Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it: a lot of my mail (IMAP) with my work server chose to vanish. The cause of this remains a little mysterious, but it’s possible it was because I was using Thunderbird and probably had not set it right; or perhaps it was b/c I was using Apple’s Mail.app, which has had problems accessing and downloading copies of messages from the old work server. Either way, a stupefying period of hours fixing things wasted.
Links: One of my favourite sites for Foss news is Free Software in Latin America. It complements Solar, which is mainly focused on Argentina, and other sites. For anglophone readers, there is some relief: FSLA is in English.
But the best part of FSLA is that the articles it includes are very often very interesting. See, for example, this: Argentine Professor Attacked for Sharing Philosophy Classics Online. The issue is one of who controls the copyright of what should normally be considered public domain material but is not here, as the professor is evidently distributing material that the French publishing house Les Editions du Minuit, claims ownership over.
The article points out that Argentina, like many other countries, must import foundational texts at enormous expense to all. it would thus seem as a no-brainer to take things online and distribute not costly paper but cheap electrons. But cost for me or you is usually another way of saying profit for them. And therein lies the problem that Foss and Open Access face: the change in economic practices.
Clearly, it is to the social good to make as available as possible works generally deemed to be not only important but foundational. Arguably, the government or whatever agency could pay the publisher and then distribute the properly licensed work. But say the government doesn’t or cannot do that. Or say that the actual cost is so steep that it could more properly be called extortion. Piracy is thus inadvertently encouraged, as it is very unlikely that the threat of punishment by remote agents will dissuade many; historically, it has not. Thus, and obviously, this is not a purely particular issue but a general one, a better solution lies in moving away from copyright policies that really only made sense before the Internet and before the distribution of copied documents was so easy.
Piracy is encouraged on other grounds, for much simpler reasons. It is the cheapest way to marketing. It worth a company to monopolize the market with legal and pirated software: the product is the same, and market share means voluntary marketing by users. Pirate users do double the marketing legal users do, as they try to compensate the psychological fact that they think they are violating against the software. In fact, they violate against law, but they do the heavy job for the software vendor: they help monopolizing the market, as they tell about the software to their fellows, as they send and receive proprietary file formats (which is promotion in itself), and they give illegal copies to folks who otherwise would be using high quality free software, but they don't know the difference, and are trapped by proprietary software vendors gaining market through pirate users.
ReplyDeletePiracy will not be punished as long as it is proprietary software's #1 marketing tool. Even the term "Piracy" is coined up because it is romantic: most people would like to be a pirate.
that is frustrating
ReplyDelete