Pay for software. Plz, plz pretty plz. I will easily drop $30-50 just to try a piece of beta software whose value prop matches a need I have. You have the money, indie devs need the money way more than you do, and they need to be rewarded for greenfield development.
$100-200 for a mature tool that actually solves the problem and is sufficiently hackable is well within the bounds of what I'm willing to spend.
Devs that don't have the money for these tools have a great way to get into the software world, use FLOSS tools to greenfield a new tool and collect $30-50 from anybody interested.
In case of this particular software, I actually wanted to pay/donate, but couldn't find a link for this IIRC. (Or it could have been via credit card, and I didn't have a credit card.)
I'm curious if there's some way for a dev to easily add a widget/button to get paid/donated for a piece of software. Ideally, with any tax etc. problems handled too. I also created some FLOSS software, and would be cool if I could just slap a button in the Readme, or in the app itself, and have a chance to get donations if someone wants to express appreciation this way.
Personally, for your use case, I'd just use Patreon. All the best aspects of donation and subscriptions with none of the downsides. Well, you do need to advertise, but that's inherent in any donation scheme.
Donation isn't the answer I have in mind. In the first place, there's no social onus placed on users of the software to provide compensation. I love the Free Software Foundation, and I agree with its goals. But I believe in the need for two ecosystems, three I guess if you include proprietary software. Free software and open source.
The main reason is I don't think the likes of SourceForge should be allowed to sully FLOSS with adware / malware and redistribute useful pieces of software. The business value of software needs to be accommodated. If you really do have a pure altruistic motive, coupled with the willingness to accept donations, then sure, knock yourself out.
But as an individual software developer with an economic motive, intellectual property is not a hostile concept, it's one that pays the bills. Idealism in this space isn't all it's cracked up to be when you're all by yourself.
If you have a profit motive, if you want to and are willing to treat your development activities as a service you're providing to the public, rather than artwork you release purely for public benefit, then you should use a standard dual-licensing scheme.
Note that my argument here concerns software tools. Tools aren't libraries. Tools are complicated, feature-rich graphical applications that can have business value as products all of their own. Tools may use dozens of libraries. Libraries generally don't depend on other libraries other than the standard one and if they do they typically vendor them in or statically link them.
I'm still trying to grok why ISPs are supposed to treat all customers equally while PayPal, eBay, youtube, GoDaddy, Twitter, etc. are allowed to pick and choose.
I'd be more comfortable with the arguments if people were consistent in them.
The ISP's are more important because of their physical locality. It's infinitely easier to create a competitor for Facebook than a competitor for Time Warner (Google, one of the world's most powerful companies, tried and failed).
That said, with the amount of ubiquity and sway on society that self-proclaimed platforms like Facebook and Google have started to have, I would not be opposed to regulating some of those as utilities too. But that's a more nuanced issue. The ISP issue is so black and white as to be hilarious, if it weren't so disheartening.
Most people have exactly one choice of ISP. If you're lucky, there might be a second one with the same price and 1/10 the speed.
Whereas I could go build an auction site myself if I really wanted to. Scaling a business takes work, but the power of software is that it requires no material resources to get started. Laying fiber is not only immensely expensive in and of itself, but ISP's have also lobbied to stack the deck severely against newcomers: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/utility-poles-important-future...
I think the amount of effort and traction you'd get from trying to launch your own auction site to compete with eBay would be about equal to getting a couple shovels and burying some cat5 around your neighborhood to compete with comcast
Plug your router into your neighbor's, and everyone else that wants to join your new ISP. I don't see the difficulty; it's just as easy as starting a new eBay site and getting people to sign up
You can create an ISP and then you have to work to get people to sign up.
You can create a eBay site and then you have to work to get people to sign up.
And your argument is the hard part of making an eBay site is signing people up and hand-wave over the build part of both these things? Apples to Spaceships comparison.
Well, the argument is that if you don't like eBay it's easy to just go make your own. I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just assuming that part of "making your own" is getting the other users to sign up, since an auction site with no one to bid isn't very useful. So it's the same with ISPs: if you don't like it just make your own.
Sure I can make my own ISP. It just won't be an international network with billions of people on it. But I'll set up a server in my house with my new ebay on it and connect it to my neighbor running his new facebook. We could even do it wirelessly.
It won't be that great, because he wants to share pictures of his kids and I want to sell my funko pops, but it's definitely easy. Unless your definition of an ISP inherently includes a connection to millions of people, in which case I don't understand why your definition of an eBay doesn't as well?
> Well, the argument is that if you don't like eBay it's easy to just go make your own.
The argument isn't that it's easy, the argument is that it's possible. There is no guarantee of success but you can try. Why even start Facebook when we already have Myspace?
There are actual physical impediments to building your own ISP and natural monopolies involved. By comparison, just a lot of people using something doesn't make it monopoly.
But what makes eBay eBay isn't their startup cost, it's the millions of people buying and selling items that make it a usable service instead of just one guy posting pictures of his funko pops for sale.
So yeah, I could launch ebay2 tomorrow but it would just be me on there. I could actually do that with Comcast2 as well, just by turning on a computer in my house but if it's not connected to anything else it's about as useless as the ebay2 running on it.
If I want to make an ISP available to even just a small neighborhood, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars of investment. Scaling it up so an entire city can use my ISP is an investment in the millions of dollars.
If I want to make a new eBay available to the world, it's a couple days of software development for a proof of concept and a few dollars for a VM in AWS/Azure/GCC. Polishing it a bit and scaling it up is only a few more months development and possibly a couple thousand in server costs, which your revenue would be scaling nicely with.
Comcast was an Internet Service Provider when it Provided a Service that allowed access to the Internet.
It will take far longer to route your home server to global DNS, all while bypassing comcast, than it would to register that server's IP on the DNS with your new URL, ebay2.com
But, that's just the same thing I, and many others, have been saying, for about five posts deep now, so I'm curious where this fight of yours is coming from.
Not if eBay started making extremely anti-consumer choices like Comcast has. At some point it would get to be too much, and competition would step in. We see that starting to happen a bit with Facebook lately, although the network effect there is stronger than with an auction site. But Comcast can do whatever the hell it wants, because nobody can even try to provide a way out.
For selling a product, off the top of my head we've got eBay, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, nextdoor, and whatever other social network you can think of. Amazon, with a bit of work. Crowdfunding sites if you wanna go that route. If that thing you're selling is a car there's specialized websites for that (shift, for example).
I have only ever been able to have Comcast, ever. In the 9 houses in 6 different cities in 3 different states I've lived, always Comcast was the only option.
Correction: They succeeded in making one, it just didn't take off as a business. There's a difference. When it comes to simply getting a certain piece of functionality, even an open-source community is free to go build a competitor and give it away for free. The obstacles when it comes to internet infrastructure are encountered before you even get in the gate.
I think of the internet as a communication technology. It's not simply a product. I think we all agree that everyone should have reasonable access to water (cleaned and distributed), because it is very important, it satisfies very primitive needs. You could see electricity as another one of these technologies we think most people should have reasonable access to, but whose primitive importance situates itself between the importance of access to water technology and the importance of access to information communication technology (the internet). It's great how individuals' humane aspects can develop from access to information and communication technology. It's certainly not a need for a human being, but it's important for helping people grow. I can continue but I think this answers the difference between the importance of information communication technology and the importance of products or services found on the internet.
The former provide infrastructure that the latter services run on. They are therefore in fundamentally different categories and so different regulations apply. That's why there isn't consistency between them, because they are different things.
The latter largely do not produce their own content and thus are not fundamentally different than what a carrier provides. Why would you say that it's ok for Google to ban Alex Jones from youtube, but not ok for level-3 to do the same?
It's a convenient kind of bullshit to draw a line below layer 4 of the ISO stack and say "everything below this line has to be fully neutral, everything above this line can be fully biased and curated". A company that provides their own content, such as Netflix, is very different than providing a platform for other people's content, i.e. Youtube/Twitter/Facebook.
Because internet is more important than binge watching Netflix. To many of us, we're thinking of it on par with water, electricity, etc.
With that said, I would agree that some other services such as information seekers ought to be regulated somehow. Ie, Google/Facebook can do massive harm these days, and their reign of independence is failing here.
Another point is that, many companies have previously ran into issues of anti-competitive behavior. This in recent years has become very very lax, too lax I feel. Windows should be providing an equal platform for everyone to run on. They shouldn't be blocking competitors applications (a hypothetical). Same goes for ISPs. My ISP shouldn't block Netflix because the ISP prefers their own media site.
To be honest, your objection really confuses me. You seem to argue that ISPs can do whatever they want, because we're inconsistent with other sites/etc. So rather than enforcing other sites, you want to give free reign to ISPs? How does that make sense? I agree consistency is important. Lets fix all abusers, not just ISPs. That should satisfy your argument, no?
> To be honest, your objection really confuses me. You seem to argue that ISPs can do whatever they want, because we're inconsistent with other sites/etc.
I don't have an objection against net neutrality. I have an objection to net neutrality policies that concentrate control with a small number of companies while stripping such autonomy from other companies. It's absurd to say that backbone providers are required to carry any traffic, but microblogging sites, video streaming sites, etc. can curate and have any bias they choose.
If it were me we'd have net neutrality, but the net neutrality policies would be conditional on whether a company wants to claim safe harbor under the DMCA or not. Anyone who wants to hide behind the DMCA has to be neutral on their platform. Anyone who is willing to take responsibility for the content they distribute can have any bias or opinion they want.
I'd also extend the DMCA safe harbor provisions to require that the customer be identifiable and within the legal jurisdiction of the United States.
> Lets fix all abusers, not just ISPs. That should satisfy your argument, no?
It would make me feel that we're being consistent and actually taking the internet closer to fairness and equity.
> I don't have an objection against net neutrality. I have an objection to net neutrality policies that concentrate control with a small number of companies while stripping such autonomy from other companies. It's absurd to say that backbone providers are required to carry any traffic, but microblogging sites, video streaming sites, etc. can curate and have any bias they choose.
Why? Going back to the common carrier regulations pre-Internet, it's like you're saying that just because mail carriers have to carry anything (as long as it's safe), then magazines delivered by mail carriers would have to allow anyone to write articles.
There's just a fundamental difference between forum and transport.
> Why? Going back to the common carrier regulations pre-Internet, it's like you're saying that just because mail carriers have to carry anything (as long as it's safe), then magazines delivered by mail carriers would have to allow anyone to write articles.
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that an entity that wants common carrier protections has to act like a common carrier. If they want to be a publisher with full editorial control of the content they publish content, then they don't get common carrier protections. If Facebook and Youtube/Google want to say "you can't say that here", then they can take responsibility for what they do allow to be distributed on their platform. I feel the exact same way about Comcast or Level 3.
> Facebook/YoutTube/Google don't want to be common carriers though. They're DMCA safe harbors, but that's totally different.
I didn't say they should be. I was correcting your analogy, then I reiterated the idea that you can be a publisher with control over what you publish and liability for what you publish, or you can be free from liability and not have editorial control. It's an easy concept and it fits perfectly as a principle to strive for with regards to net neutrality.
> Do you think newspapers shouldn't be allowed to have opinion articles that are prefaced with "not the opinion of the paper"?
What relevance is your question to the topic at hand? It's not like newspapers are absolved from liability for what they publish, even OpEd's and opinion columns. Imagine a newspaper publishing a six hundred page sunday edition, chock full of advertisements, and the full contents of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone under the byline potterfan69 and a header on the page saying "Opinion."
The vast majority of media websites that make their money by delivering other peoples' content have an interesting problem. They skirt the line between curating and merely providing a form of storage for everyone. The minute you curate, you fall down an interesting rabbit hole.
That's not even to mention the business model of youtube which is largely based on copyright violation.
In any case, the difference between ISP and major media website is insignificant to the average user. It's one big blob.
What would this other platform be that provides a similar reach?
Freedom of speech isn't just saying what you want while alone on your back patio.
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc is the "digital public space".
Hell just take a look at what private companies are doing to the attempts at making alternatives: gab is threatened daily, and BitChute keeps getting bumped by payment processors.
> Freedom of speech isn't just saying what you want while alone on your back patio.
Freedom of speech isn't "You can say what you want on any platform and reach as many people as you want" either. Saying Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube are "digital public space" is akin to saying some sports stadium is a "public space" - yes, big crowds come to them, but they can still escort you off of the field. You can even just try protesting peacefully (in USA) and get a not-so-nice visit from the police.
NN can prevent things like an ISP blocking $SOME_PRESIDENTIAL_CANDIDATE_WEBSITE or $ABORTION_CLINIC_WEBSITE or $GUN_STORE_WEBSITE. Not having NN is more like electricity company blocking you from charging Android phones and requiring that you only charge iPhones, or vice-versa.
You can actually go right outside that sports stadium and still have your message heard. If you're banned from Twitter, FB, and YT; you have effectively no voice on the internet.
The social media companies that have monopolized public discourse on the internet would be more akin to the whole city being owned by the stadium owners, and that specific scenario has been ruled in favor of the first amendment in the past.
At the bottom of your Wikipedia article there is a more relevant case:
"While the Marsh holding at first appears somewhat narrow and inapplicable to the present day due to the disappearance of company towns from the United States, it was raised in the somewhat high-profile 1996 cyberlaw case, Cyber Promotions v. America Online, 948 F. Supp. 436, 442 (E.D. Pa. 1996). Cyber Promotions wished to send out "mass email advertisements" to AOL customers. AOL installed software to block those emails. Cyber Promotions sued on free speech grounds and cited the Marsh case as authority for the proposition that even though AOL's servers were private property, AOL had opened them to the public to a degree sufficient that constitutional free speech protections could be applied.
The federal district court disagreed, thereby paving the way for spam filters at the Internet service provider level."
Not at all, no idea where you got that idea. The discussion is about the right of the government to force private companies to do things with their own property.
The AOL case is more relevant because it involves a private internet company and data crossing it's privately held servers, much like Twitter today.
The Marsh case involves a company acting like a government, then trying to stifle free speech. Twitter never acted like a government.
The Marsh case handles a scenario in which a private company controlled the public space.
The big 3 of social media currently do the same thing, however in a digital sphere. Trumps twitter, for example, was ruled as a public resource and therefore he couldn't block users from his feed. So here we have a private property leveraged as a public gathering space.
Would you have the same opinion here if Twitter was banning minorities based on race? Is it still a private company that can do whatever they please?
==The Marsh case handles a scenario in which a private company controlled the public space.==
and acted as a de-facto government by providing fire, police and other services typically provided by governments. Twitter is not similar, as multiple people have already mentioned.
==Trumps twitter, for example, was ruled as a public resource and therefore he couldn't block users from his feed.==
His personal Twitter feed is a public resource. Trump is the government, blocking people is literally the government limiting free speech. Twitter is not the government.
==Would you have the same opinion here if Twitter was banning minorities based on race? Is it still a private company that can do whatever they please?==
No, because they are very different, as explained by justice.gov [1].
"Federal laws prohibit discrimination based on a person's national origin, race, color, religion, disability, sex, and familial status."
> No, because they are very different, as explained by justice.gov [1].
Then please explain to me individuals like Sarah Jeong being outwardly racist yet a member of the blue check cadre.
There is clearly a double standard here, and you seem to be in the grouping of individuals that appreciate the oppression when it suits your own interests.
Now we have moved the goalposts from banning people to giving blue checks. I'm not even sure what stance you are arguing anymore. One more time, Twitter is not the government.
Mike Cernovich is outwardly racist and has a blue check, what's your point? Are you applying a double standard?
The AOL case wasn't merely about spam--you can't pretend that it was. Here's part of the opinion:
> By providing its members with access to the Internet
through its e-mail system so that its members can exchange
information with those members of the public who are also connected to the Internet, AOL is not exercising any of the municipal powers or public services traditionally exercised by the State as did the private company in Marsh. Although AOL has technically opened its e-mail system to the public by connecting with the Internet, AOL has not opened its property to the public by performing any municipal power or essential public service and, therefore, does not stand in the shoes of the State.
Do you think your water company should pick and choose? How about your electric company? Maybe they can charge you a higher electric rate during Game of Thrones because they know you want your power more than normal then? etc
I don't want a company picking and choosing which bytes of mine are fast or slow. I'm buying byte containers, their job is to ship them. I dictate how fast, and who it gets shipped to. End of deal. Full stop. Any deviation of that is wrong in my book.
I've seen electric companies bill like that to reflect the realities of power generation and usage, but it's applied equally to all consumers of electricity at the time of day.
Using 1000w of electricity with a 1950's toaster cost the same as using 1000w of electricity with a 2018 microwave.
And hopefully it would cost the same to use 1000w of electricity to power your home server hosting a website that criticizes the local electricity company.
> And hopefully it would cost the same to use 1000w of electricity to power your home server hosting a website that criticizes the local electricity company.
Yes, but electric companies don't charge differently for different appliances that one is using (they couldn't know anyway), but it's applying those high peak rates globally and indiscriminately. The problem with internet post net neutrality is that internet providers could pick and choose based on what service one uses.
And we all know that internet providers try to be something else besides moving the byte across the network. They want to be telcos, they want a share of the media and grab whatever they could get their hands on. Net neutrality, from my understanding, attempted to prevent just that.
I would be OK with whatever speed I want to purchase and be stuck with that speed no matter what content I am choosing to consume. And in high demand if they chose to charge higher rates indiscriminately I'd be OK with that.
If their pipes are at full capacity they should charge more but indiscriminately!
For consumer-facing eyeball ISPs, in almost all US markets, consumers have an extremely limited set of ISPs to choose from, typically a traditional telephone provider like AT&T or Verizon and a traditional cable provider like Comcast or Cox (if they're lucky enough to have both). As such, those eyeball providers have an effective monopoly, and if I don't like the network policies of my ISP, I have almost no recourse to change them. Those monopoly providers have also consistently lobbied against any challenges to their position: attempts to start a municipal ISP offering services to residents will be strongly challenged by incumbent providers, often to the point of outlawing municipal ISPs entirely at the state level.
In contrast, I can very much choose alternate providers for everything else you've listed--I don't like GoDaddy and don't use them for domain registration or hosting, and I had thousands of options to choose from. Twitter is by no means the only social network in town, and has challengers within its specific microblogging niche.
So, you don't really need a law for AT&T to not policy your traffic, but that you need competitors to be able to enter the market and provide services. Something even Facebook and Google has (although they're quite close to a monopoly) but US ISPs don't.
If a service provider starts to do some silly stuff no one wants, there's no reason not to start a competing business, offer service without that silliness and win over the market. Except if entry barriers are too high.
But the trolling is a serious problem and more effort needs to go into addressing it directly. This is the stuff that righteous idiots grab a hold of - it's basically an iron buoy thrown to people that can't swim.
To top poster: these two things are not the same. They are wholly different classes where at the very base level one cannot exist without the other, literally. One is a utility provisioning and the other an appliance, figuratively.
lol. I guess that I'm a righteous idiot then (ie. someone who might not agree with you).
Mostly, the point is that people choose their battles based on bias or their own needs, not some sort of overall logic.
I can understand the argument over the various sorts of non-neutrality. A need to bring together cable tv and internet pricing and bandwidth needs, the opportunity to break out fixed and variable pricing on bytes moved, etc. The main point is that it simply isn't as simple as waving a sign around and getting out the vote.
Heck, we might as well all get worked up about the fact that the USPS allows you to buy 1 day shipping or that the shipping companies cut special deals with large customers. Another example is toll roads.
The world is a complicated place and doesn't succumb well to slogans.
Those services all have vibrant competition, your ISP definitely doesn't.
The whole point of common carrier regulation is to make sure that industries that are essential to the economy, inherently non-competitive, and impossible to implement effectively as a government service can exist and serve their purpose in society. Youtube/google/fb doesn't fit that definition. There is absolutely competition in that space, and there's little switching cost for individual actors.
Google has almost no competition in several different market categories, and not just regionally, but on a global scale. I have three ISPs which offer about comparable service offerings, and four major wireless carriers. And no wired ISP even can say it has national coverage.
Tech monopolies are bigger, they have more money, and they've spent more of that money convincing you ISPs are the big bad.
I'm not opposed to regulation, but regulation needs to apply to tech companies as well as ISPs equally. And you'll discover that support for regulation vanishes as soon as that comes into play.
People have forgotten that tech companies now also do infrastructure and ISPs now also do services. So when tech companies are trying to get ISPs regulated, they're trying to lock down their competition. (Unsurprisingly, Google Fiber was known for trying to dodge being classifed as a telecommunications company specifically so it wasn't subject to the same regulations it's competitors weer.)
You are lucky to have 3 comparable ISPs. In the area where I live each town has at most 2 ISPs. One of them provides DSL and the other cable. This means if you want speeds above about 5Mbps you have 1 choice. We were forced to switch to cable because our DSL provider couldn’t even manage to maintain a consistent connection much less the 5Mbps we were paying for. All this to say there are plenty of places where there is effectively 0 competition between ISPs.
On the other hand if I don’t like Facebook I can choose not to use it or I can use another social media platform. If I don’t like Google I can easily use an alternative (at least for all of the consumer products I use from them). I can’t easily go to a new ISP that is comparable if I don’t like my ISP.
You are missing most of the point: ISP competition and tech competition are not dissimilar, and their placement in the product market is not dissimilar. They should be subject to the same regulations. But the tech companies pushing these regulations are strongly opposed to being subject to these same regulations.
Most people cannot easily leave tech companies easily, even if they believe they can. You actually can't leave Facebook, for instance, if you want to talk to your friends who are on Facebook. You can't leave Gmail without finding every contact and online account you have and updating your email address. (This is why AOL still has so much email!) Similarly, most people have options for ISPs, both wired and wireless, though it may be a worse service offering.
Heck, life generally is filled with that kind of inertia.
It's not easy to change banks or brokerage houses. Does it make sense that someone with $1M at Vanguard gets a bunch of special perks and lower fees? Not fair!!!
So how could you tell an AI-generated Rothko from the real thing? If you can't tell the difference, is there a difference?...a kind of Turing test applied to art.
Personally, I think that a helluva lot of modern art has a high BS level, and welcome the uproar that a computer could bring to it.
It seems to me that the easiest way for a Germany to cut on energy needs is simply by having less people live there. I expect they would have been at negative population growth without shipping in a scad of people.
Well duh, the only other ways are “be more energy efficient” (hard because they’re already good at that) or “get everyone to do less” (I’d approve of that, but most people don’t seem to).
Likewise, the cost of less people living there (or in any defined region) is less taxpayers, less people making stuff, and less people supplying stuff.
I can't say that an economic model built on continuous population growth makes any sense. The piper will get paid at some point. Even the current notion of driving down the average age via mass immigration will only last so long.
In any case, what really matters is the per capita wealth, not total.
All growth has to stop at some point, not just population. But if we want population to grow as much as possible, we can add a few more digits before we hit the planetary limits of anything other than stupidity and political short-term-ism.
(On the other hand, stupidity and political short-term-ism are exactly why we now have problems with loss of biodiversity, antibiotic resistance, a disrupted nitrogen cycle, phosphorus waste, a quarter of the CO2 in our air being artificial, boom-and-bust economic cycles, etc.)
Over time, these hardware companies grow or die. Their products have to get cheaper, hopefully due to economy of scale. Company management never wants to kill the old products with new ones, plus it's pretty hard to guess exactly where to go.
Everyone eventually falls off the treadmill.
Years later, of course, management has amazing 20/20 hindsight.
What a tremendous waste of money.