If you are seriously going to argue that copyrights (and patents) are
not a type of monopoly right, then this discussion is over. :P

Nobody can build their own identical IntelliJ from their own spare
parts (i.e. electrons) and sell it legally, even under another name.
That smacks of state-monopoly power to me. Same as building their own
<foobar> from nuts and bolts, if <foobar> is patented, and going into
competition against the originator, and so forth. Nobody can make
their own Mickey Mouse cartoons -- even with wholly original plots --
without Disney's permission. Still think copyrights and patents don't
grant monopoly powers?

On Jun 23, 2:04 am, "Mike Schilling" <mscottschill...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

Whoa, words in my mouth --! I never said I wanted it to be illegal.
You go right ahead and try to make money by selling copies, if you
think you can even without restricting other peoples' abilities to
make more copies and use them as they see fit, including resell them.
It isn't impossible -- Red Hat makes money partly by selling install
kits, which anyone could freely copy under current law as it's all
GPL, and there's often a market for limited edition/original signed
whatevers, where copies may be made, but don't have the market value
the originals command. Why is an original Rembrandt saleable for huge
amounts of money even if cheap copies can be had everywhere? It isn't
copyright law. And that means copyright law isn't needed to motivate a
future Rembrandt. Build up a reputation and originals of your own
works, including retroactively ones you made before you became famous,
may be worth a fortune on eBay. Of course becoming rich and famous has
always been something of a crapshoot, but that won't be changed, and
if large industry groups didn't gateway access to the major methods of
distribution and venues of visibility, it might become less of one.
Actually, no matter what happens to the law, in the immediate future
those groups will lose most of their power anyway. Now they can be
bypassed and distribution and exposure had by way of torrents, cheap
web hosts, Myspace, and Youtube, with a big push of momentum from
being blogged about, if you make something worthy of note. In fact, in
the next twenty years the world is going to change more than you can
possibly imagine ... whether you want it to or not. Prepare as best
you can; hedge all bets, avoid those slow-maturing bonds, and keep
your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, because we are
going to be experiencing some turbulence.

Sure, and irrelevant. Anyone can make Coca-Cola and sell it; they just
can't call it Coca-Cola unless they have the trademark. I'm fairly
sure the formula is only a trade secret, not a patent, so if you can
discover it you can probably use it, as long as you don't do something
like bribe or otherwise induce a Coca-Cola employee to breach a
confidentiality agreement or the like, or break wiretapping or
trespassing laws. Finding it out by dumpster-diving is probably
perfectly legal, assuming it's possible. Trial-and-error discovery of
a fizzy formula that tastes identical is certainly legal.

As for the house, nobody else can sell that house, but they can
probably legally build their own exact replica out of their own
pocket, and sell that. They can't build their own replica of IntelliJ
that way and sell it, even if the parts (a blank CD, some bandwidth,
some electricity) are paid for out of their own money. Therein lies
the difference.

In response to this and two other new posts here: To the extent that
the others cannot be substituted for IntelliJ, its makers do hold
monopoly powers. For example, if there are problems with
interoperability. (Likely they can all work as clients to common
version control servers, but supposing this were an issue, you would
then have one company gatewaying access to interoperate with your
IntelliJ-using shop. This happened for real for years with the
MSOffice document formats making having, and frequently upgrading,
MSOffice effectively mandatory for all business computers in the
world, and only recently has OpenOffice and its MSOffice compatibility
seriously eroded Microsoft's monopoly power in this area.)

To the extent that copyrights and patents limit the ability for anyone
to make products that can completely substitute for or interoperate
with IntelliJ, there exists a significant problem. In principle, the
threat is enormous, especially given the ability to use gratuitous
encryption on some protocol IntelliJ uses and then claim
"circumvention" under the DMCA and equivalent laws against any
competitor that tried to reverse engineer it and make an interoperable
or fully-substitutable product. Likewise, if the protocol involves
some gratuitous and patented convolution, even an independently
designed or clean-room-reverse-engineered third-party codec allowing
interoperation has to license the patent or it infringes. Ouch!

In fact, the threat isn't just theoretical. Both types of tactics are
used to stop competitors making substitutable or interoperable
products every day. There have been attempts to use legal measures to
stifle interoperable third party:
* Game servers (BnetD);
* Remote controls;
* Ink-jet ink cartridges and print heads (multiple occasions in the
case of ink, and at least one with print heads);
* Car parts; and
* Assorted software of various sorts.
That's just so far. Some of the times the bullies lost in court.
Fairly often they've won and retained a lock on interoperable
products.

While I have no reason to believe that the makers of IntelliJ are
doing anything nasty like that at this time, the only way you can be
sure a vendor won't pull a stunt like this to enforce lock-in at some
future date is if the product is open source. At minimum you better be
able to get your data out in an open format via an open protocol or as
a disk file. In the case of IntelliJ, if it can interface to bog-
standard CVS or SVN, or output plain ASCII or Unicode .java files (and
it can probably do all three), you are not at serious risk of lock-in,
though it would be nice if project definitions could be output in a
universally usable form as well (ant buildfile? I know Eclipse can do
that, but can IntelliJ?...)

Even then the original issue still stands. If IntelliJ is not
superior, wasting money on it instead of using a free IDE is silly. If
it is, the question arises of why Eclipse and/or NetBeans don't catch
up rapidly. If it involves patents or circumventing encryption in ways
that may run afoul of the DMCA, then it means it's because IntelliJ's
makers have a bona fide monopoly. If it does not, then you might want
to consider carefully whether you want to spend money to line some fat
execs' pockets, or instead spend some time improving the Eclipse or
NetBeans codebase to have equivalent functionality.

If the functionality is proprietary, ask whether it's as desirable as
it seems ... or even desirable at all, as proprietary functionality
may be a route to becoming locked in to one provider of some service,
and then you'll have to pay, and pay, and pay perpetually. That way
lies digital serfdom, as with adopting any kind of "software as a
service" with a high cost of switching. The one kind of "software as a
service" I'll ever accept is the sort that does not involve any
proprietary protocols and so provides no cost of switching. Web search
and Google Groups being cases in point -- Google don't have the
world's only search engine or access to nntp news, and no important
data is built up over time that I can't easily either lose or extract
(just the read/unread data for news postings), so the cost of
switching away is virtually nil. No danger of lock-in.

On Jun 25, 5:14 pm, blm...@myrealbox.com <blm...@myrealbox.com> wrote:

Adobe is evil and its software is crap. (Sounds like another software
company that casts a somewhat larger shadow for non-Mac-users, hmm?)

Ads, schmads. Ads are going to go the way of the dodo in a decade at
most. Narrowcast, foo-on-demand, smart client devices, users being in
charge of their own client devices, and filtering capabilities will
kill any kind of advertising that isn't either interesting content in
its own right or embedded plugs and product placements. The latter
will, if too blatant, damage the host content's rating on the peer
review based charts, and it won't make the top forty that week or any
week. (We already have the beginnings of this. Firefox with Adblock.
Rotten Tomatoes and other sites with crowdsourced movie ratings.)

The only thing that can save the traditional commercial is the
imposition by fiat of "trusted computing", i.e. taking our computers
away from us and renting the functionality back at ridiculous prices,
or at minimum "a government/Hollywood cabal owns root on all boxes;
everyone else, regardless of if they paid for and own the physical
hardware, is a mere unprivileged user". I find it unlikely the forces
pushing for that nightmare can prevail in the end. Putting region and
"UOP" restrictions in DVD players provoked consumer backlashes and
griping; reaching into our general-purpose computers to impose similar
restrictions would provoke a broad-based revolt by IT professionals
and serious non-professional computer users alike. (Microsoft's put
some evil stuff like that into Windows Vista. At last report, Windows
Vista is not selling very well, and those statistics fail to take
account of those who try it and then reinstall Windoze XP, counting
them as one more Vista convert. Contrast the rapid uptake of Windows
95, and later of Windoze XP despite the controversy over WPA.)

One other form of ad will survive, besides an ad that's entertaining
in its own right and an embedded plug. That will be the classified ad,
where people specifically go when they want information about things
for sale, and can be considered to include online things like
sponsored links at Google and sites like Craigslist and eBay. (Google
AdWords is another matter. It will die, though not quite yet.
Sponsored links on the other hand appear while you're searching for
something rather than getting in your way when your goal is something
other than search, and, if they are relevant to the user's search,
they may remain successful indefinitely.)

How did you think they kept out the ones that know what they're doing?
The ones that would spot code that was there just to make Netscape or
(these days) Google Desktop Search perform poorly, or win.exe not work
with 4Dos and PCDos (ok, maybe before your time), or whatever and blow
the whistle to the media, or would spend all their time fixing bugs
and thereby denying the Microsoft Support side of the operation
revenue, or would make Notepad so efficient and useful that nobody
would shell out for Word anymore, or would fix some of the dumber
algorithm choices like Explorer's frequent use of bubble-sort and
other quadratic-time algorithms, thereby causing Microsoft to fail its
under-the-table obligations to Intel to force people to buy ever-
faster CPUs in exchange for kickbacks?

Let's face it -- Microsoft does not want to produce quality software.
If they did, with their money they could surely manage it and yet they
do not. Therefore they obviously don't want to. Quality software is
easy for the competition to interoperate with. It's easy for users to
avoid paying your support department if the software simply works. If
the built-in abilities don't suck they compete with your own paid add-
ons. Hardware manufacturers pay you to make your software gratuitously
slow and bloated, and pay a lot more than your customers do. The
entertainment industry pays you to cripple it in other ways*, and pays
a lot more than your customers do.

* Disclaimer: documented in the case of Zune-related goings-on. Not
proven in connection with Vista misfeatures. Yet.