiple people who can study the software, even
| in small numbers, are still adding more information, and
| so more potential trust, than the alternative.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > But it is definitely not true that source code would
| have any use to most computer users (smart phone users,
| really) today. They simply would not have the ability to
| do anything with it.
|
| It seems like GitHub and other sources of open source
| software offer an opportunity to test your hypothesis
| empirically. I am biased to think that its existence
| demonstrates that source code is of use to at least many
| users.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > It strikes me as endearing, but naive, to believe that
| most people would be able to treat software as anything
| but a black box simply if the source code were available
| to them.
|
| I don't think end users modifying software is a realistic
| scenario, but that doesn't mean there aren't realistic
| scenarios enabled by Free software.
|
| Having (appropriately licensed) source code available
| means people can pay others (with the necessary skills)
| to adapt software to their needs. Closed source software
| greatly restricts or removes that possibility.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| I don't think that's fair. There are a lot of instances
| where people go out of their way to experiment with
| systems despite limited literacy. The example that seems
| most salient is PSP homebrew, something I was doing at
| the age of 13 without a single hint of how anything
| computer related functioned.
|
| The question becomes one of community and accessibility,
| and community begets accessibility. Opening source allows
| for easier access to fundamental aspects and lowers the
| "activation energy" of the whole process to develop and
| thus invites greater participation. Like how many man-
| hours get spent probing for vulnerabilities that enable
| jailbreaking? And note that these are specialized
| rarefied man-hours, and the whole system is also
| adversarial in that those seeking to crack the code are
| in competition with those trying to conceal it.
|
| Pull all that out and make it all accessible and perhaps
| 13-year-old me would've tried to recode that 64x64 limit
| on the icons and learned something in the process,
| enable, iterate, participate...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I think Free software encourages exceptional end users to
| participate as you're describing. I didn't mean to imply
| differently. Encouraging this kind of development is
| definitely good.
|
| The bigger win that I see, though, is enabling
| communities of users to band together and work together
| or finance development of software with the community's
| common goals in mind. That's not something that
| proprietary software has historically done much of, and
| proprietary software doesn't permit that community to
| fork the software when goals don't align.
| bobajeff wrote:
| Yeah, I was recently reading the history of smalltalk and
| some of it's creators goals was to make it possible for
| everyone to be "computer literate". That is everyone
| being able to make their own programs without specialist
| programmers doing it.
|
| In that book it seems that Kay eventually gave up that
| idea. Noticing it seemed that people would take years to
| be capable of doing interesting stuff with computers.
|
| Which I think might be why his later research was more
| about just making code smaller and more comprehensible by
| domain experts.
|
| Edit: It is worth noting that the idea seems to have been
| picked up by Dynamicland via their Realtalk protocol.
| Though I suspect they have ways to go before achieving
| that goal.
| carapace wrote:
| > programming new editing commands was so convenient that
| even the secretaries in his [Bernie Greenberg] office
| started learning how to use it. They used a manual
| someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but
| didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who
| believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared
| off. They read the manual, discovered they could do
| useful things and they learned to program.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
| ta1243 wrote:
| I have never looked at the source code for vim, but I
| have used features that people other than the original
| developers have created.
|
| I have however looked at the mod_proxy_wstunnel module in
| apache and edited it to suit my needs. I never expected
| to do this, I'm not a developer -- certainly not a C++
| developer, however running sed -i
| 's/WebSocket/websocket/g'
| ./modules/proxy/mod_proxy_wstunnel.c
|
| Means it works for my use case. In a world without free
| software I would not be able to do that simple thing.
|
| Likewise I have changed some custom filters on ffmpeg for
| my own build. Again that's C, and my C is horrible. I
| don't need to deal with the somewhat opinionated views of
| the ffmpeg developers to fold them back upstream - I can
| just have my 2 or 3 changed files to use them for my
| purpose.
|
| Just because I don't look at the code for 99% of the
| software I use, it doesn't mean I don't benefit from it
| being free software, and for the 1% of cases when I do
| need to change something, I can. That's freedom, and I'm
| happy that the GPL ensures my freedom.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Consider the situation where people bring their car to a
| mechanic other than the manufacturer to have changes or
| maintenance done to it. Imagine a world where the same
| thing is both possible and encouraged with software. That
| is the Free Software vision.
| hn_acker wrote:
| Free software is not just about having the technical
| means to modify the software (access to the source code
| and not being impeded by technical measures against
| running modified versions instead of the original
| software) but also the legality to do so. Free software
| grants any users a legal right to modify it. That many
| users won't modify free software (because they lack the
| motivation/time/money/need) is not a strong argument
| against the usefulness of free software, because the
| users who would modify free software can do so without
| worrying about being sued. Additionally, the end users
| who won't modify free software can still benefit from the
| freedom because copyright is two-sided. Not only is it
| legal for people to modify free software, it's legal for
| end users to use other people's modifications of free
| software.
|
| Free software is especially important in cases where the
| developers of proprietary devices use DRM as a secondary
| _legal_ barrier (provided by 17 U.S. Code SS 1201,
| section 1201 of the DMCA, in the US [1][2]) against
| otherwise non-infringing actions such as inspection
| (which is why access to source code remains a crucial
| requirement of free software alongside the freedom to
| modify) and repair. (Tangent: The EFF is arguing in Green
| v. Department of Justice that the anti-circumvention
| portions of DMCA 1201 violate the First Amendment [3].)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_and_Perf
| ormance...
|
| [2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
|
| [3] https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-
| justice
| adhamsalama wrote:
| To advance our civilization.
| carapace wrote:
| The lack of practical constraints on copying bits is exactly
| the rationale for the statement.
|
| Since the cost to copy information (once the original bit
| patterns have been crafted, which process is, as you point
| out, typically costly) is close to zero it becomes regressive
| to charge for copies of information.
|
| Clearly we should pay handsomely those who develop the
| original useful information.
|
| - - - -
|
| edit to add:
|
| Sorry, I realized I was just paraphrasing the clip, and you
| probably already get it and are asking a different question,
| something like, granted that copying information is very
| cheap, still why should we just freely give each other useful
| information? Eh?
|
| The answer there is that we're all in this together and we
| have serious challenges to face (climate, plastic and other
| "forever chemicals" and pollution, crashing of the marine
| ecosystem by destruction of plankton resulting in widespread
| famine (we eat more fish meat than all other animals),
| asteroids, etc.) and so we should do our best to accelerate
| our capabilities and power-with-wisdom to cope with it all.
| iteygib wrote:
| I feel it's essentially what a library is. There is a public
| or private cost behind it (like taxes to pay for it), but for
| all intents and purposes, the information inside of it is
| 'free' from the standpoint of the sheer amount of use and
| good it can provide for that cost. It is not technically
| free, but as close as it can be, and the information it
| provides has undoubtedly paid it self back a countless amount
| of times to the public (getting inspired, research to create
| things, relaxation, etc. etc.).
| Zambyte wrote:
| Don't spend your life producing information. Spend your life
| doing things derived from information. If information is Free,
| what you do with it becomes the only valuable aspect of it.
|
| Don't sell manuals. Write manuals, and sell labor (I will make
| your device behave in X way by doing Y, as described in my
| manual). Don't sell software. Write software, and sell labor (I
| will configure your computer to do X using Y software).
|
| We have been held back so much by the artifical scarcity of
| information... it's absurd. It's nice to have a nice, cushy
| ecosystem where you don't have to compete in your domain (ie
| hardware manufacturers bricking devices for "unauthorized"
| upgrades / fixes, software proprietors having a monopoly on
| maintenance), but imagine a world where you had to compete or
| fail. I think we ought to try that sometime.
| resource_waste wrote:
| I have fears that the work I do today, will cause some sort of
| negative externality like Apple.
|
| I might be a hardware engineer, make something cool, but you have
| some psychopath take your work, manipulate people's emotions and
| make them feel status insecure, then sell to them. Think of how
| much pain low income people feel watching Apple's commercials
| knowing they have an old iPhone. Think of the Apple legal team,
| promoting themselves at consumers and developers expense. Close
| to a billion people had their neurotransmitters negatively
| affected because of Steve's hardware success.
|
| It just worries me that my good intentions today, can turn into
| immoral actions 10-20 years later.
| josfredo wrote:
| I think this is a general rule. Everything we do today,
| regardless of the short-term benefits they may achieve, will
| eventually "turn to the other side", effectively balancing
| things out.
|
| My take is that it is far more valuable to do things just for
| the joy of it.
| ecocentrik wrote:
| The amplification of Apple's prestige brand status and it's
| influence on conspicuous consumption is a function of Apple's
| marketing and branding efforts and not related to any IP they
| developed.
|
| Sorry to break it to you but most people who can't afford the
| latest iPhone find alternatives that fit their budgets with
| very little emotional distress. It's only individuals that feel
| the desperation to gain the approval of peer groups that
| discriminate based on middle class luxury prestige brand
| markers that experience any kind of emotional distress from not
| being able to display those brands on their person.
| teddyh wrote:
| If you make beautiful art, then psychopaths and murderers will
| still look at your art and enjoy it. Should this dissuade you
| from making beautiful art?
| tuyiown wrote:
| > I might be a hardware engineer, make something cool, but you
| have some psychopath take your work
|
| You forgot the apple periods where they had little general
| appeal and it was just weird to use apple hardware. The process
| you describe started with the iPod, but its dynamic wasn't only
| due to marketing, at the time, the thing was really unique to
| interact with. You could really genuinely still think to do a
| great engineering work at the time, and the kid being killed
| over an iPod being a freak event.
|
| I don't like this anti-corporate over simplifications, the
| psychopaths may be are, but they are not all controlling semi-
| gods, things emerges out of proportion also by themselves, like
| any kind of self-reinforcing processes.
| apercu wrote:
| I stopped primarily using Apple for a couple years, until
| they released OSX and I could run Apache, PERL and MySQL on
| my local machine instead of needed an internet connection to
| ssh to a linux host. Wifi not really being a thing in public
| spaces then, it allowed me to work from a coffee shop.
|
| At the time, Apple seemed like they were about to go out of
| business.
| cpach wrote:
| It's Stewart :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free
| corytheboyd wrote:
| > Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be
| expensive. ...That tension will not go away.
|
| Damn, that is very well said.
| robg wrote:
| Pretty sweet sweater Woz is wearing, anyone know the story? Did
| early Apple custom make apparel?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| early Apple culture is unrecognizable compared to the modern
| versions IMHO
|
| source: 1987
| apercu wrote:
| I remember (as a mac owner from '92 on) getting a catalog in
| the early 90's of Apple apparel. I'm not dreaming right?
|
| A quick search definitely brings up an 87 catalog and clothes
| available from the website in 97, but I swear I got a paper
| catalog in like '93 with some corny clothes....
| qgin wrote:
| The original Apple Watch:
|
| https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-apple-watch-from-1995
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| It was Grateful Dead then turned into then turned into The
| Matrix
| schappim wrote:
| It's ironic to watch a video about IP and information freedom
| constantly marred by the Getty watermark.
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