The future is arriving too fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/the-future-is-arriving-too-fast <comment><USER3> A friend works in TV and film and deals with the licensing for this kind of thing. It seems like a colossal disaster at best. It's complicated, convoluted and greedy. We've discussed it many times before, but it doesn't look like the TV/film industries will ever get themselves to a Spotify-esque point.

Which is a shame, because it'll be to their own detriment (as it will be for the music industry again, if 'stars' persist in exclusivity for streaming rights) when people revert back to torrents (as one comment here has already stated). The fact is, most people are prepared to pay for a VOD and/or music service. We just don't want to pay for 3 of them. Money aside, it just isn't convenient. "Can we listen to The Beatles? Yes, I'm not sure whether it's on cassette, CD or vinyl, so search through all three collections, then make sure the appropriate player is plugged in. If it's not there, we'll need to look at buying the minidisk. Or shoplifting it."

Anyway, I appreciate the point of the article wasn't purely a rant about VOD/DVDs, and it was a point well made.

<comment><USER4> There are two fundamental problems:

1) What's good for the consumer isn't necessarily good for the creators. In other words, they have an incentive to fight the future rather than embrace it.

2) The extra efficiency of distribution created by technology is hell on legacy business models. Streaming media is an example of disruption shrinking the whole pie. Craigslist wrecked the classifieds business and became wildly successful but it did so NOT by moving 90% of the industry's revenue to Craigslist; it did so by capturing 10% of the revenue and destroying the rest.

<comment><USER5> Creators != content industry

<comment><USER4> I tend to agree but this is really a separate conversation. These days, the struggling musician will give away music for extra exposure in the hopes of becoming famous so they can make money touring. That's the best they can do because nobody sells 50 million vinyl records anymore, although that's probably more likely than selling 50 million CDs (note I didn't say albums).

Still, regardless of where these dollars flow, to creators or the "industry," it's fewer dollars.

<comment><USER6> well, digital sales only (which are still less than CD and I think streaming/radio + public performance make much more now than by then) are currently worth more than total music sales in the seventies, which I don't think were a particularly bad time for music creativity. ([http://publicradio2.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/files/2014/02/un...](http://publicradio2.wpengine.netdna- cdn.com/files/2014/02/units-vs-dollars-riaa.jpg))

<comment><USER7> 1) I don't think that graph is adjusted for inflation.

2) I haven't done it, but I'd be willing to put a few quid on the 1970s having the largest proportion of albums in the best of lists e.g. [http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest- albums-...](http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/500-greatest-albums-of- all-time-20120531)

Also 1970s rockstars seemed to have a lot more money than their 2010s equivalents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On the contrary, the future isn't arriving anywhere nearly fast enough. I'm old too – but when I was a teenager, I expected that by now there would be a moonbase or three, not to mention thriving orbital colonies, Mars expeditions, self-driving cars for sale, solar power satellites, and maybe even brain-to- computer direct interfaces or augmented reality a la _Rainbows End_. The future ain't what it used to be, dammit!

<comment><USER9> And flying cars. Jetsons lied.

<comment><USER10> Flying cars exist - they are called "helicopters": [http://xkcd.com/1623/](http://xkcd.com/1623/)

<comment><USER11> Or Terrafugias [http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/flying-cars-get-faa- approv...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/flying-cars-get-faa-approval-for- testing/)

As someone who did a pilot's license, real flying is pretty complicated at the moment by the time you've checked 20 things, radioed air traffic control etc. To get a movie flying car like experience I think you'd need self driving car type AI to deal with that stuff. Which could happen before long.

<comment><USER10> But here the problems are clearly in the laws. Don't complain to the engineers where the flying cars are, but complain to your representative for deregulation in the laws.

<comment><USER12> And then complain about evil government not doing enough about half-ton metal bricks falling out of the sky and killing people.

Humans are too dumb to be able to drive cars safely, as evidenced by over a million people dying in traffic accidents each year. That the air travel industry has so little accidents is a miracle, and in big part owed to all those pesky and annoying regulations that can coordinate thousands of people on the same task and make them do their jobs right.

<comment><USER10> > And then complain about evil government not doing enough about half-ton > metal bricks falling out of the sky and killing people.

I believe that the class of people who complains in this case is rather disjoint from the class that wants less regulation.

<comment><USER12> Maybe among the people who think deep about those issues. You'd be surprised if you talked to the general population. It's "deregulate all the things!" but then they complain that the food they eat is crap and companies keep screwing them over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Netflix ambition of a smorgasbord streaming product has slammed straight into the reality of the murky world of internationally licensed content.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

The public has seen the future with Spotify, and wonder why video can't be the same. But there are a lot of people with influential positions in the industry whose livelihood depend on this red tape. Byzantine licensing laws fund entire departments of faceless middlemen, greedy regional affiliates and dark armies of lawyers.

Music wasn't particularly different, it's just that we are further along in the capitulating-industry-dinosaur story there.

<comment><USER14> In fairness, the raw product of music has the advantage of being very cheap to produce. A lot of the value that the industry provides is in marketing. There's also an extent to which bands can afford to give away music on generous terms, because they can use it to publicise other, non-reproducible forms of entertainment like gigs.

By contrast, with the exception of a small minority of films that rake in on merchandising, in the movie/tv industry the film is the only real product. That product is extremely expensive to make. If everyone only streamed Netflix to consume video, the industry would have to drastically reduce investment in making original content. That might be an acceptable outcome to many people, but I can see why the industry would want/need to fight it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some small part of me was hoping this post was a little deeper than Netflix.

<comment><USER16> The post successfully made the point, evidenced by it evincing a deeper feeling in you.

<comment><USER15> I think the title made the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I do wonder whether the licensing snafu that is the movie world is, in the long term, going to kill it or at least badly damage it as an artform.

We already know it's hideous and irritating from a consumer's point of view. But what you may not know is that it's horrendous from a creator's point of view too, at least if you're making a film with a less than $20m budget.

And that accounts for a great deal of the talent _entering_ the industry.

In order to sell a film the conventional way, you have to visit multiple film markets to meet potential buyers, do a festival run for social proof (and go to all those festivals), potentially pay out of your pocket for a cinema run, negotiate with a bunch of people who all have far more information than you do as to the value of your film, employ third parties (sales agents) who have a near-universal reputation as crooks, and finally, quite likely sue to get anything beyond the advance you're promised.

(And other stuff. Lots of other stuff, which I'm not going into here. Masters, E&O insurance, delivery formats...)

Selling a film - not making it, just selling the finished thing - takes 1-2 years, and can easily require a $50k budget.

(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of _anyone_ who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.)

By contrast, selling a book involves uploading that book to Amazon, setting a price, and promoting it. If you're being thorough about your launch process it might take 3 weeks.

I've been a filmmaker for 20 years. I'm currently dipping my toe in the world of games development, for pretty much exactly these reasons.

<comment><USER18> > At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - <USER2> > that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they > knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally > from their own site. Nobody did.

Has that ever happen at all? I didn't hear about that yet.

<comment><USER19> Is the "narrative" qualifier there to exclude documentaries?

I paid to stream the Minecraft documentary ([http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft](http://www.2playerproductions.com/projects/minecraft)). I think that is the only documentary my kids ever got excited about watching.

<comment><USER17> Yes. Documentaries are a completely different world to narrative feature films and one I don't know a lot about. The financials work very differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The weird thing about the law that we ended up with is that if you receive the digital bits via a plastic circle you can do whatever you want with them including make money off of them without giving any of it to the copyright owner. But if you receive the bits via the internet the copyright holder can get you thrown in jail if you try to hand the bits off to anybody else. It makes no sense but Hollywood outmaneuvered everybody on the lobbying in the 90s and it seems this is what we're stuck with going forward as they get their rules codified into international trade agreements that will last decades.

<comment><USER21> Not entirely true. You can't use a DVD for a public showing, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> Streaming may be preferable in some cases, but it's clearly not the only means of distributing some movies. That remains the plastic circle. _

What's still lacking are digital stores which sell video files. DRM-free. Who needs circles if you can have a file and use it any way you want? But DRM poison prevents the future. So I wouldn't say it's arriving too fast. It's arriving way too slow.

<comment><USER23> But why buy a movie when you can just rent it on demand? That way you're not locked in to a particular format or quality level and don't have to worry about backups.

<comment><USER22> _> But why buy a movie when you can just rent it on demand?_

If it's something I like, I prefer to have a backup of it and watch it where I want and how I want. I always do that with music, games and e-books. If it's one time use, then not making backups is more acceptable. You can ask same question about physical books. Why buy it and not just get it in the library? Similar answer will apply.

Secondly, unless that streaming is using some ubiquitous cross platform technology (like Web browser without DRM garbage), it won't be available on many platforms and will be tied to provided application. DRM-free file makes it platform independent.

Thirdly, I find it weird that streaming should be equated to inability to get a DRM-free file. Streaming is simply convenience (no need to download). But it shouldn't preclude ability to download itself. They are not contradictory, except in the mind of DRM pushers. For instance GOG's failed video service provides ability to stream video, and download it as well. Equating streaming to renting is incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> At this point, Netflix is almost like the streaming company that acquired a plastic disc company, and hasn't quite gotten around to killing it yet. Search also feels biased towards streaming, to the point where it will suggest several "not even close" streaming movies before the literal title that you're searching for.

<comment><USER25> I think Netflix intentionally provides bad suggestions. The last week I've tried several times to use Netflix. In each instance, I spend 10+ minutes trying to find something, fail, and give up. Netflix "recommends" stuff that it rates at 1 star. Terrible junk.

And they don't even have the decency to make it easy to see 3rd party ratings or trailers. And if you start something that sucks, it's hard to tell it to stop showing it to you. They also removed the easy way to mark "Not Interested". It's become a much worse experience, perhaps bounded by their limited catalog.

They must know this. They must see the stats on how long people spend browsing vs cancellation rates.

<comment><USER26> I'm also confused by their approach to interface. Perhaps there is some hidden benefit to having people accidentally start watching films when they just want to learn more about it, even if they immediately stop?

Maybe it somehow satisfies some arcane distribution requirement in a way that saves them licensing fees on the more popular films? Maybe it helps some department improve some metric that some other department cares about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The biggest hindrance in the country where I live is licensing agreements. Companies buy exclusive rights to popular content, limit it to their restrictive and expensive platform/service. This license will often last from 6 months to a year. I'm tired of getting the, "this content is not available in your region" because its either unlicensed or been elusively licensed.

I understand the benefits of exclusivity in distinguishing products, but rather than 6-12 months (or sometimes more), it should be more like 2 weeks, or a month. Unlike exclusivity on xbox/ps4/pc, where the content is specifically designed for those platforms, there is no technical reason for exclusivity for media content.

Half the time the rights holders don't even license some content for my country until a few weeks to months later. Occasionally, not at all. They could license it on netflix for my country, or other similar service, but refuse to do so. Yet this is in spite of netflix having a license for the same content in the US, or other regions.

With the internet, regional licensing just makes no sense for digital goods. A service like netflix should be able to obtain a license for content and distribute it to whom ever they want to, where ever they are. The only barriers to this are artificial.

So while the future may be rushing forward, in many ways, we are partially stuck in the past, held back by archaic and antiquated systems of past generations that are unable to let go. Its a matter of perspective. For some the future isn't coming soon enough, for others its rushing by.

<comment><USER28> Content is rarely/never designed _specifically_ for a games console. Game engines are always mostly portable and the porting costs are quite low. Video game exclusivity, when it happens, is nearly always a business decision to try and boost the popularity of the platform.

The main problem is that the big audiences are still on the older platforms, not Netflix or equivalents (and if all audiences moved from older providers which are at least competing, to Netflix, would that really be better? Or just replacing the devil you know with the devil you don't?)

<comment><USER29> Speaking as someone who has ported games to other platforms before, it's not as easy as you say. There's almost always platform-specific issues to deal with. It's rarely as easy as "Export -> to Xbox" (although Unity tries real hard to do this, it took us several months to convert one of our games from PC to iOS).

Differences in input, resolution, screen sizes, and RAM often become hurdles that take real time and manpower to overcome, and can be insurmountable, depending on how the game is structured. The companies might have legitimate concerns over whether their time is better spent on porting to new platforms, or spent working on the next title.

That's why you see so many third parties handle the ports, so the core team can move on to new projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> On this note, I met an entrepreneur in Maryland making hundreds of millions by buying (or getting for free) used music cassette tapes and scratched cds, and cleaning them up, repackaging them and selling them at gas stations throughout the US. There is still gold in them circle things and them thar hills.

<comment><USER31> You cannot do millions doing that kind of job all by yourself. So I guess that you need a whole company for it, which implies managing people, money, paying salaries, taxes, etc. It's not only "cleaning scratched cds".

<comment><USER30> Yes, he has a massive warehouse with a huge operation. He also sells dvds to walmart.

Edit: he also sells used video games.

PSA: Just because a dvd is shrinkwrapped, doesnt mean it is new.

<comment><USER32> I may have seen him doing covert advertising on reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A different way to look at the author's point is that rather than Netflix streaming everything the problem is actually that they don't maintain feature parity between their desktop and mobile websites. If he could manage his disc queue from his smartphone he wouldn't have neededto write this blog post. And that is a very valid point - huge numbers of people use their phone as their primary way to access the internet, so having features that are only available to desktop users alienates a big chunk of your market. For a company the size of Netflix to fail in this regard is quite irksome.

<comment> jim-greer These people need to learn about "request desktop site on mobile". It's buried in Safari, but still doable.

> For a company the size of Netflix to fail in this regard is quite irksome.

As a shareholder, I applaud them for not spending resources to include little- used features on their mobile site. Being a big company doesn't mean you can do all things for all people.

<comment><USER34> Request desktop quite often fails. I'm assuming the browser is passing a desktop use agent so I can't imagine why it does. But it seems to happen more on sites with the "m" subdomain.

<comment> jim-greer I've never seen it work on a site with an m subdomain. But Netflix serves both sites from www.

Edit: I take it back. Somehow it works right on my own site, Kongregate. I wonder what the trick is?

Edit: The trick seems to be a session variable that remembers the browser used to say it was mobile. Then a request to 'm' with desktop headers should redirect to 'www'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The DVD mailing is really a separate business from the streaming. Netflix were right trying to split it off. Unfortunately they did it too early and there was a big backlash. Had they waited a year or two longer few would have cared. Qwikster would have been a separate company with its own leadership and its own app, focused on those who want plastic circles in the mail. Ok, you would need two subscriptions if you want both services, but I am sure there would be a cross-promotion package deal.

</comment><comment><USER36> bittorrent = new plastic circle

<comment><USER37> Not for movies that we old people like. Either the movies are not to be found, or the quality is lousy, or it's seeded by one person with a dial-up connection.

<comment><USER38> Reddit's OpenDirectories subreddit sometimes has non-bittorrent servers with older movies in what I assume is good quality (judging from the file size).

Of course that's not a solution for when you want to watch a movie in the next few hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Netflix only supports DVD queue management from its desktop page. That's a mildly annoying work if a particular service (but since the desktop page world fine on mobile, only mildly annoying), and hardly worth the overblown drama of this article, which is our histrionics.

</comment><comment><USER40> > The mobile version of Netflix's site also has no provision for managing > plastic.

Has he tried switching to Firefox and use the 'Request Desktop Site' option ?

<comment><USER41> Pretending not to be a mobile device is not a solution for a deficient mobile site, it's a workaround.

<comment><USER40> Agreed, I was not contradicting the author.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> A good friend has an extensive pirated media content library.

He insists, and I believe him, that this is not primarily because he is unwilling to pay for the content, but simply because getting it on demand through a commercial channel is too difficult and inconsistent.

</comment><comment><USER43> We are the mindless, soulless, mass of consumers and we are the future! New is good, old is bad. Forget the past, forget history - we are forging the future without any of that! An ideal future! Quality is measured in Megapixels, truth is what our prophets tell us, and individuality be damned. Now off to the future we head for the sake of it! Follow us over this cliff - redemption lies at the bottom. Anyone who claims otherwise is a racist troll!

Don't get left behind, old man. You will surely be a miserable person without the latest apps on the latest iGadget. Besides, there is no place in our ideal world for people like you.

<comment><USER44> Everything that's new is old already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> We recently encountered a situation where (brought to mind by recent political events) my wife wanted to watch Bob Roberts[0], an obscure "mockumentary" about an outrageous wealthy political candidate.

I'd never heard of it. She asked around, and almost none of her friends had either. She was so insistent regarding its relevance that we set up a viewing party to see it.

Being naive, we both assumed it could be streamed... somewhere. We haven't used those plastic discs in a while either, but we figured we would not need them. We didn't know whether Netflix would have it, but we figured _somebody_ would take our money so we could see it.

Nobody. Nowhere. It was completely unavailable.

I figured that the rights were tied up to keep those physical discs moving from shelves. I thought I'd run to the nearest big box store and pick it up. I went to their web site to see if they had it.

Nope. Not there.

I mean, I suppose you can imagine how my story ends: I go to a shady looking site where I can find this particular movie for free and have it saved on my hard drive with no restrictions. Just as I was becoming annoyed with the future, I was reminded of how senseless this problem is.

It was a good movie, and it was good that our friends could enjoy it. But it's easy to imagine a future where it disappears forever, for everybody.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Roberts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Roberts)

</comment><comment><USER46> The tl;dr is "Netflix has no way to request 'plastic discs' via the mobile app or mobile website".

I guess that's fair. Personally I don't even _own_ a device that can play "plastic discs" anymore, which I think is kinda the point (of Netflix not making that a first class use case).

Some commenters for some reason have seemingly just taken the title and extrapolating to the entire content industry (did all these people actually click on the link?).

A lesser point is finding content. Movie A is on Netflix and Amazon. Movie B is on Hulu. Movie C is on plastic discs only. This is a general problem (for consumers) as the content producers fight the inevitable commoditization.

The movie industry is suffering not from piracy or streaming (IMHO) but from TV. Streaming and "plastic discs" made long form serial content viable. There's something deeply satisfying about the almost 48 hours of Breaking Bad vs the 2-2.5 of almost all movies (most of which these days seem to just regurgitate the same superhero formula time and again).

Additionally, good TV can be produced pretty cheaply too compared to any modern movie budget.

</comment><comment><USER47> Because I am also old (getting there, okay), I remember doing this thing called 'writing stuff down' on like a bar napkin and then going home to my PC and looking something up, like little plastic discs that could be sent to me. Yes, I frequently still carry around an analog user interface communication device...yeah, a pen. Just sayin'.

</comment><comment><USER48> As demand goes down, supply will too. There comes a point where it isn't worth making something anymore. Those that demand it still will miss out. To me, this is an acceptable outcome of capitalism.

But I don't think that's what the article is saying. I think it's saying, "There's a difference between wanting and liking ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_salience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_salience)). Demand is determined by wanting, not liking, and so that's what the market responds to. People don't do a good job of wanting what they like, and thus the market is reducing supply too quickly."

Ie. plastic circles (and their analogs) really make people happy. If people were smarter, they'd realize this demand for them would be higher. But because they're mistaken, supply falls too quickly.

I agree, but don't know of a solution.

</comment><comment><USER49> Just decided to go through a ton of super hero movies with my kids, mostly catching up with the Marvel time line.

Impossible without the Netflix Plastic Circle service. Overall, the First Sale Doctrine makes the Plastic Circle service much more valuable than the Netflix Bits service, in my opinion.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First- sale_doctrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine)

Seems more and more difficult to find something we haven't seen, appropriate for all of us to watch, and decent artistic quality on streaming. I think our need for immediate gratification is leading us to give up long established legal rights. Watching bad content because we're too lazy to put something good in our queue and wait for the plastic circle to arrive.

</comment><comment><USER50> > Apple killed the floppy

What'd Apple do to kill the floppy? I remember that floppies really only died after pendrives became common. Even with CDs before, there were still floppies around, since it wasn't as simple to copy data to CD (not to mention lack of removal).

<comment><USER51> I assume the reference is to the 1998 release of the iMac G3...the first popular mainstream PC without a floppy drive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The future's been arriving too fast since velocipedes (bikes) were corrupting our youth. This sounds more like a business problem Netflix has invented to solve a (to them) bigger business problem, and such tactics have always existed.

</comment><comment><USER53> Use dvd.netflix.com from mobile.

<comment><USER54> Yes. So the basis of this rant is a poor UX decision on the part of Netflix.

It would be fine to sort of hide that there are discs... if my account didn't include that. But if it does, there should at least be a button somewhere near the top that takes me to the DVD website from the normal mobile / streaming website. There's certainly one going the other way!

</comment></comment><comment> jim-greer To paraphrase Louis CK:

Everything is amazing and some people aren't happy. The amazing new things make them forget that the crappier old things are still around. They just need to look underneath the big pile of amazing new things.

</comment><comment><USER55> The unfortunate part of this situation is that the only good content Netflix has is their own TV shows.

They don't have rights to stream any decent movies, those are all still just discs. Exactly one time in the last three years when I've gone to search for a movie I wanted to watch was it available for streaming.

<comment><USER56> __They don 't have rights to stream any decent movies __

That seems hyperbolic. Just browsing around (I decided to cap this at 5 minutes):

The Interview

Forrest Gump

Major League

Pirates of Carribean

Hot Fuzz

Armageddon

Kingpin

A League of Their Own

Inglorious Basterds

Scarface

Django Unchained

Legally Blonde

E.T.

Days of Thunder

The Princess Bride

Crocodile Dundee

Clear and Present Danger

V for Vendetta

Galaxy Quest

Running Man

Big Trouble in Little China

Talladega Nights

Kill Bill (1 and 2)

Star Trek Movies (including The Wrath of Kahn)

Tommy Boy

Team America World Police

Lilo & Stitch

Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back

Wayne's World

Clerks

Bill & Teds Excellent Adventure

<comment><USER57> That's a great list if you're 12.

They don't have The Godfather.

<comment><USER58> Scarface and Django Unchained are movies for twelve year olds?

<comment><USER59> Yes. In terms of content, most of Hollywood's movies don't reach any more depth than your average comic. The PG rating system is only concerned with maintaining a standard of purity, it doesn't reflect a movie's story depth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hold down Apple TV mic button, say movie name, rent movie from cheapest available service and start streaming instantly.

The future is here, it's just a different business model than music.

</comment><comment><USER60> Back in the DVD/Bluray era, I wonder how many hundreds on tonnes of plastic was consumed, and how much carbon was burnt shipping it? And how much of that now sits in landfill?

</comment><comment><USER61> An iMac doesn't even have a CD/DVD drive any more. And the movies that I want aren't offered for sale, but only for rental. Apple is destroying my present.

<comment><USER62> Can't you still buy the "USB SuperDrive" accessory thing?

<comment><USER61> Yes, increasing the clutter. iMac is a failed design that forces me to add mess and clutter in order to get to an appropriate functionality. The computer itself is not extensible and hardly serviceable. The alternative, Mac Pro, is now only for rich people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's possible Netflix is crippling your experience on purpose, to provide leverage in their negotiations with content owners.

<comment><USER64> Netflix can buy DVDs at retail prices and rent them out over and over. If it want to put pressure on content companies it wants the DVD part of the business to be as robust as possible. That way it can say "We'd love to stream your stuff, but we don't really _need_ to. We're really sort of doing you a favor here."

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Solution: Just torrent stuff :)

<comment><USER66> Well to be honest they don't even want my money anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I expected the last sentence to read "And I was born in 1980."

<comment><USER68> So young?

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> This is relatable on a couple of aspects...

First, that the advances of technology are outpacing the scenarios which they are used. As I have voiced elsewhere here, it is alarming to see billions and trillions of dollars flowing towards people who seem incapable of balancing, let-alone considering, the higher-order consequences of their actions, like, say, shutting-down the home-automation systems your customers bought as a consequence of being absorbed by a competitor. Or, denying random people things and services they used to have access to.

More disturbingly, it seems that many do see these later effects, and they're sacrificing their customers' interests on the altar of the almighty dollar. Is this really what we want?

Secondly, modern media consumption via streaming is simpler, yes, if you're a first-world citizen with money and typical interests. It does a disservice to people who do not fit this mold, and they are legion. The older, peer-to-peer model of file-sharing (and, in some cases, sneakernets) thrives and survives in this adverse environment, in addition to providing personal independence and privacy.

Thirdly, the chain of variables in a streaming economy is so much longer than a world of plastic shiny discs. As an example, to watch a movie via a DVD you bought or rented, you need:

* viewing device with electricity and a screen (one-time cost)

* a DVD player, properly connected (one-time cost)

* software on said device able to execute and play the disc (one-time cost and not even a consideration historically)

* the disc, in a workable condition (edit: and a compatible region), and the funds or means to acquire it (one-time cost)

* knowledge to operate the DVD player

... and thats it. Compare with Netflix, Hulu, et al:

* viewing device with electricity, internet access, and a screen (one-time cost)

* a working, high-bandwidth internet account that can reach your servers with an acceptable latency (recurring cost)

* a current account with your service provider(s) of choice (1x+ recurring cost)

* current software, able to execute, on said device (recurring cost due to updates)

* a provider that is online and accessible

* knowledge to operate the media player, but also possibly the web browser, on a phone, or tablet, or computer (one-time cost)

* knowledge of current account credentials (sometimes difficult for some)

The cost side of streaming media is so much higer, and entails significant recurring obligations. If you can't pay your streaming bill, much of this goes away. There are many more points of failure. This is simply unacceptable in many parts of the world.

<comment><USER70> Well you forgot the region code problem the DVD had. At least in the beginning it was really hard to get around this. It's definitely easier if you were in region 1 and only wanted to watch content for this. But in the beginning it was pretty hard to get around that if you were living somewhere else.

I've bought a region 1 DVD (beeing in a region 2 land) and had to reflash my DVD drive to play this DVD. And don't get me started on store bought DVDs which were in English and German, but if you wanted to watch the English version you had to watch it with subtitles.

<comment><USER38> _> And don't get me started on store bought DVDs which were in English and German, but if you wanted to watch the English version you had to watch it with subtitles._

Assuming you are talking about playback on a computer: Only the officially licensed software did this, along with blocking fast-forward during movie previews etc. But VLC for example let you select whatever audio track and subtitle track you wanted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> is this guy serious? Ambitious title for some lame words that leave my heart weeping. Could've searched and completed a torrent download before finishing the second sentence. Obviously not many people experience your roadblock, otherwise there would be a market and it would be filled. Maybe there is a market. Get off your ass and get to work. I thought this article was on some Wait but Why, AI, tipping point or something.

</comment><comment> jim-greer In this thread - a lot of people who don't have a Netflix DVD plan saying that it's hard to use their DVD plan.

</comment><comment><USER72> This guy is missing out on the present waiting for a future where Netflix has all content availaible to stream for 9.99$ a month.

As far as I know, you can stream much more content from say Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Crackle, etc. Just need to be willing to pay. You can also buy plastic discs from a lot of places. And if you don't want to pay, you can torrent the world.

So I don't really understand what's his complaints about? He preferred it when Netflix was a mail rental company? I doubt that's worthy of HN.

<comment><USER73> Really old movies are surprisingly hard to find... Outside of Turner Classic Movies (thanks, Comcast, for dumping that from my package and leaving all the other shit), and the Criteria Collection, it can be kind of difficult to find anything that isn't Oscar-winning or older than 30 years. Torrents don't even really help - you might have 4000 seeders for the latest shaky-cam movie theater rip of a super hero movie, but for a somewhat obscure John Ford western from 1947, you might have two, three, maybe.

<comment><USER74> I wonder how much of that is due to the reign of terror of the hollywood monopolies in their fight against torrenting? Of course the consumers of obscure movies are less common than the latest blockbuster, but they're out there, and there are enough of them. They're turning off seeding and peering once the download's complete so that they won't get caught. Torrenting can help preserve those old/obscure things and make them available even when the owners don't care and think it isn't worthwhile. But because of the fight to protect the new pop things, the old /obscure ones vanish. Meanwhile, the new pop things have so many more people interested, that they are readily available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> So in a bar he gets a Movie recomendation, send a SMS to his home server which dumps the stream, rips and burns it to a plastic disk, ready when he gets home.

If he can't code hire a dev, $200 should suffice.

I found the problem in the past was licensing 'issues' prevented whole swathes of old movies ever being shown in the UK - this is pretty efficiently fixed now.

Solving the legal issues is a separate problem that was trivially solved for previous disruptive innovations.

Compulsory blanket licenses, existing media taxes, distribution agencies - just like when radio & libraries were innovations would allow outdated laws to catch up with technological reality. Maximalist copyright is an anti- capitalist protection racket devised by ancient distribution monopolies.

<comment><USER26> I think you misunderstand. He's not objecting to streaming and does not prefer a physical DVD. Instead, he's saying that the movies he is recommended are rarely available for streaming. If he could legally stream the movie rather than waiting for a DVD in the mail, he would do so.

<comment><USER75> I beg to differ, my last sentence suggests compulsory licensing to solve this. Pay musicians just like radio & libraries from the existing media taxes. This would allow all modern expression and access.</comment></comment></comment>


SQLite Release 3.31.1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqlite.org/releaselog/3_31_1.html <comment><USER2> The unnamed "popular and widely-deployed application" appears to be Firefox and Thunderbird: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=949644](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=949644)

There's more discussion here: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1607902](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1607902)</comment>


Ask HN: Market Validation as a service? - <AUTHOR>

I know a lot of people don't want to call up customers and talk to people or don't know the right the people to connect to. How much would you be willing to pay for a market validation report ($1000,$5000,etc.)?<p>Obviously if you as founder don't want to call up customers there is a good chance you probably aren't going to make it, but I guess there is always a chance. I know there are probably companies out there that will do this, but I am not sure exactly who they are and I am pretty sure they are pretty expensive.  If anyone knows of such services I would like to know. <comment><USER2> I think your second point is spot on. I would think a much more valuable service would be helping find a co-founder or commissioned sale person willing to work with tech guys to validate would be more important. I need a sales guy for my idea. I'd be willing to pay someone to go out and kick some doors down but would need some long term solution as well.</comment>


The culture war at the heart of open source - <AUTHOR> https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source <comment><USER2> The real amnesia about "open source" history is that, at the time of the formation of the OSI, developers and companies were _afraid_ of Free Software, Copyleft, and GNU. Making free/libre/community code palatable — even merely for re-use — was an uphill battle. Nowadays, use of open source is so pervasive that you get a strange look in developer circles when you use the word "proprietary". And we are worrying now about paying for committer/maintainer time given how important OSS modules are, especially standard and popular programming libraries and database technologies.

That is _quite_ the inversion. Let's take an example: search. Elastic has gone public while employing an army of Elasticsearch and Lucene committers, and while selling SaaS and cloud services around Elasticsearch and related projects, thus paying for those committers, creating a massive ecosystem/community, and revenue for themselves (plus return for their investors). A win like that would have been unimaginable in the pre-OSI era. Companies wouldn't adopt Elasticsearch, wouldn't put real data in it, and certainly wouldn't pay some company to run it for them.

Instead, that era saw companies like Verity, FAST, Autonomy, and similar proprietary search engines. Can you even name a proprietary on-premise deployable search engine today? Even if you can, it's probably powered by Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch under the hood. That's how much the entire universe has shifted.

<comment><USER3> Many companies are still afraid of copyleft. When you see what actually gets used in corporate environments and shipped in commercial products, it's almost exclusively MIT/BSDL/AL, some LGPL, and very little GPL.

<comment><USER4> "Used in corporate environments" and "Shipped" are two completely different thing. You will find GPL software all over the place in the enterprise because there is no risk.

You won't often see GPL software in shipped commercial products, because when you ship stuff you might need to include proprietary components you don't want to have to open up. It still does happen from time to time though.

<comment><USER3> I have personally worked on a GPL component that's a crucial part of a shipped Microsoft product, so I'm well aware that it happens. But compared to non- copyleft licenses, it's a drop in the bucket, even with the industry-wide embrace of Linux. And if Linux couldn't blaze that path for other stuff, I'm not sure what can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The point of "open source" was pragmatism over strict ideology, but then the ensuing vulnerability was exploited by DRM/SaaS.

The sheer amount of "open source" today is because it is a great marketing term for what is effectively proprietary software or feedstock for proprietary software. It's not popular culture due to its empowering users, or even the pragmatism of say being easier to debug, but because it is the specific technology that Surveillance Valley businesses are built upon!

Furthermore, dumped-over-the-wall projects like Android would be better referred to as "Shared Source" (with its association) - the Free branches are seemingly unable to actually keep up with the master!

I think the _answer_ to the conundrum is still "Free Software", but IMHO the FSF needs a strong makeover. On fundamentals, Stallman was and continues to be very much _correct_. But he seems to have become _less applicable_ due to not necessarily choosing the right battles or making the right compromises.

Here ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436615)) is a thread I wrote a few days ago expanding in the specific context of firmware blobs.

<comment><USER6> > _Furthermore, dumped-over-the-wall projects like Android would be better > referred to as "Shared Source" (with its association) - the Free branches > are seemingly unable to actually keep up with the master!_

I think I'd called this "spectator source". You can watch for free, but don't expect you'll really get much time on the field.

<comment><USER7> I think 'source available' is already an established term, i.e. the source is there to view, but that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What we are seeing is not as much a war inside the community but an assault from a set of corporations that want to harvest their ownership of a name associated with a successful opensource project into making them the next Microsoft as they have to repay their investors/owners with super-normal profits a functional free market cannot actual provide.

All of the recent issues have started with someone trying to reinvent Microsoft shared source idea where the focus is on code transparency not the right to modify and fork.

It's a common pattern of substituting the real movement with a cargo cult copy, where the original goals is replaced by a set of consumable you have to buy, that have killed far more important movements then the opensource one in the past where orithe attack does not come openly but as astroturfing campaigns crafted to subvert real criticism and create the impression that the purveyors of cargo cult movement is trying to save the movement where as the goal is usually to carve a way for them to generate the cash their investors/creditors demand if not to become filthy rich.

The opensource schism between osi and fsf was more about letting opensource escape the leadership by committee culture of academia and find a way for it to ride the corporate beasts as a symbiotic parasite through forking and re- merging. Where as the current manufactured crisis stems from the need of a bunch if startups to turn the relationship around and control the opensource project they back like a rider controls a horse which means preventing forks and independent commercial contributors.

The Linux project where nobody uses the mainline kernel tree directly in production is a good example of the OSI model, here we have a bunch of companies forced to provide code upstream in order to provide a Linux product downstream to their customers in a relationship where there is not a "Linux inc" monopolizing the revenue stream generated from the end users but where all of the commercial contributors gets the revenue from their individual customers.

What the likes of elastic or mongo that have been the center of controversy recently want is to become that single entity monopolizing the entire revenue stream of the opensource project they sponsor, which was also what oracle tried to become for MySQL and OpenOffice, as this is not an new conflict.

<comment><USER9> One point I think the article missed was the advent of the web, which has rendered a lot of these debates moot - when everything is X-as-a-Service then the only thing running on my machine is some bloated javascript written by someone who thinks they're an engineer because they graduated a boot camp. I mention this because ultimately, and this is the point I think is missing from the article, whether $serverside_framework is libre or proprietary makes no difference - the company is going to get rich selling my personal data either way. That is to say, to a lot of people for whom computing is synonymous with the web, the distinction between free software/open-source software and proprietary is blurred because less and less code runs on our devices now.

The stale, tired lecture that Stallman's been giving for the last 15 years about ethics isn't persuasive any more because the really odious code isn't running on my machine. Whether facebook's codebase respects their engineering team's collective freedoms or not simply has no bearing on my experience as a user. I'm getting exploited either way.

<comment><USER10> You are conflating two very distinct problems.

But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you evidently noticed the second one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (I'd like to note that most of these thoughts that follow are not directly tied to the article or aimed at Steve Klabnik; the article is good but it doesn't seem to make an assertion about what's right or wrong.)

I still hold strong that this "war" is getting silly. This whole thing seems so antithetical.

Open source is being chosen by developers and startups because it has technical benefits, it's appealing, it attracts attention, etc. The reason why it is all of those things is exactly because of what open source _is_. If you control the monetization strictly, it's not open source, and it loses the appeal. Simply having source _available_ isn't appealing to me. Contributing to a project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.

In my personal opinion, SaaS is not exploitation. Being able to do this is the point. The difference today is that there are people releasing software as open source under licenses that permit others to monetize their software... and then are shocked when they actually do it. Last time I made this argument, I mentioned Linux, and being the quintessential open source project it's a super good example of how open source can be collectively beneficial. I stand by this, and I would presume Linus is not bothered by the massive monetization of Linux. Since that's the point.

If someone wants to build proprietary software, please do. The open source community can survive without another NoSQL database, I'm sure, and nobody will blame you. Few will do this, though, because many want to eat their cake and have it too. Whatever. In any case, please don't attempt to conflate "open source" with "shared source" in the meantime. I've said it before and I will say it again: You aren't saving open source. You are saving your profit model. And nobody blames you for that. I say this as a continued user of Caddy, Redis, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm an employee of Google, these are my personal opinions and not those of my employer.

P.S.: Steve, I'm really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to clarify your thoughts on that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! You're right that I'm not attempting to in the post, so no worries.

> If you control the monetization strictly, it's not open source, and it loses > the appeal.

Hmm, open source and free software both say nothing about money. Could you elaborate a bit?

> Simply having source available isn't appealing to me. Contributing to a > project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.

I think you'll like my next post. :)

> P.S.: Steve, I'm really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to > clarify your thoughts on that?

What I _will_ say is that the speculation of this as being about "brogrammers" is incorrect. I don't want to super get into it, because my thoughts aren't fully formed, and this is a hot-button topic. What I will say is that, in the last 20 years, our discipline has grown, and women are returning to it. If you take the large public figures in both movements, like RMS and esr, both have attitudes and beliefs that are... not great, on topics like sex, gender, and other social issues. In general, the social stuff around these movements is very masculine, and often socially regressive. This makes it hard for women to care about these movements. Obviously, these are mostly broad generalizations, and there have been some women who are involved here. I know several women who are very passionate about both Open Source and Free Software. But I've also spoken to many who say "never", and the numbers speak for themselves.

<comment><USER11> >Hmm, open source and free software both say nothing about money. Could you elaborate a bit?

To me, the fact that they say nothing is the important part, and it's why the whole thing works. At first I thought it was weird that GPL didn't limit commercial use, and now I think it was absolutely essential that it didn't.

>... If you take the large public figures in both movements, like RMS and esr, both have attitudes and beliefs that are... not great, on topics like sex, gender, and other social issues. ...

Interesting. Well, I don't personally see the connection just yet but I'll keep an open mind. It seems like there probably is something to be said.

<comment><AUTHOR> > To me, the fact that they say nothing is the important part, and it's why > the whole thing works.

Ah, gotcha. :) Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Business friendliness is not an ideological choice. Maybe a careless choice or a calculated one. But I don't think anyone has strong beliefs in it. Hence, the OSI side is fighting with an agenda. FSF, on the other hand, is ideologically strong, people hold genuine beliefs and fight for those beliefs. Well, not lately. As it turns out, FSF is not ideologically strong enough to take on modern issues and is ok for companies to wrap and build around free software to offer it as services, but never release any of the supporting code, forcing users into a proprietary lock-in, because they cannot run similar services without all of that extra code. So, here we are, in a need for stronger ideology. And even though this is also agenda driven of smaller companies, startups trying to protect themselves from bigger companies, there is still a lot to believe in.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's a fair statement of the FSF's position.

From the horse's mouth:

> _Early drafts of GPLv3 allowed licensors to add an Affero-like requirement > to publish source in section 7. However, some companies that develop and > rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They > want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the > administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement. By > publishing the GNU Affero GPLv3 as a separate license, with provisions in it > and GPLv3 to allow code under these licenses to link to each other, we > accomplish all of our original goals while making it easier to determine > which code has the source publication requirement._

[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#SeparateAffero](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl- faq.html#SeparateAffero)

The "administrative burden" is not academic, by the way. Where I work we spend a lot of time and money checking that we are compliant with every license pulled in directly or indirectly into our products.

<comment><USER13> Administrative burden isn't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, either. GPLv2/3-style copyleft gets forgone all the time on pure process grounds. It's nontrivial to identify which _permissive_ licenses apply to some bag of artifacts an engineer dug up online.

FSF faced fork threats when it floated AGPL-GPL merger in GPLv3.

<comment><USER6> > _Administrative burden isn 't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, > either._

I didn't mean to imply that. The AGPL however greatly expands the scope of folks to whom the burden applies. Some companies can basically just look for AGPL to exclude because they don't distribute anything.

Others (like us) must check _everything_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing RMS has said is that Free Software (GPL) places no restrictions on how anyone _USES_ the software. The rights reside with the actual users.

The GPL does restrict how you _REDISTRIBUTE_ it. If you modify the software, you must distribute the modifications when you redistribute it.

Businesses that just use the software are fine with GPL.

But businesses that want to redistribute GPL software cannot fork and close it.

But they're businesses and have revenue, so they can pay others to use their software, or just use MIT/BSD licensed code that allows fork and close.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think the FSF philosophy has proved remarkably prescient. For a long time I didn't really get it and it seemed excessively rigid and unrealistic. So many of the dangers that I now see in the path of technology were anticipated in the founding principles and four freedoms however. I've definitely come round if not yet a card carrying convert.

<comment><USER16> There's a whole subreddit called /r/StallmanWasRight so you're hardly alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This argues for a third counterpart to FSF-style "Free Software" and OSI-style "Open Source Software" terms.

Apparently, FSF is too preachy and OSI is too business-y and thus following "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" style, a new, third movement of producing software that is free to copy, free to modify, etc. will naturally arise on its own.

There are allusions to brogrammers who know nothing more about OSI than 'It's on GitHub!!', I'm not sure how charitable that is but I can say for several years that no matter how many wiki walks I've taken down the history of Linux, GNU et al which is probably where some of those brogrammers fell as well. IDK the difference, does it really matter, might as well stop looking into it any further than that.

The schism and lack of unity between church of FSF and church of OSI has probably had a net detracting effect on getting software to be more permissible, even if the absolute effect has been way more FS/OS software than would be expected otherwis.

I could be totally wrong, I didn't show up for computing until the Win 95 days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reading!

> a new, third movement of producing software that is free to copy, free to > modify, etc. will naturally arise on its own.

I think this is a bit too teleological. I'm not confident that such a thing _will_ happen. I think that the environment is ripe for something to happen, but I don't know what that is. That's exactly because of

> IDK the difference, does it really matter, might as well stop looking into > it any further than that.

I don't think that most people's conception of open source matches the FSF/OSI definitions. Does it really matter? I don't think it does for most people. I do think there's a values mis-match there though, and that means there's the possibility for a new thing that's a match. I think there are significant obstacles to that project, though. That's for the next post. I hope that I actually write it though, I've been trying to for over two years...

<comment><USER17> I agree with both of your points.

I will add that if the difference between the FSF and OSI definitions of OSI don't matter...perhaps they should merge and join forces? Get the (not that it sounds great to say it this way) least common denominator between the two definitions, unify the Orgs, and present a unified front to prospective learners. There's propriety software and FOSS, the former word is defined in the dictionary, the latter word/acronym is defined at freesoftwareisopensource.stallman , rthar than the "it's over here at the FSF websites, on your right, past the "Linux should be called GNU/Linux arguments" aisle."

<comment><USER18> _> if the difference between the FSF and OSI definitions of OSI don't matter...perhaps they should merge and join forces?_

I don't see how merging would be possible because FSF and OSI have _incompatible_ philosophical differences to sharing/distributing software.

E.g. OSI is compatible with _permissive_ licenses such as MIT License and BSD License. That's totally against what FSF and Stallman is about and their GPL license reflects that philosophy.

<comment><USER19> > OSI is compatible with permissive licenses such as MIT License and BSD > License. That's totally against what FSF and Stallman is about

Essentially all of the permissive OSI-blessed "open source" licenses are also FSF-blessed "free software licenses"; they are not "totally against what the FSF and Stallman is all about."

<comment><USER18> _> Essentially all of the permissive OSI-blessed "open source" licenses are also FSF-blessed "free software licenses"; they are not "totally against what the FSF and Stallman is all about."_

To both dragonwriter and steveklabnik,

Saying "totally against" was too strong. Let me try to clarify.

Yes, the GNU license list has _" The following licenses qualify as free software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL."_[1]

To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with _underlying philosophy_ of FSF and Stallman. That just says _using_ those licenses as part of GPL projects is _acceptable_. However, they don't really fulfill Stallman's _strategy and objectives_.

An example of what I mean by BSD & MIT not aligning with Stallman's objectives would be past comments about him missing the chance to include Chris Lattner's LLVM/clang project in GCC.[2]

Presumably, Stallman would have not let llvm/clang become permissive-BSD license like Lattner did. He would prefer llvm/clang's valuable capabilities to be licensed as copyleft-GPL just like GCC. (More commentary on that style of thinking.[3]) To him, the permissive licenses _" helps the enemies create proprietary software"_ (paraphrasing previous Stallman comments).

That's why I believe FSF and OSI have fundamental incompatibilities. The MIT & BSD licenses being on the GNU "approved" list doesn't really solve that.

EDIT to add reply to: _> The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide. _

I disagree because it seems that Stallman has taken great pains to explain why they are _not aligned on the freedoms_ that software should provide. There is some _overlap_ between FSF and OSI but that's different from alignment.

[1] from: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html)

[2] [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-02/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs- devel/2015-02/msg00594.html)

[3] [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not- lgpl.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html)

<comment><USER19> > To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with underlying > philosophy of FSF and Stallman.

Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's a slightly different issue.

The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be provide. They differ on how problematic they view software that does not do that, and (largely as a consequence of the preceding disagreement) on how to best move toward a view where the benefits of software providing the freedom they agree on is broadly enjoyed.

<comment><USER20> > Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not > compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be > compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's > a slightly different issue.

I don't think this is accurate. Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license can be relicensed under the GPL because nothing in it contradicts the GPL. BSD, MIT, Apache, etc. licenses don't put any restrictions on how you can relicense the software, therefore they can be relicensed under the GPL.

The philosophy if the FSF is that you should have access to the code of the software you run, and that all software should be GPL. It helpfully offers a list of software that can be used as a base for GPL'd software.

In this case, "compatability" should actually be read as in "IBM-compatable" not as "simpatico" or "synonymous."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think there are 3 wars that overlap but not fully.

(1) Pragmatic debates about the usefulness of copyleft vs. BSD/X11/MIT/etc. in various situations (and for various goals), (2) a (tribal, and mostly imaginary?) "business vs. hackers" narrative, and (3) RMS vs. everyone else.

OSI itself doesn't figure prominently in how I think of open source. I realize Open Source^tm is something that OSI legally defines, but going all the way back to the endless Usenet arguments in the '90s, the "open source vs. free software" conflict was never really about OSI vs. the FSF (IMO). It was more about accepting a multitude of licenses as acceptable alternatives, vs. adherence to the strictest and most complicated one (plus accepting Richard Matthew Stallman as your personal lord and savior).

It also felt like "open source" meant promoting a bunch of things as a common good, but "free software" meant promoting something very specific as good, and calling out a bunch of other things as evil. It's like working for a charity vs. being in someone's army. I wonder how much this contributes to which side is more appealing to someone, based on their values and personality.

Maybe this has become way more convoluted since the '90s, but I always considered open source to be a superset of free software. All GPL'd software is open source, but not all open source software is GPL'd. It's less of an "x vs. y" conflict, and more of a "(x, y, or z) vs. x" conflict, with a bunch of cultural and personal baggage tacked on to it.

<comment><USER22> I was around for those arguments in the 90s as well, and that's not at all my take on it.

The FSF was always very clear that the BSD-type licenses (at least once the minor issue of the "advertising clause" was dealt with) were Free Software licenses in their opinion. The Debian Free Software Guidelines always covered a wide variety of permissive "open source" licenses, and in fact the DFSG was used as the basis of the OSI's Open Source definition.

So I've never seen Open Source as a superset of Free Software - or vice-versa. Rather, they have always been almost or even exactly the same set. It's not, and never has been, about alternative taxa - instead, the difference was always more one of marketing.

It's not a question of _What_ \- it's a question of _Why_. The Why of Free Software is _" So that people are free to share and modify the software they use"_, and the Why of Open Source is _" Because this method of development creates better software."_.

If a new movement does crystallise, it will be because neither of these _Whys_ satisfy the new constituency, and their new answer to _Why Permissively License Your Software?_ will be their rallying point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is why the GPLv2 doesn't only require the source code itself. You have to be able to _effectively_ make use of that software freedom.

It doesn't matter so much if you had software freedom, if all you had was the freedom to study, which is only one of the four freedoms.

You need the freedom to modify, and freedom to install modified versions, and the GPL guarantees that.

Question: How many IoT devices out there are running GPL'd firmware, providing source code, but no method to actually modify the device (or the current method is unmaintained and broken)?

Answer: A lot!

If you can't request sources and _build & install_ them, it's a GPL violation.

Rebuilding and reinstalling linux on IoT devices is a necessary step towards privacy and security on those devices.

<comment><USER24> >This is why the GPLv2 doesn't only require the source code itself. You have to be able to effectively make use of that software freedom.

GPLv3 is intended to be better at this than GPLv2, specifically the anti- tivoization bits: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why- gplv3.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know I've grown old when this history and the nuance of the open source concepts need to be spelled out for a new audience.

Just some self-reflection. Thank you very much Steve for doing so in your usual engaging style.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I once met a lead who called Google "a bunch of hippies", because some part of their software was Open Source.

His company had ~10 employees.

We decided we were not a good fit.

</comment><comment><USER27> > I'm not sure exactly how it happened. I think the lazy answer is > "GitHub!!!!". I do think GitHub played a role, but I think the answer is > more complex than that. I personally think that gender plays a huge role. > But that's a different essay. Regardless of why it happened, something did > happen.

"GitHub!!!!" may be a lazy answer, but why isn't "gender!!!!" an equally lazy answer?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Gender is an extremely complex topic, "github made more devs" is not.

2\. I didn't say that "gender!!!" was an answer; I said that the answer is complex, and that things like gender play one role in it.

3\. I didn't give _any_ answer here, explicitly, so it cannot be a lazy answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> i could imagine a third camp between Free Software and Open Source following something like the Qt dual-licensing model:

1\. You are free to use this software for non-commercial use.

2\. If you'd like to use this software for commercial use, you must either actively contribute to this project, or provide a donation to the project maintainers at Patreon / Paypal / Liberapay, etc.

<comment><USER29> Qt can be used commercially for free. It's LGPL whether you pay or not.

Users only need to pay for a license if they want to distribute statically linked software with Qt, if it is licensed in a way that is LGPL incompatible.

<comment><USER30> > Qt can be used commercially for free. It's LGPL whether you pay or not.

This is true now, but was not always the case.

<comment><USER31> The parent comment implied that it was still the case however, which is misleading; it has been available under GPL rather than the non-commercial "QPL" since 2000, and under the less-restrictive LGPL since 2009.

Qt is also interesting in that there is also an agreement in place with the KDE Foundation that ensures that the Qt Company will always offer the core parts of Qt under a "proper" open source license. If they choose to switch to one of these non-commercial licenses again, then KDE is entitled to release the source under a BSD license if they want

[https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php](https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Worth looking at these books in relation to this topic

Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source: The Politics of Open Source [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0745324142/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0745324142/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Ub4MCbBF31XWS)

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Experimental Futures) [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0822342642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0822342642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_tc4MCbRPWHNJZ)

</comment><comment><USER33> " _I'm not sure what that movement will look like, and I'll explore why in another post. To give you a teaser: the problem is in the way that both Free Software and Open Source are formulated. The rot is in the roots, and I'm not yet sure what will replace it._ "

Looking forward to it.

In the meantime, consider a couple of kernels: Linux and sixth (or seventh edition) Unix. Unix wasn't released under a free or open license, but the effects were similar to an open source license: you could give away your changes if the recepient had an ATT license.

The results were SunOS, Solaris, and other monstrosities like AIX, HP-UX, Irix, and a dozen others, all different enough to prevent compatibility and ensure lockin. This lasted until the Unix environment collapsed under it's own weight.

On the other hand, there's only one Linux, under the GPL. There are forks, but few have real momentum. Major improvements are absorbed into the mainline kernels.

Likewise, in the C and C++ compiler space, gcc (its internal bit rot not withstanding) ate all of the other options.

You don't see the difference in most open source, possibly due to the momentum of Apache and Mozilla. Or possibly because most software has a short half- life. But see Amazon and Google's cloud support offerings.

Licenses express ideology. Choose your roots carefully.

<comment><USER34> As additional note, gcc only picked up steam when Sun decided to start the trend of selling UNIX developer tools as an additional package.

<comment><USER33> I'm not sure of the chronology there; didn't gcc _start_ when Sun started separately bundling development tools?

<comment><USER34> No, it preceededs Sun's decision by a couple of years.

[http://shape-of-code.coding- guidelines.com/2017/03/22/happy-...](http://shape-of-code.coding- guidelines.com/2017/03/22/happy-30th-birthday-to-gcc/)

[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050525231654621](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050525231654621)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another view is that this has to do with how projects are managed. It is common to provide access to sources. Accepting submissions of changes to add features or fix bugs depends on who considers them to be improvements and why. If you want to really own a problem and cannot get the managers of the project to accept your changes then you need to fork. This issue exists with both free and open source but ownership is more directly asserted with open source.

Saying this is money does not seem to mesh with the world we live in where RedHat provides services with free copylefted software valued at billions of dollars. Free copylefted software is big money now for better or worse.

</comment><comment><USER36> I could have used some examples of "the war" in progress. Personally, this war has not really impinged on me. I'm not claiming it's _not_ happening, but it would be good to have some evidence that it _is_ happening. Or that the war has gotten hotter recently.

Also, I have to say that I think it's a mistake to view "open source" as solely motivated by commerce. One big practical difference between FSF and OSI is how accepting they are of permissive licenses like BSD and MIT. Basically, OSI likes them and FSF doesn't. (Or at least FSF prefers copyleft licenses like GPL.)

It's true that permissive licenses are more commerce-friendly, but one could also argue that they are more freedom-friendly as well. After all, with a permissive license, you can add your own proprietary extensions to a codebase and then sell the resulting executable without sharing the source for the extensions. With copyleft licenses, you are restricted from doing this. Thus permissive is arguably more free-as-in-freedom.

Of course, copyleft advocates argue that copyleft licenses are more free in a larger sense, in that they guarantee that the _code_ stays free. And, you know, maybe they're right. But I think it's something that reasonable people can disagree about. Whereas a lot of copyleft advocates seem to think that permissive licenses are a sign of moral weakness.

I would say the permissive licenses are "free" in a libertarian sense, and the copyleft licenses are "free" in maybe an anarcho-syndicalist sense.

It seems like a lot of people are convinced that copyleft licenses are more ethical than permissive licenses. I'm afraid I just don't agree with this.

<comment><USER37> The preference for permissive licenses vs copyleft license depends on where you value the freedom. As a developer who wants to write software, you might prefer permissive licenses because you have the freedom to do whatever you want with the software like including it in your propreitary software. As a user who ultimately runs the software, you might prefer the copyleft license because you get those same freedoms as the developer. I would admit that whether a user uses software that uses a permissive or copyleft license, it is pretty much the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes, so the saying goes.

To anyone acquainted with the history of Christianity (or religion more generally) and the history of libre software, the parallels are simply fascinating.

From the Book of St. IGNUcius, 12:1-12:

 _Then began rms to speak to the people this parable; A certain person created a program for perself, and sent its code to other programmers, and went into a far country for a long time. When per returned, per sent an email to the programmers, now selling the software as a service, that they should forward any code that they had improved, so that other programmers might benefit from it: but the programmers ignored the email, and refused to acknowledge the debt._

 _And again per sent another email: and they ignored this one also, and maligned per on other mailing lists, calling per greedy and envious for prestige, and still refused to acknowledge the debt. And again per sent a third: and this one, too, they ignored._

 _Then said the creator of the program, What shall I do? I will send the code of my latest extension to the program under a copyleft license; it may be they will understand the obligation of using libre software and the reciprocal sharing of code when they read the license and modify the code._

 _But when the programmers saw the new code, they reasoned among themselves, saying, this is a vast improvement on the original: come, let us obfuscate this code and delete the license, that we may continue to sell the software without giving back._

 _So they added the code to their the program and deleted the license. What therefore shall the original programmer do unto them?_

 _Per shall come with lawyers and sue these programmers, and shall then give the source code to others._

 _And when they heard it, they said, Google forbid._

 _And he beheld them, and said, What is this then that is written, The license which the engineers rejected, the same has become the backbone?_

 _Whosoever shall fall upon that license shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder._

 _And Silicon Valley and their coders the same hour sought to lay hands on him; and they feared the people: for they perceived that he had spoken this parable against them._

</comment><comment><USER39> > I think we'll end up with a new movement. For the same reasons that "open > source" came up with a new name, I think the movement that will arise from > today's developers will also need a new name.

The name is _source available_ and you don't need to have a movement for that. I don't see any schims here, essentially it is a more transparent version of freemium where you also can see the code and that's all decades old.

<comment><USER40> _The name is source available and you don 't need to have a movement for that. I don't see any schims here, essentially it is a more transparent version of freemium where you also can see the code and that's all decades old._

Source transparency? Maybe we can popularize the idea that it's considered an altruistic act for tech media companies to escrow their source with academic organizations? This would help academics and museums preserve the exact media experience of each generation.

From the article: _Somewhere along the way, Open Source ran into a problem that many movements face: the members of the movement no longer understood the ideology that created the movement in the first place._

Why shouldn't the values change? If people share source for prestige/recognition, to benefit from "more eyeballs" and to share the maintenance expense of shared infrastructure/libraries -- what's wrong with that? Society still benefits. The world isn't the same place where Stallman first thought of GNU. Why should the exact same ideology apply? What's wrong with some evolution?

<comment><USER3> "How could you treat a culture as separate from its connections? How could you draw a circle around it and say, "This, this is the culture, and so it will remain?" A culture wasn't a final product, like a cup of coffee in alabaster, or a sordid climax in an execution alley. People didn't _have_ culture, they _did_ culture. In fact, culture was like a mill: it accepted knowledge and people, and it changed them in certain ways, and it even redesigned itself in the process. Change was intrinsic to culture."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Kudos to Klabnik for quoting from original documents. As he notes, Free Software is a complex phenomenon, and I respectfully submit that he doesn't do justice to the seeds-of-its-own-demise nature of its founding. My account, based largely on Sam Williams' outstanding Free as in Freedom:

[http://www.sampenrose.net/tools/](http://www.sampenrose.net/tools/)

</comment><comment><USER42> Not through yet, but small suggestion:

> I'm not here to argue if the FSF has accomplished this goal

You reference the FSF here, but introduce it with its full name in the next paragraph. I assume that's because you moved stuff around slightly in editing. It's a small thing, but it's slightly weird seeing it used and then introduced afterwards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, thanks! Will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Lots of words and phrases have their meanings change over time. That's not culture war, that's just... culture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. The war is over which particular possible future meaning will happen, not over the concept of change.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm a Free Software fanatic. I've often thought of getting a shirt that just says "STALLMAN IS CORRECT" in big block letters, so people know where I'm coming from. (As an aside, FWIW, the Open Source movement looks, to someone like me, like a largely-successful campaign to undermine the ideology that inspires RMS. But that's beside the point I want to make.)

To me, the current economic systems (left, right, center) are all sub-optimal. I assumed automation would obviate most human labor and usher in a kind of Golden Age (cf. Bucky Fuller, et. al.) Instead, we have pocket computers that serve as strip malls and surveillance devices. (I'm in SF, where we have people living in tents in the shadow of shoddy "luxury" condos. This is hella dystopian y'all.)

To someone like me, if you're programming a computer and NOT working towards a post-historical techno-utopia then you're kinda part of the problem.

We have split the atom: no one should go hungry anymore.

Blah blah blah, RepRaps, blah blah, universal basic income, blah...

<comment><USER45> > I'm in SF, where we have people living in tents in the shadow of shoddy > "luxury" condos. This is hella dystopian y'all.

Why is it dystopian? Some moral and economic systems value individual distinctiveness. What better way to express this distinctiveness than one's choice of living arrangement?

<comment><USER46> >Some moral and economic systems value individual distinctiveness. What better way to express this distinctiveness than one's choice of living arrangement?

Did you just equate suffering from typhus, hepatitis, bacterial infections and other diseases directly tied to homelessness with a "choice of living arrangement"?

Did you do this while being aware that homelessness is a "choice" that historically begins with an acute lack of capital that forces an event called _eviction_?

<comment><USER45> It is absolutely a choice, both on the individual and community level. Some individuals (after consulting their trusted subject domain experts) even choose to give their children the opportunity to suffer from Meningitis and other serious illnesses.

Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents alongside sidewalks.

<comment><USER46> >It is absolutely a choice, both on the individual and community level.

Eviction, the gateway to homelessness, is in no way a choice. Inability to accumulate, pay or borrow capital is so seldom a choice, the word is effectively meaningless in the context.

>Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents alongside sidewalks.

That is true, but it has to be said it totally contradicts your first point, because sufficient and sweeping redistribution of housing and housing capital is the answer to nothing but the coercive suffering felt by those who lack capital, not the answer to some alleged "choice" taken by the sufferers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I remember in the early days of JPG some people claiming that despite the size advantage GIF's image quality was inherently better and should be preferred. One JPG fan wrote something that really stuck with me: "I don't know which is 'better', but I know I'd rather have 10 of these than 2 of those". Software developers are, as a rule, lazy. We pick "free as in beer" software because it means we don't have to figure out how to get accounts payable to approve it. We pick MIT licensed software so we don't have to figure out how to get the lawyers to approve GPL. And we publish stuff on GitHub with random new licenses because it's so easy to do. In the end I would rather have 10 such projects to cull code and ideas from than 2 that had carefully articulated ideologies that provided clear motivation for each clause in their license.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thinking more about the issues, it really seems this only affects a subset of software, specifically server software. A SaaS company won't be able to turn and sell some desktop software as a service. We sort of seen this in the past with hosting companies selling services with apache, php, and various other software together, but I guess the maintainers of these projects were not competiting in this area so it never mattered.

I also find it odd that one of the reasons to use the term open source was because of the ambiguity with the meaning of free. Even with this reason, the majority of open source software is free/gratis.

I agree with the problem we are facing now, we are just not educating many developers on free and open source software. It is probably something we need to improve on.

</comment><comment><USER48> I do think there is a left vs right type of conflict between FSF and OSI. Esp Eric Raymond is appears firmly to be a partisan right winger, remember the very political things he tried to get included into the Jargon File some years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you, and it partially informs where I'm going with this. I think the FSF is liberalism, and the OSI is libertarianism, more than a left vs right thing, exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Has Hacker News ever considered a policy against undated articles?

I have no idea when this was written. It uses the word "today" four times and is written in the present tense but is it referring to events as of a day ago, a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago?

Please put dates on your articles. Otherwise they read as spam, cynically positioned as "evergreen."

<comment><AUTHOR> The date is literally the first text in the article, though it is a very light gray. Hovering over it or the title makes it black.

This is Svbtle's decision, not mine.

<comment><USER50> What an idiotic hosting platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like it, personally. It has some flaws like anything else, but overall it works well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> How did this guy manage to write an entire article on GNU, the FSF, and ultimately open-source, without once mentioning Richard Stallman's name?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because:

1\. I tried to write the article without mentioning anyone's name.

2\. I didn't like it as much as when I quoted from particular sources, so I started putting names in.

3\. Personally, I am more sympathetic to RMS and more biased against esr. I really, really struggled to actually link to esr in this piece, but in the end, decided it was right. But I just didn't think about Stallman. My desire to work against my bias ended up just biasing my work.

Writing is hard.

<comment><USER51> Fair enough.</comment></comment></comment>