From ... Path: supernews.google.com!sn-xit-03!supernews.com!cyclone2.usenetserver.com!news-out.usenetserver.com!howland.erols.net!EU.net!Norway.EU.net!127.0.0.1!nobody From: Erik Naggum Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: LispWorks Pricing Information from Xanalys Date: 09 Dec 2000 14:05:14 +0000 Organization: Naggum Software; vox: +47 800 35477; gsm: +47 93 256 360; fax: +47 93 270 868; http://naggum.no; http://naggum.net Lines: 214 Message-ID: <3185359514853009@naggum.net> References: <3A263124.38058778@xanalys.com> <3A263435.88F25533@anglia.ac.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: oslo-nntp.eunet.no 976371422 15071 195.0.192.66 (9 Dec 2000 14:17:02 GMT) X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@eunet.no NNTP-Posting-Date: 9 Dec 2000 14:17:02 GMT mail-copies-to: never User-Agent: Gnus/5.0803 (Gnus v5.8.3) Emacs/20.7 Xref: supernews.google.com comp.lang.lisp:4930 * Dr Nick Levine | The interesting difference between LispWorks and Allegro pricing | remains the issue of charging - or not - for runtimes. Without wishing | to forestall the debate, it is my opinion what whatever commercial | difficulties Harlequin as-was had with its lisp products in the past, | free runtimes was not the cause. I have tried, but I can't make sense of this last statement. Did the Lisp product bring in "enough" money that you did not have any need for royalties? It seems odd that a license to print money would not be useful to someone, especially someone in commercial difficulties. Would it not have mattered if they got any money from royalties? (That means no relevant user base, which contradicts other information I have.) I also find it strange that one can have opinions about accounting issues, so I guess you mean that it is your opinion that if they did charge for runtimes, they would have lost an equal amount of sales, which I suppose is a valid opinion. However, I think it is hard to pin anything down on a single cause, so for any contributory cause, you could easily say "it was not the cause" unless it was so major a contributory cause that it would at least have equalled the rest combined. Since that is unlikely, unless the whole business were focused around royalties, which we know was not Harlequin's model, I can't make heads or tails of what you're trying to say about Harlequin. If we apply an interpreter of British understatements and general vagueness in preference to precision, however, I get the impression you're trying very hard to have an opinion about another company, which _does_ have royalties as part of their business model and that you are trying to invalidate that model by implication. Personally, I think the whole business model of the software industry is rotten to the core. Microsoft is not even a contributory cause -- Bill Gates isn't smart enough to invent or create something like this. It used to be the norm that software was essentially free (gratis) and just vehicles to move hardware, which was tangible enough to make it easy for the anal-retentive beancounters to count and weigh and such, especially those in the government offices in charge of squeezing the juice of out the produce of society. I think the software crisis has been created by the tax laws and government officials who were unable to understand the value of the computer industry products. Since the Western business world is operating very closely in a trigger-response pattern relative to changes to the tax laws, the regulators are fully to blame for the inability of societies to value software properly, and hence the "protection" the software industry got in the Y2K scare, the ability to skirt warranty and every other consumer protection law, the non-constitutionality of the War on Software Piracy (which is much worse than the absolutely insane War on Drugs measured in results and costs and accepted loss of personal freedom), and numerous additional deep-rooted and pandemic consequences of bad (working to destroy) and sometimes evil (intended to destroy) policy and ignorant idiots with too much power. One of the consequences is that software development is paid for over the marketing budgets, like cheap plastic pens with logo imprints that work no longer than you remember where you got it and T-shirts of so low quality that they couldn't have been sold as clothes -- when you give some trinket away as a marketing gimmick, of course you don't want to warrant, support, or maintain it, and of course nobody would even dream of paying royalties for it, they can just get another cheap pen or T-shirt or shirnk-wrapped software package of the shelf somewhere else. Microsoft, the ruling king of mass marketed trinketware, are just surfing on the same tsunami that lifted Taiwan and Hong Kong from poverty into an inflated economy that just _had_ to crash down and wash out _enormous_ values some day. We see the same situation in the so-called Internet business and lots of people have written articles and books about why it cannot succeed in the long term the way it operates today. In the meantime, producers of fine pens and quality clothes and excellent software suffer because they cannot brand their products with their own logos in large print and give them away while waiting for the wash-out. While the users are waiting for quality software, lobbyists have even succeeded in exempting Internet companies from sales tax, rewarding incompetence and waste, computers and software have remarkably short lifetimes in the generally accepted accounting principles and tax laws, often with depreciation to near zero before Moore's law could possibly apply, rewarding "investment" in new hardware as a very good way to reduce your taxable profits for the entire business market. Like an economy where the inflation is so high you'd better spend your money while it is still hot off the printing presses or it'll be worthless, you have to be inordinately smart and probably rich in real values to recognize what the _real_ values will be a few years down the line. But like all inflation, the inflation in the software industry is caused by the government policies of _devaluation_ of the reference valuables, which when push really comes to shove is the ability of the average citizen to secure a reasonable living after his ability to work hard enough to produce more than he consumes has been depleted by the passage of time -- or, in other words: Our trust in a stable future. That is the real victim of the ongoing novelty craze and the give-away culture that has resulted from massively retarded policy decisions shortly after WWII, when the government goal was to rebuild and instill hope in the future near term. The government role has since been reversed because the near term future of its past policies are now _our_ past. Instead of being a guarantor of stability and long-term safety that each of us cannot build or even maintain on our own, policies in the information technology industries have turned into guarantors of instability and short-term profiteering, effectively betting the future on the fun we can have today, a massive lottery where everybody loses, especially the guy who wins $25 million and discovers that everybody else has to _continue_ to play (read: lose money to) the lottery for him to get monthly installments. The software industry has turned into a pyramid game because the government valuation strategies for software have penalized longevity. It has absolutely _nothing_ to do with the so-called "rapid pace" of the technological development. It isn't rapid and I'll dispute a claim of general development, too. It's all about marketing old ideas in new and ever more shiny wrappings, and nobody does that better than Microsoft today. Their "innovation" is _purely_ restricted to more shiny wrappings, because that is where the money is in today's market. Here's how to destroy their power: Force software and hardware acquisition costs to be depreciated over no less than five years, and treat support, royalties, and other lifetime costs as financial costs, effectively loans to the vendor. There will be lots of excruciating pain lining up for the stupid people who bet their future on the short-term fun and the quick buck, but that's just life: Quick bucks sometimes vanish with no notice whatsoever and if you reap enormous profits in the short term, you're supposed to take care of the long-term saving yourself, anyway. Government was set up to protect society as a whole and all individuals, not only some of them, and it currently protects only some individuals at the expense of our future and the long-term stability of society as a whole. Worse, it's the government that is playing the lottery with its citizens and random fate will determine which us have to pay the big prize the government decides to collect if it isn't stopped from betting our future on low-quality software by rewarding incompetence and short-term profiteering in the information technology industry. Programming never was just about making some trinket please a user or a programmer, but building infrastructure and long-term solutions and improvements to the human condition. The global interdependency on software makes low-quality software even in the home and small office a serious threat to our ability to maintain safe and secure living conditions. E.g., viruses, which threaten both financial stability and vital information, are caused by Microsoft, not malicious hackers like that self-serving jerk Bill Gates constantly whines, as we all _know_ that bad people exist and will always exist and form a threat to our safety unless we take precautions against them. Responsibility for the failure to take such precautions cannot be placed anywhere but on the creator of the vehicle of the malice -- ironically recognized by the U.S. court system for everything _but_ software. The unique perspective of longevity and stability of a programming language like Common Lisp is what _may_ save us all through the impending crash, and the ability to save up enough cash to survive the wash-out is crucial to carrying us through. To bring this back to the concrete level: The commercial difficulties that Harlequin had, no matter what their causes, is a strong indicator that they some if not all factors of their operations were not smart enough. I'm loathe to exonerate free runtimes and no royalties just because someone waves his hand and opines indirectly that something else was "the cause". Instead, I think software _should_ be subject to continued payments as if they were services actually produced by the people who produced the software. The legalistic reasoning behind this is that software is not static like hardware, and that it takes effort and incredible levels of foresight and intelligence to ensure that software continues to work under changing conditions, which means that royalty implies warranty and vice versa, and that this warranty cannot be paid for through purchase of a product alone because of the varying cost of the warranty according to the risks involved in the different uses it sees. The only time you should accept _not_ to pay royalties is when you have accepted to assume all costs and all risks of ownership yourself, and if you do that, you're a goddamn fool, in _any_ business relationship, meaning that whoever got away with selling you shrink-wrapped software without normal product warranty is a con artist and a fraud and should hae been prosecuted and shut down by the government. Instead, we have the government perpetrating the worst possible fraudulence towards its own citizens by allowing the continued operation of software companies that threaten the very fabric of society through an open-ended license to engage in what would have been criminal neglect in any other industry. Then again, people have their daily routines to go through, not enough cash to think long-term, and generally lead lives they do not control, so they don't hae time to concern themselves with what they fear might be huge policy issues well outside their graspability, but which really comes down to this: If the U.S. Government continues to protect the essentially fraudulent operation of the software industry and continue to support corporations which deny and ridicule the concept of product warranty, it bets the future of its citizens on a whimsical idea that safety and stability are _unnecessary_ in the software world and therefore that there _are_ no risks worth defending and preparing against, meaning: The government doesn't care what happens to any of its citizens 10-20-40 years down the line, but it is impossible for any one of us to prepare ourselves for more than a few years ahead, and the more complex the infrastructure we rely on, the fewer years, and that affects the entire globe. The U.S. Government is gambling with the lives of billions of people when it protects the software industry from having to conform to quality measures and allows the industry to run pyramid games and using future funds to pay for past mistakes. This is criminal recklessness on a global scale, and no significant number of voters will notice until their pension funds and social security evaporate due to the impending crash in the protected industries. Paying royalties to one company when you have the option of not paying royalties to another company is not going to change the big picture, but a company with commercial difficulties _not_ demanding royalties is tantamount to _encouraging_ further recklessness. Being a parasite off of the marking budgets of large corporations who try to get paid for something entirely different is not my idea of supporting longevity of anything, so using marketing-funded tools is very far from what I consider rational use of my time and money, not the least because the marketing-funded tools will have to continue to amaze and thrill the statistical fraction of the mass market in marketing terms, not in any quality terms that a product that has to pay for itself from every one of its customers would have to do. Sorry for the gravity of the message. My cat's back from the hospital with about 7 lives to go, and longevity issues tend to crop up with me when the threat of its absence is most clear and present. Have a nice weekend, though -- I know I will. #:Erik -- "When you are having a bad day and it seems like everybody is trying to piss you off, remember that it takes 42 muscles to produce a frown, but only 4 muscles to work the trigger of a good sniper rifle." -- Unknown