Lars Pind

Dell’s Software License Policy: A very entertaining real-life story about Dell’s computers requiring you to agree to licenses, the text of which they do not provide!

Two different Dell representatives suggest the customer goes to a public library or his neighbor to find the licenses on the web on the home pages of the respective software manufacturers. Only problem: It doesn’t say which software is on the machine!

I can’t understand that people are so scared over open source software licenses like the GPL because they feel like they don’t know what they’re agreeing to.

Reminds me of my own old piece, Contracts Everywhere.

Mark Hurst is impressive. Now with This Is Broken, a complaint box that lets you send in your frustrations over everyday things. What a great idea, and cool to see it pick up like that. Mark has a definite talent for press, which I admire.

NY Times: Whatever Will Be Will Be Free on the Internet.

What all this means for the future of intellectual property, and some businesses, is as unpredictable as the open-source revolution itself. In the music business, it seems remarkable that only a few believe the technology cannot be held in check.

One of those few is David Bowie. “I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing,” Mr. Bowie said in an interview last year. The future of the music industry, he suggests, is that songs are essentially advertisements and artists will have to make a living by performing on tour.

Economist: Microsoft at the power point.

Government purchases of software totalled almost $17 billion globally in 2002, and the figure is expected to grow by about 9% a year for the next five years, according to IDC, a market-research firm (see chart). Microsoft controls a relatively small part of this market, with sales to governments estimated at around $2.8 billion. But it is a crucial market, because when a government opts for a particular technology, the citizens and businesses that deal with it often have to fall into line. No wonder Microsoft feels threatened—the marriage of open-source software and government could be its Achilles heel.

I read about the new DC 9/11: Time of Crisis in the paper this morning, and it does sound like a somewhat disturbed flick, so I wanted to learn more about it and went to Google.

The top hit for DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is http://www.showtimeonline.com/movies/movies_product.cfm ?titleid=119354 which then redirects me to http://www.showtimeonline.com/lockout/us.cfm, which says

We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.

Why, thank you :)

Perens and Raymond has written an open letter to SCO.

SCO taxes IBM and others with failing to provide warranties or indemnify users against third-party IP claims, conveniently neglecting to mention that the warranties and indemnities offered by SCO and others such as Microsoft are carefully worded so that the vendor’s liability is limited to the software purchase price. They thus offer no actual shield against liability claims or damages. They are, in a word, shams designed to lull users into a false sense of security—a form of sham which we believe you press on us solely as posturing, rather than out of any genuine concern for users. We in the open-source community, and our corporate allies, refuse to play that dishonest game.

Also, see SCO’s open letter and Linus Torvald’s.

Clay Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content. Another compelling piece by always hard-hitting Shirky on why micropayments will never work.

The people pushing micropayments believe that the dollar cost of goods is the thing most responsible for deflecting readers from buying content, and that a reduction in price to micropayment levels will allow creators to begin charging for their work without deflecting readers.

This strategy doesn’t work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. The only business model that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction costs is theft, and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration for micropayment systems.

Very nice basic introduction to computers by my friend and co-worker Joel.