[GRLUG] Itunes and France

[David Pembrook]

But are you saying that a company does not have a right to make
something and own it? I love open source and thats a choice for me and
many others. But if I make something the world wants, do they have a
right to it by demanding it from me? Are intelectual rights obsolete?


Ron Lauzon wrote:

>Bob Kline wrote:
>  
>
>>I think France has this basically right in principle. Knowingly or not, it is fighting for standards, and we mostly know how important those are, and
>>what the PC world was like just 15 years, when almost everything was proprietary, and expensive.
>>  
>>    
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>Many groups are (finally!) discovering what many of us have known for a 
>long time: Proprietary is bad for the consumer.
>And they are discovering what "proprietary" really means.
>
>For example, the big push to use the Open Document Format instead of 
>Microsoft Word.
>
>Back in the '80s, the saying was "No one ever got fired for going with 
>IBM."  By the mid 1990s, that was no longer said.  Now the saying is "No 
>one ever got fired for going with Microsoft" but that is now just 
>starting to be false.
>
>  
>
>>The only way to beat all this is with standards.  You
>>either have standards or you get monopolies.
>>    
>>
>And companies (like Microsoft and Apple) who have business models based 
>not on providing the best value, but rather on DRM and customer lock-in, 
>want to either own these "standards" or cry foul when their proprietary 
>standards become de facto standards and they are called to open them up.
>
>  
>