Pay For Games On Pandora?

[Exophase]

Yes, Stallman may sometimes be guilty of over-generalization - yet I think his point of view is absolutely necessary, to keep the Overton window anchored. In any event, I think the distinction with respect to source code remains universally applicable - if nothing else, works in the public domain can be and always have been a source of artistic innovation, something that will never happen with software that doesn't have available source code. (Of course, the currently ridiculous copyright regimen will probably ensure that any public-domain software would be obsolete, anyway, but there's at least some hope here).

edit: I mean software that has passed into the public domain, rather than actively being released into the public domain, since those usually have source available.

And where exactly are the provisions for a "look but don't touch" license which would allow source examination without providing the ability to redistribute modified as you please? These ideas are very unpopular, especially amongst the GPL crowd. I also think that software, as a source of artistic influence, is at least as meaningful in what you can view from the end result than from what the source tells you (actually, more so, although I know many programmers disagree).

Of course I'm not arguing the typical utility of open source, but the right and freedom I feel people should have to not open as they please (and sell things as they please). To use a simplistic and perhaps child-like argument, I don't really grasp why it's okay for the vast majority to not program (ie, do not have a moral prerogative to sit down and code) but that those who do must release the source. To me there's a world of difference between something beneficial and something being passed as universally mandatory, and in as much as others take a stance on principal against these issues I feel fully principally opposed to this oppressive mentality.

No offense, but I view any philosophy whose flaws are acknowledged but justified by virtue of being "absolutely necessary" with extreme trepidation. I also find it quaintly ironic that these things are being discussed as proponents of freedom.

 

[Exophase]

Actually, it seems to me that his views on software are much closer to how art actually works.
When you buy a piece of art, it is yours to do with as you please. Hang it up in your office and enjoy it. Resell it. Paint a mustache on it. Cut it to pieces and glue them back together along with other pieces of art you've purchased and package it as an entirely new piece of art. Stallman just wanted the same thing with software: the right to reasonably be able to alter or update what you have purchased.
Closed source software is kind of like the artist laminating his work to prevent the buyer from tampering with it.

edit: and when I say "art" I mean a physical piece of art: a painting you've commissioned, for example.

Yes, and I'm not saying anyone should be inhibited from doing what they want to software they've bought. But this does not include demanding that the source be released. NOT releasing the source is not a preventative measure; it's not providing what is entirely a privilege. No more.

The more fitting analogy to "open sourcing" a painting would be to release detailed videos on how you painted it, documentation for what tools you have used, any drafts you have done beforehand, and so on. In my eyes a program need not be considered any more than a compiled binary. Source code need not be more than a tool towards that end.

To put it another way, imagine insisting that every piece of a movie in its "source" form be made accessible to make it as easy as reasonably possible to modify the movie. I'm sure a movie has a lot of source code.

 

[-Tj-]

The "pay what you want" system is my favorite, but I'm not against a dev charging what they feel is fair. Of course free is nice, but I know how hard it is for some to create their software AND put food on the table.

IIRC a large number who downloaded the Humble Indie Bundle (for example) didn't pay even though it was for charity. I think the 'pay what you want' system is a praiseworthy ideal but open to abuse. IHMO you either charge for software or you don't. If you ask payment for Pandora software then with such a small market it really has to be a killer app.

I agree, it's definitely open to abuse. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised of the experiment wouldn't have made even 10% of the amount they did if neither charity nor release of the source code were involved. But if you allow people to name their price, I would think they'd be less inclined to pirate it if they think the price is too high (less, but probably not completely). For example, choosing to pay $1 for a simple game as opposed to charging $5. Perhaps some people might pay less, some might pay more. There's a lot of variables, but I find myself less inclined to buy software that I don't think is worth the price than to name my own price.

Also, I would imagine this kind of system can provide a lot of valuable feedback to the developers like how much people are willing to pay, and what percentage of people are too cheap (or too poor) to pay.

Edit: typo.

 

[RodrigoCard]

(...)People who use emulators, hack PSPs to use isos and jail break iphones are NOT the best audience to be asking money from.(...)

I agree with this part,
but not with this one
People who uses emulators are not generally pirates.
Yes they pirate the roms, but it is not like modifing a hardware to run pirated software.
you can run them on pc/gp2x/dingoo/whatever out of the box, download and go...

 

[nikudorei]

I buy software I like or have a need for, no matter what platform it is on.
I would gladly buy software for the pandora platform.

 

[Elanzer]

I buy games if they're good, it doesn't matter what platform they're on.

Admittedly I do pirate alot of games on a try-before-buy basis, especially those which I'm sure the novelty will wear off within 30 minutes and I'll throw it away. Before I started pirating games I was stung so many times with those $60-$80 console games that weren't even playable for an hour.

Games that are just $10 or less are different, I've bought many games on steam that were $2-10 just because I thought they would be neat, and haven't even gotten around to playing them yet half a year later. It's a drop in the bucket.

 

[Tom`]

The more fitting analogy to "open sourcing" a painting would be to release detailed videos on how you painted it, documentation for what tools you have used, any drafts you have done beforehand, and so on. In my eyes a program need not be considered any more than a compiled binary. Source code need not be more than a tool towards that end.

To put it another way, imagine insisting that every piece of a movie in its "source" form be made accessible to make it as easy as reasonably possible to modify the movie. I'm sure a movie has a lot of source code.

Well, yes and no - one of the major ideas I'm trying to get across is that a piece of artwork (or a movie, or a piece of literature) is its own source code - if I want to modify it, I can do so directly.

Taking the literary example further, there's been for years an ongoing debate over the legitimacy of fanfiction - a debate which was stirred up recently when author Diana Gabaldon posted a screed on her blog which condemned the practice of writing fanfiction in strong terms. This upset quite a lot of people, because the default position, with more or less legal support depending on jurisdiction, is that fanfiction is perfectly legal and ethical (since for most Berne Convention signatories, ideas are not copyrightable - just specific descriptions of those ideas). Fanfiction clearly labeled as an independent work and not commercialized is tolerated by the vast majority of authors; some even encourage it, often under a Creative Commons license.

Proprietary software, on the other hand, inherently restricts this kind of usage. A book, a movie, or an artwork is not comparable to a compiled binary, because that is only understandable to a computer - and moreover, any of those things are invariably distributed in a "finished" state. Software, on the other hand, frequently is not, insofar as bugs are fixed and new features added, and nowhere is this more important than in the case of an emulator.

edit: and this, more than anything else, is why I would be very unlikely to pay for an emulator, unless I was certain it would either be perfectly functional (highly compatible, smoothly playable if not actually full-speed) or that development was and would continue to be ongoing, and I would receive updated versions at no additional charge.

 

[Alpha2]

(...)People who use emulators, hack PSPs to use isos and jail break iphones are NOT the best audience to be asking money from.(...)

I agree with this part,
but not with this one
People who uses emulators are not generally pirates.
Yes they pirate the roms, but it is not like modifing a hardware to run pirated software.
you can run them on pc/gp2x/dingoo/whatever out of the box, download and go...

I'm not saying people who do these things are all evil pirates and anarchists, but they are people who are generally used to playing games for free. Many of us pay full price for games at some point or another but there are also plenty of people with in the community who, when they see the chance to get a free game, will leap at it. Even if there are those that follow some form of moral code in the use of emulators, at the end of the day they're still getting free games that the publisher or developer would have rathered you paid some money to play.

 

[Exophase]

People who use emulators, hack PSPs to use isos and jail break iphones are NOT the best audience to be asking money from.

Actually, you're dead wrong on the second part - it's okay though, there's no real way you could have guessed otherwise. I have made utterly obscene amounts of money exclusively from people who have jailbroken their iPhones, and I'm not the only one. People jailbreak more to run stuff Apple doesn't allow on the app store than to not pay for anything.

 

[VRAndy]

How could I possibly say until I know what software we're talking about?


(Besides, I'm allergic to forum polls. I have a doctor's note.)

 

[Alpha2]

People who use emulators, hack PSPs to use isos and jail break iphones are NOT the best audience to be asking money from.

Actually, you're dead wrong on the second part - it's okay though, there's no real way you could have guessed otherwise. I have made utterly obscene amounts of money exclusively from people who have jailbroken their iPhones, and I'm not the only one. People jailbreak more to run stuff Apple doesn't allow on the app store than to not pay for anything.

Fair enough in that you're making money, God knows there are plenty of legit reasons to jailbreak, but still a Jailbroken iphone can potentially play a PSone game that was technically never purchased. Like I said above, not everyone is an evil pirate. A person might buy or send you a donation for a decent emulator because they really thought you deserved it for the work, but download 200 PSone games, you'd never really know.

 

[Exophase]

Well, yes and no - one of the major ideas I'm trying to get across is that a piece of artwork (or a movie, or a piece of literature) is its own source code - if I want to modify it, I can do so directly.

I don't agree with you, particularly in the case of movies. Even with literature you could argue that by not distributing a CD with a .txt of the book (or somehow making it readily available) the author is discouraging people from modifying it.

Taking the literary example further, there's been for years an ongoing debate over the legitimacy of fanfiction - a debate which was stirred up recently when author Diana Gabaldon posted a screed on her blog which condemned the practice of writing fanfiction in strong terms. This upset quite a lot of people, because the default position, with more or less legal support depending on jurisdiction, is that fanfiction is perfectly legal and ethical (since for most Berne Convention signatories, ideas are not copyrightable - just specific descriptions of those ideas). Fanfiction clearly labeled as an independent work and not commercialized is tolerated by the vast majority of authors; some even encourage it, often under a Creative Commons license.

Fanfiction is not a modification of a work, it's a borrowing of certain elements in an otherwise new work, elements generally regarded as relatively abstract and under fair use. It's more akin to being inspired by the user interface of a program than forking its source code. If you took a book's text wholesale and modified some part of it and redistributed it I think the response would be very different from what you describe. The term you'd be met with is "plagiarism", which is not exactly heralded by the creative public, although I can't speak for yourself nor Mr. Stallman.

Proprietary software, on the other hand, inherently restricts this kind of usage. A book, a movie, or an artwork is not comparable to a compiled binary, because that is only understandable to a computer - and moreover, any of those things are invariably distributed in a "finished" state.

A movie is not understandable by a human, it's understandable by a DVD player, projector, computer, etc, in a similar way a program is. You can sort of eventually edit a movie, in the same way you can resource hack and eventually reverse engineer a program, but you're at a substantially disadvantage compared to the original authors of the work. A particularly fitting example here would be that of a 3D movie.

Historically a lot of software HAS shipped "finished" (not perfect - but how many movies et al are? Of course we get things like director's cuts too..) The industry trend of releasing broken things is another issue, although admittedly it's difficult to escape this with as complex as software has become.

I'm not arguing that software shouldn't be fixed, but I don't see how that makes it immoral for software to be released w/o providing the end user a means to fix it. And honestly, I don't think the real thrust of FSF's zeal is that pragmatic, I think it's all a question of injustice. I think when rms couldn't fix those drivers his response wasn't that it'd be better if he had the source code to the drivers (mind you, the original authors fixing it wasn't an option, and I think that this is indicative of how he views a lot of things, a kind of superiority complex/control issue that for instance leads him to expect all useful software to eventually be under GNU), but that this is "wrong" and an entire worldview needed to be erected to counter it.

Software, on the other hand, frequently is not, insofar as bugs are fixed and new features added, and nowhere is this more important than in the case of an emulator.

edit: and this, more than anything else, is why I would be very unlikely to pay for an emulator, unless I was certain it would either be perfectly functional (highly compatible, smoothly playable if not actually full-speed) or that development was and would continue to be ongoing, and I would receive updated versions at no additional charge.

Sounds entirely reasonable to me to not pay for something that doesn't promise to stay on top of fixing things, or isn't "good enough" from the start (most emulators won't approach perfection).

However, I do think that for some emulators (definitely not all, many prove the exact opposite) they benefit MUCH more from having their original authors focused on working on them than from being open source. So take your pick - if the original author(s) abandons the emulator then you'll want it to be open, but sometimes you'd prefer they stick with it. This is more true for embedded programs than PC ones, and emulators for handhelds falls more under the embedded realm.

Also, if someone is charging $3 for an emulator that may not be perfected, but is also the only game in town (and may be indefinitely) then while you may not put down the negligible amount of cash on principle most will basically choose to be at the developer's mercy.

 

[kagato]

I have made utterly obscene amounts of money exclusively from people who have jailbroken their iPhones

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

 

[Alpha2]

Sort of off topic:

This talk of artistic works reminds me of the guy that wrote Pride and Prejudice And Zombies. It's the same book as Pride and Prejudice but with zombies added to it and it makes you wonder exactly what allows them to get away with it besides the fact that they actually credit the original author with a sub credit by the person that added anything zombie related.

In the terms of a program or application, if you made your own spreadsheet application that looked exactly like one Apple or Microsoft made, but used none of their source code (not that you could actually get it) and was graphically indistinguishable, would it be considered a copy of their work even though you created everything it it yourself?

Just wondering, that's all.

 

[Exophase]

Fair enough in that you're making money, God knows there are plenty of legit reasons to jailbreak, but still a Jailbroken iphone can potentially play a PSone game that was technically never purchased. Like I said above, not everyone is an evil pirate. A person might buy or send you a donation for a decent emulator because they really thought you deserved it for the work, but download 200 PSone games, you'd never really know.

How is what a person can do with a Jailbroken iPhone any different from what they can do with a Pandora?

At any rate, I'd prefer less insinuations of someone being "evil" for downloading PS1 games; that strikes me as a bit of a religious accusation. PS1 games "legitimately" bought today would mostly be after market, where they were sold for a pittance and profiting an aftermarket vendor. These games are not necessarily abandoned by their maker (although often they effectively were) but were all but abandoned by their previous owner. The creating company is certainly not seeing more money for it. Sure, for some games they might be resold on PSN or what have you, but that requires you to now play them on some new, potentially pretty expensive machine. What if you want to play them on a PS1? What if your PS1 broke and PS1s are now hard to find?

Some will not download software illegitimately regardless of the practical consequences, and I respect this. But I don't think people should be too quick to roast over the coals those who aren't, for old or hard to obtain things. At some point tracking down stuff gets old and when no one is really profiting you start to wonder what the point is. Multiply that by 200 for 200 PS1 games. Or go back further, is it evil still for 200 NES games? Atari 2600 games? It doesn't seem that far reaching to indemnify over.

Fortunately some companies are starting to release their old stuff, which is encouraging.

 

[Exophase]

In the terms of a program or application, if you made your own spreadsheet application that looked exactly like one Apple or Microsoft made, but used none of their source code (not that you could actually get it) and was graphically indistinguishable, would it be considered a copy of their work even though you created everything it it yourself?

See: Open Office

Things like this are rather left for the courts to decide and piss everyone off over.

 

[Alpha2]

Fair enough in that you're making money, God knows there are plenty of legit reasons to jailbreak, but still a Jailbroken iphone can potentially play a PSone game that was technically never purchased. Like I said above, not everyone is an evil pirate. A person might buy or send you a donation for a decent emulator because they really thought you deserved it for the work, but download 200 PSone games, you'd never really know.

How is what a person can do with a Jailbroken iPhone any different from what they can do with a Pandora?

At any rate, I'd prefer less insinuations of someone being "evil" for downloading PS1 games; that strikes me as a bit of a religious accusation. PS1 games "legitimately" bought today would mostly be after market, where they were sold for a pittance and profiting an aftermarket vendor. These games are not necessarily abandoned by their maker (although often they effectively were) but were all but abandoned by their previous owner. The creating company is certainly not seeing more money for it. Sure, for some games they might be resold on PSN or what have you, but that requires you to now play them on some new, potentially pretty expensive machine. What if you want to play them on a PS1? What if your PS1 broke and PS1s are now hard to find?

Some will not download software illegitimately regardless of the practical consequences, and I respect this. But I don't think people should be too quick to roast over the coals those who aren't, for old or hard to obtain things. At some point tracking down stuff gets old and when no one is really profiting you start to wonder what the point is. Multiply that by 200 for 200 PS1 games. Or go back further, is it evil still for 200 NES games? Atari 2600 games? It doesn't seem that far reaching to indemnify over.

Fortunately some companies are starting to release their old stuff, which is encouraging.

I agree. Dont get me wrong, I'm not condemning anyone for their choice either way. I'm pretty sure we've all done something "morally gray". My only point in listing these particular segments of the population is to point out the fact that a lot of people get games without paying for them via different methods and how it might be difficult to convince some of them to pay money for something they might think should be free for whatever reason.

 

[-Tj-]

People who uses emulators are not generally pirates.
Yes they pirate the roms, but it is not like modifing a hardware to run pirated software.

Pretty sure if you pirate something you are a pirate. ARRR!!

 

[Tom`]

I don't agree with you, particularly in the case of movies. Even with literature you could argue that by not distributing a CD with a .txt of the book (or somehow making it readily available) the author is discouraging people from modifying it.

True, but it's a much weaker argument than that for software, since the text of a book is completely understandable and, if necessary, transcribable into an editable format, and a compiled binary isn't.

Fanfiction is not a modification of a work, it's a borrowing of certain elements in an otherwise new work, elements generally regarded as relatively abstract and under fair use. It's more akin to being inspired by the user interface of a program than forking its source code. If you took a book's text wholesale and modified some part of it and redistributed it I think the response would be very different from what you describe. The term you'd be met with is "plagiarism", which is not exactly heralded by the creative public, although I can't speak for yourself nor Mr. Stallman.

Well, it's true that this would be a better argument against software patents. It's not plagiarism unless you're trying to pass the work off as your own, though - something that's regarded very poorly in the free-software community, such as it is.

I'm not arguing that software shouldn't be fixed, but I don't see how that makes it immoral for software to be released w/o providing the end user a means to fix it. And honestly, I don't think the real thrust of FSF's zeal is that pragmatic, I think it's all a question of injustice. I think when rms couldn't fix those drivers his response wasn't that it'd be better if he had the source code to the drivers (mind you, the original authors fixing it wasn't an option, and I think that this is indicative of how he views a lot of things, a kind of superiority complex/control issue that for instance leads him to expect all useful software to eventually be under GNU), but that this is "wrong" and an entire worldview needed to be erected to counter it.

I'm not arguing that proprietary software is immoral, just less useful and less valuable than equivalent free software. It's true that the FSF (or at least Stallman himself) is more concerned with questions of morality and justice than pragmatism now, but the former developed as a result of the latter - if RMS's thinking is flawed, it's in that he has an overblown sense of justice (or injustice) - he has an issue with something, and so it becomes THE issue, one which must be corrected for the world to operate as it should, and which people should do everything in their power to resolve. I don't think it's egotism at all, or that he feels the need to control anything - it's more a skewed sense of priority coupled with a drive to fix every possible issue at any cost.

Alpha2: Believe it or not, you're supposed to be able to be able to do whatever you want with public-domain works. It's a feature of the system, not a bug, albeit one that the **AA and similar organizations would like you to forget.

As to the question, layouts are explicitly not covered by copyright (I can provide citations if you want, but it's very late right now). Artwork would be, so e.g. button designs might have to be changed a bit. You'd be legally in the clear in many if not most jurisdictions, notably excluding the US, since parts of the software are likely to be patented, which means you're not allowed to recreate them even completely from scratch. This is why most Linux distros won't play h.264, mp3, aac, or a host of other rather common formats out of the box, because although the decoders are completely free and open source software, they are covered by patents held by very rich groups of corporations who could demand license fees for every codec distributed.

 

[kagato]

This talk of artistic works reminds me of the guy that wrote Pride and Prejudice And Zombies. It's the same book as Pride and Prejudice but with zombies added to it and it makes you wonder exactly what allows them to get away with it besides the fact that they actually credit the original author with a sub credit by the person that added anything zombie related.

It might have something to do with the fact that Pride and Prejudice was written in 1813.

A brief copyright primer:

Copyright is effectively a government-granted monopoly on the right to modify, reproduce & distribute a creative work. Theoretically, copyright always has an expiry date, after which time the work enters what's known as the public domain. You can do pretty much whatever you like with public domain works (except claim original authorship, for example) without paying a cent. Originally, copyright only covered a work for 14 to 21 years, before it reverted to the public domain; these days, it's author's-lifetime-plus-70-years in most places. (The rule of thumb being, every time the Mickey Mouse copyright gets close to expiring, another 20 years gets added on.) As a result, copyright can hardly be reasonably described as "for a limited duration" any more...

However -- regardless how you slice it legally, Pride and Prejudice has well and truly fallen into the public domain.
(As have the vast majority of stories and folk tales upon which Disney have based their animated films; but that's a bitter irony for another day.)