I visit slashdot quite a bit (maybe that is my first problem) and am appalled by how these people beleive that everything should be free. I personally use NetBSD mac68k for my proxy server. I felt that the creator deserved some compenstation so I wired 25 dollars and thanked him. He wrote a 2 page email to me thanking me and saying how out of 10 emails he gets most of them are angry people wondering why this or that doesn’t work, or calling him stupid… ect. He said that people seem to take him for granted for what he does. I shared this story on slashdot, and I got about 700 emails saying how I should have not paid him, I didn’t pay him enough, how I should not be paying for a free peice of software and other things. I never got one supporting what I did. (other than from the author who provided me with his home PH# in case I had any problems) This just makes me angry (BTW this occured over 2 years ago)
that people think that stuff like this sould just be free and take it for granted.
I stopped using Napster over a year ago becuase I realized that MP3 trading was wrong. I was one of those people who went out and bought a CD burner to make cds. I made over 50. When Metellica came out and said that Napster was wrong, I poo pooed it and didn’t pay attention. Then I actually understood what they said. I looked at my ever growing CD collection and realized I had not bought one CD in a year, and had literally 3000 stolen songs on my computer. I promplty deleted the songs, and put the cds in the microwave.
I agree CDs are expensive, and being on a high schoolers budget, I don’t get to buy as many as I want. I just say get over it, not all things in life should be free. Today on slashdot, there are people saying that one person should buy an ebook, then post it on the internet for every one to read. To me, this is the last straw. I know people who write books, and yes, I realize publishers make quite a bit of money for books (and CDs) but I know someone who lives off selling about 30,000 copies of a book a year through a publisher. He just happens to be my brother. He does not complain that his book retails for 19.95 and he only gets 1.25 for each book sold, he is thankful every day that he gets a royalty check on time, and can live very comfortablly on it.
Why do these people on slashdot, and other sites think that all corperations are bad? (I am not a fan of MSFT and to protest, I use a mac.) but many of these people on slashdot, work for a large company who pays them for their work and makes a profit on it. In no way am I a polittcally conservitive person (I don’t want to get into who I voted for, but it was defenantly not Bush) yet whenever I disagree people or companies should be able to make a profit, I get called names like corperate monkey, or a money dictator (or profanities).
What is wrong with these people? Can they not see that not all things in life are not free? It is not like I am a newbie with techknowlogy. I can set up A unix box, build friends computers. program in C++ and Java and have been working for a Apple dealer in hardware support for the last 2 years. It just apalls me that these people blatantly steal and then say they do it because of the “Man” who tries to hold them down.
Sorry about the long rant, but I need to get it off of my chest.
Moderator’s note:
Edited down the subject line because it side-scrolled the whole forum. Hope it didn’t damge the OP’s actual intent, though. The subject line gets indigestion when too many discrete elements get linked by slashes.
To put it in technical terms.
I love freeware and all that stuff, but if i like it a register and all that.
I love Linux cos it is free and it is different ( less so with every passing day )
I totally agree with this rip-off thing. If people put stuff out for anyone to sue for nothing ( freeware etc. ) then i have no qualms about grabbing it and plonking it on my machine until i need to use it. But Napster and all those ‘file-swap’ services really bug me. These guys are working hard to make all this music/software, and they are getting ripped off by people who often aspire to be like them.
It Sucks. God am i glad i dont have any kind of skill that can be ripped off.
They want everything free because they got stuff like Linux for free. When you have good stuff like open source and easy file swapping, people experience how free things are super fantastic. It becomes real hard to go back to paying for things you used to get for free. Even when its wrong, old habits die hard.
I’ve taken both sides on this issue, and I actually wrote a pretty long essay for school arguing the exact opposite point, but today (flips imaginary coin) I’m going to take the anti-Napster side.
Yeah, I do like Freeware. Every piece of software I’ve written so far has been freeware, and unless I write some really huge program (like a game) everything will be freeware. It’s just more respectful IMHO to give things out for free.
Does that mean EVERYTHING should be free? No. As a programmer, I have learned much effort goes into making software, and how little recognition programmers get. (I would like to get at least a little money for something, even if the other 90% of people would inevitably pirate my software anyway.) But another thing I learned from programming is that it’s really easy for some 15-year-old (like me) with a C compiler to come up with some brand new file sharing program, and (thanks to The Wonders Of The Internet) make it a worldwide standard within a very short time.
I still think, in the case of musicians, they are getting more money than they deserve (I say this because I am also in a band, and it’s not that hard to write good music.) But if I want some software (or music…or books for that matter) I’ll just pay for it. It’s not that expensive anyway.
People have even more wildly unrealistic expectations about software they pay for. I know because I supported it for years and I still get angry thinking about the gall of those people. It’s got nothing to do with the price… it’s human nature.
As for MP3s, there has never been a question of musicians being ripped off. The MP3 question is who gets to do it… the fans or the record company. I supported Napster because in my mind, better the fans than the music industry. The big six have a history of treating artists like dirt that MP3 enthusiasts can’t hope to match, even collectively.
I use Napster (well, useD) to find new artists I liked so I could go out any buy their cds. I used it almost exclusively for those purposes, and once about every month I’d go through my MP3 collection and have to delete dozens of files because I now had them on cd.
Slashdot ran an article the other day called Why Won’t You Pay For Content? When I saw the article posted there were no replies to it. Rather than rush in with a “first post,” I wrote a real reply which was (IMO, anyway) well thought out and pretty well written. Unfortunately, by the time I finished, I was post #135 or some such, and my reply was lost in the noise. But, if anyone would care to read it, it’s here: