food for thought: code bloat

[Bruce Abbott]

A lot of people don't understand what open source is.

Lots of companies perceive open source as a threat rather than a help. Classical example of this is Nintendo. They have a huge legal department suing people left right and center for doing pretty much anything to anything with a Nintendo badge on it. According to them you are not even allowed to share video footage of there games running on legit hardware. They try to shutdown people developing emulators for there systems (but fail to do so because it is not ilegal). They even threw DMCA claims at YouTube channels that show how to use emulation. There was a effort to decompile SuperMario64 back into C code. They threatened legal action to it too, even tho it contained no copyrighted data from the original ROM cartridge

Nintendo wrote the code for their games, so it belongs to them. They make money from it by selling the game cartridges and the consoles to play them on. Any method used to get around that potentially loses sales for Nintendo. How is that an example of open source 'helping' them?

The reason Nintendo try to stop people making emulators is obvious - because they know people will use them to play pirated games. 'Decompiling' a game into C is effectively the same as simply copying the game - which is illegal and immoral. The game is their creation so they have the right to maintain control over its IP. Open source is not the same as free, but when the source code is out there it's hard to police your IP. Nintendo trying to do so is perfectly within their right. If they don't it could be claimed that they have abandoned it - so they have to police it. There is still money to be made from SuperMario64, but if you let people copy it freely and run it on an emulator then Nintendo get nothing. Why do you hate capitalism?

Your 'classical example' of companies perceiving open source as a threat is actually a classic example of freeloaders taking stuff that doesn't belong to them, to the detriment of the hard-working producers of it. You think SuperMario64 is a great game and you want to play it? Buy the game and the official machine to play it on. Don't want to part with the money? Write your own great game. Oh, but that's too hard? Now you know why you should pay for it.


 

[Nominal Animal]

Nintendo wrote the code for their games, so it belongs to them. They make money from it by selling the game cartridges and the consoles to play them on. Any method used to get around that potentially loses sales for Nintendo. How is that an example of open source 'helping' them?

The same way availability of books free of charge increases the sale of books by the same author, as discovered by Baen Books' Baen Free Library.  It was founded in 1999 by Eric Flint, an author himself, and publisher Jim Baen.

The reason Nintendo try to stop people making emulators is obvious - because they know people will use them to play pirated games.

Yet, there is no actual data backing that "knowing".  In fact, actual experiments and statistics points to the opposite.

Except for a few bad apples who try to make a profit off others (by clandestinely using open source in their commercial projects, usually breaking the license; or by making fake cartridges or copies of games and selling them), a typical "pirate" actually spends more money on games than those who do not "pirate" at all.  Companies didn't ditch DRM because they decided to be lenient towards "pirates"; they did so because it hurt their sales.

But by all means, do take your personal beliefs stemming from stereotypes and other peoples beliefs as "knowledge" and "facts", and completely ignore what results have been discovered by actual independent research.  No, I will not give you any sources or links, because that just leads to the social game of "if you listen to that source, you must be X"; you have to do the research yourself.  The question is, are you willing to risk having your "knowledge and facts" be overturned by actual research, or not?

A bit over two decades ago, I was just like you.  Then, I hired a lawyer to teach me how open source licenses, and copyright licenses in general.  I learned how open source actually works for a company working on ordinary profit-making principles.  Baen Free Library did something very similar to creative literature.  Both of us are still bombarded with arguments from people who insist that their core beliefs trump practical experience, and that what we found to be true, could not be true because their beliefs.  It can be horribly tiring, I suspect something like being Dave on Twitter debunking all kinds of dodgy tech from Batterizer to Solar Roadways.

[Bruce Abbott]

Actually, less e-junk and wasted resources would be much better for us to survive on the long term. Based on your reasoning we should limit the lifetime of cars to 5 years, instead of using them for 15 to 20 years or even longer.

In Japan they effectively do limit the lifetime of cars to 5 years. Due to that policy I was able to buy an 8 year old imported Nissan Leaf when I never could have afforded a new one. Apart from the battery the car is practically like brand new. In Japan Nissan has a replacement program for old batteries, but I live in new Zealand where the Nissan agents aren't at all interested in doing it (either for imports or cars sold locally through them). They want to me to buy a new Leaf - or better yet some polluting gas car that they can make more money out of servicing - every 5 years or so.

And that's how Japanese car manufacturers can continuously innovate while making lots of money. But they make more money from bigger more expensive cars, so that's what they push (who cares about the environment, eh?). Nissan got their CEO Carlos Ghosn (father of the Nissan Leaf) arrested on trumped up charges of fraud. Seems they didn't like the direction he was leading the company, as they have lots of bloated gas cars they still want to sell.

Ironically, we would actually be better off if most gas cars were taken off the road after 5 years - and replaced with electric cars. But not more gas-guzzling SUVs. This same principle also applies to computers. Modern computers can be made much less power hungry and cheaper than older ones with the same functionality. But bloat prevents that from being realized. Microsoft could easily keep supporting older versions of Windows that are less resource hungry and just as capable - but they don't (unless you are the US military) because there's no money in it.

It's all about the money. You know it, I know it, we all know that money makes the world go around. That's how the system works and anything that threatens it threatens our way of life. Long term? In the long run we are all dead. Who cares about after that? Capitalists don't care at all. And we are all capitalists - we wouldn't be part of the system if we weren't.

[Bruce Abbott]

The same way availability of books free of charge increases the sale of books by the same author, as discovered by Baen Books' Baen Free Library.  It was founded in 1999 by Eric Flint, an author himself, and publisher Jim Baen.

Books, computer games, they're exactly the same  - right? Wrong.

I ran a computer shop from 1991 to 2002. I can assure you that availability of pirated games did nothing to improve sales of the originals. I sold heaps of blank disks though, and the computers to use them on. Still wasn't enough to save Commodore, because software developers were sick to death of piracy. They put demos on magazine cover disks but it didn't help much. Games that took years to develop were cracked in days (sometimes even before release) and distributed around the world via the pirate networks. By the time the latest games got shipped to New Zealand everybody already had a free copy. A few people were willing pay for the originals, either because they wanted the physical stuff that came with it or they were just too honest. The vast majority didn't care. This eventually led to collapse of the Amiga games market.
 

The reason Nintendo try to stop people making emulators is obvious - because they know people will use them to play pirated games.

Yet, there is no actual data backing that "knowing".  In fact, actual experiments and statistics points to the opposite.

So you say. But it's not up to you to decide. If Nintendo don't really 'know', and could actually sell more games by letting people play free copies on their PCs, then it's their choice to not do so. You are not on their board of directors, so you don't get a say. One thing for sure though is that Nintendo is one of the few console game producers still in business, and was last year rated the richest company in Japan. They didn't get there by making stupid decisions.

Except for a few bad apples who try to make a profit off others (by clandestinely using open source in their commercial projects, usually breaking the license; or by making fake cartridges or copies of games and selling them), a typical "pirate" actually spends more money on games than those who do not "pirate" at all.  Companies didn't ditch DRM because they decided to be lenient towards "pirates"; they did so because it hurt their sales.

Yes, DRM hurts sales. But if it wasn't for pirates (which on some platforms is the majority of users if you don't have some DRM) it wouldn't be necessary. Game cartridges are themselves a form of DRM, because they are expensive for the individual to copy and fake cartridges can be impounded. Game console makers got by for years because of this. However today - with modern PCs, emulators, and the net - users don't need to buy any hardware and distribution is essentially free. The only people making money from that are computer hardware vendors, ISPs, and Microsoft.
 

But by all means, do take your personal beliefs stemming from stereotypes and other peoples beliefs as "knowledge" and "facts", and completely ignore what results have been discovered by actual independent research.  No, I will not give you any sources or links...

I don't need links or studies to show me the practical difference between open source and closed source software. Right now I am using a PC running Linux Lite, which is practically the same as Windows but totally free. How many others are doing so? How much are the authors making from it? All Linuxes combined currently have 2% of the desktop market. Windows has 76%, MacOS X has 16%.  Microsoft didn't get to be number 1 by making their software open source.

A bit over two decades ago, I was just like you.  Then, I hired a lawyer to teach me how open source licenses, and copyright licenses in general.  I learned how open source actually works for a company working on ordinary profit-making principles.

Good for you. But don't assume that because it worked for you it must work for everyone. Plenty of software developers have started open source and then realized they needed more control over their IP. Hey, maybe some of them were wrong about that. But you don't get to tell them what's best for their situation. The market will decide. If Nintendo is anything to go by then the market has already decided...
 

[Siwastaja]

So you say. But it's not up to you to decide. If Nintendo don't really 'know', and could actually sell more games by letting people play free copies on their PCs, then it's their choice to not do so.

It is their choice yes - but what they actually own, what they can exactly do about it, and who they can target, is all limited by law.

For example, if your neighbor plays music too loudly for your comfort, you have every legal right to complain to the landlord or maybe even press charges, but you can't kill your neigbor, cut their electricity, or attack the company who manufactured their audio equipment, or the one who installed their TV set.

Similarly, the only thing Nintendo can legally do something about is to attack those who distribute the game cartridge images (rom files) because those are copies of copyrighted software.

Meanwhile, emulators, as long as they come without any games, are just completely legal, like your neighbor's audio equipment, even if it can be used to play illegally obtained content.

Similarly, making gameplay or emulator videos on Youtube is completely legal.

Making fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, on the other hand, is, AFAIK, an actual criminal offense: the "cure" is worse than the disease, especially because it attacks different people than those actually responsible. People downplay the seriousness of this, but it is actually a pretty big deal fundamentally. Our Western societies are built on the idea that independent authorities (police, judges) decide if someone is guilty, and only said authorities can limit our freedom of speech, and even then under very strict rules. Laws like DMCA (and similar laws elsewhere) shifted this responsibility to individual private companies; similar to you actually having the right to kill your neighbor, for a good reason explicitly specified in law (e.g., neighbor attacking you and you acting as self-defence). To compensate for this shift, it was made illegal to misuse this power - obviously. This is equivalent to you killing your neighbor when he actually did not attack you - try and see what happens.

Yet, large companies do fraudulent DMCA actions - criminal offenses - all the freaking time without getting prosecuted and convicted. And even more weirdly, there are people on the internet who try to justify these actions with some mental acrobatics. This just demonstrates how ****ed up society we live in.

[PlainName]

I agree with much of what you said there, but...

Microsoft didn't get to be number 1 by making their software open source.

They didn't get there by selling to the end user, either. I think most sales were actually the Microsoft tax, where they stiffed vendors selling PCs. It's no coincidence that at one time (not sure about now) it was cheaper to buy a new PC with Windows installed than with no OS at all.

I don't think Microsoft is a good example of either route to big money. Word got to be the de facto office suite because world+dog pirated it, but companies who had to actually pay for stuff then bought it because everyone was used to it. Without the pirating Word probably wouldn't have beat the opponents (or if it did, not as fast), but of course a game cartridge isn't going to be an essential business tool.

[Berni]

Yep it is the fact that big companies abuse various methods of silencing people/things, rather just taking them to court for what is actually ilegal by the law. Or in the case of Nintendo actually taking a open source project they tried to squash in the past and using it as the core component of a product that they then sell and turn a profit on. Even Microsoft or Sony don't pull evil stunts like that.

Yes, DRM hurts sales. But if it wasn't for pirates (which on some platforms is the majority of users if you don't have some DRM) it wouldn't be necessary. Game cartridges are themselves a form of DRM, because they are expensive for the individual to copy and fake cartridges can be impounded. Game console makers got by for years because of this. However today - with modern PCs, emulators, and the net - users don't need to buy any hardware and distribution is essentially free. The only people making money from that are computer hardware vendors, ISPs, and Microsoft.

In 2020 the developer CD Project Red released one of the biggest games of the year Cyberpunk 2077 completely DRM free. Yet it was found among the top sellers for the year in multiple platforms. The same developer has released a lot of its games in a similar way in the past 15 years and they are doing well, in fact they are racking in huge profits.

DRM is not a requirement for having good sales. Having a good product that is easily accessible for the right price is what brings huge sales numbers.

Yes piracy is bad! If everyone pirated all software then people who create it would go out of business. But there are reasonable lengths to go to when fighting it. For example with any software that businesses use you can focus on hunting down companies that pirate there software. Those are easy to make them pay up handsomely to avoid going to court over something they will surely loose. They also buy 100s of licenses at a time, not just 1 that a home user would.

[Nominal Animal]

Right now I am using a PC running Linux Lite, which is practically the same as Windows but totally free. How many others are doing so? How much are the authors making from it? All Linuxes combined currently have 2% of the desktop market.

And Linux has 100% of the HPC market, and a major piece of the server market (at least twice the next competitor, which is not Windows).
Majority of Linux kernel and library developers get their salary from companies and organizations in this sector.

You think you know Linux by using one on desktop?  You're only leveraging the zero cost aspect of it, and not the things that make it useful and powerful.  You're not willing to pay –– or even to reciprocate by spending time and effort –– for anything, so you and others like you do not even form a market: you're a black hole.  It is exactly the existence of this 'market segment' why nobody sane using Linux for business purposes cares a whit about Linux Desktop market share.  There just isn't any business worth doing there, and a lot of black hole (gimme! gimme! I'm your user, you owe me!) demanders with zero intent on reciprocality or support.  They're not even potential users, they're a burden.

No wonder you have zero understanding of what I was trying to convey.
(I do admit a large part is my failure to convey things in English in concise, understandable manner: me fail English.)

[madires]

It's all about the money. You know it, I know it, we all know that money makes the world go around. That's how the system works and anything that threatens it threatens our way of life. Long term? In the long run we are all dead. Who cares about after that? Capitalists don't care at all. And we are all capitalists - we wouldn't be part of the system if we weren't.

Actually, it's human greed. Money is just a concept. And the economic system also doesn't matter much. You'll find greedy people in all systems.

[Zoli]

Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy - don't look further then the PC game market.
Attached is a study about piracy(pretty old and lonely, 2015), for some details.

[brucehoult]

By the time the latest games got shipped to New Zealand everybody already had a free copy.

There's most of your problem, right there.

In an age of instant communications you have to do simultaneous launch around the world. There are millions of people who are perfectly willing to pay for the product, but what they are NOT willing to do is sit on their hands for weeks or months while their friends are all using and discussing the latest thing.

Computer games are not heavy. It only takes a plane 12 hours to get from LAX or SFO to New Zealand. (and if it is manufactured in Asia then we are *closer*)

It works the other way too.

I remember when Apple launched the iPhone 3G and/or 3GS. They went on sale on the same date everywhere in the world. At least one of the NZ distributors (I recall it being Vodafone) opened their doors at 00:01 on that date. Shops in California opened at their normal 08:00 or 08:30 or whatever it was.

Some enterprising people managed to buy a dozen or a hundred iPhones in Auckland just after midnight, jump on a flight to California, and sell them on the street in Los Angeles or San Francisco at a large profit before they went on sale in shops there. The 19 hour time zone difference helped, obviously.

[brucehoult]

Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy - don't look further then the PC game market.
Attached is a study about piracy(pretty old and lonely, 2015), for some details.

I couldn't immediately find a clip of another Jobs' explanation that if you want a song and download a few copies off Napster or Limewire and check them to see which are mislabeled, which are poor quality etc instead of paying $1 to buy the song on iTunes then "you're working for less than minimum wage".

[PlainName]

I couldn't immediately find a clip of another Jobs' explanation that if you want a song and download a few copies off Napster or Limewire and check them to see which are mislabeled, which are poor quality etc instead of paying $1 to buy the song on iTunes then "you're working for less than minimum wage".

Currently I purchase books for 99p off Amazon and the first thing I do is run them through Calibre to remove the DRM. I don't share them with anybody, but if I couldn't remove the DRM I wouldn't buy them, and these are the equivalent of the $1 tracks Jobs was on about.

A $1 track is just $1, but you don't have just one track. You tend to have loads of them, so you're really talking loads of $. And the 'middle way' that Jobs speaks of is to lock all that up so you can only access them with some specific software on specific kit at the whim of a mega-corp who doesn't see you as an individual. That's just bonkers.

[YurkshireLad]

I couldn't immediately find a clip of another Jobs' explanation that if you want a song and download a few copies off Napster or Limewire and check them to see which are mislabeled, which are poor quality etc instead of paying $1 to buy the song on iTunes then "you're working for less than minimum wage".

Currently I purchase books for 99p off Amazon and the first thing I do is run them through Calibre to remove the DRM. I don't share them with anybody, but if I couldn't remove the DRM I wouldn't buy them, and these are the equivalent of the $1 tracks Jobs was on about.

A $1 track is just $1, but you don't have just one track. You tend to have loads of them, so you're really talking loads of $. And the 'middle way' that Jobs speaks of is to lock all that up so you can only access them with some specific software on specific kit at the whim of a mega-corp who doesn't see you as an individual. That's just bonkers.

Can you download kindle books from Amazon to a PC?

[Zoli]

Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy - don't look further then the PC game market.
Attached is a study about piracy(pretty old and lonely, 2015), for some details.

I couldn't immediately find a clip of another Jobs' explanation that if you want a song and download a few copies off Napster or Limewire and check them to see which are mislabeled, which are poor quality etc instead of paying $1 to buy the song on iTunes then "you're working for less than minimum wage".

Did you understood what I've written:
Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy
I'm not interested what is Steve Jobs opinion on piracy, since it had his own business to peddle.
The document I've linked is a properly done research, not a personal and biased opinion.

[PlainName]

Can you download kindle books from Amazon to a PC?

Sure. You install the Windows Kindle app and that downloads your books. You can also use it to read them, but I never do

[brucehoult]

Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy - don't look further then the PC game market.
Attached is a study about piracy(pretty old and lonely, 2015), for some details.

I couldn't immediately find a clip of another Jobs' explanation that if you want a song and download a few copies off Napster or Limewire and check them to see which are mislabeled, which are poor quality etc instead of paying $1 to buy the song on iTunes then "you're working for less than minimum wage".

Did you understood what I've written:
Convenience and competition ALWAYS beats piracy
I'm not interested what is Steve Jobs opinion on piracy, since it had his own business to peddle.
The document I've linked is a properly done research, not a personal and biased opinion.

Why are you attacking me when I'm agreeing with you?

Also, I'd take the real-world vast success of the iTunes store (and others) as far stronger evidence than a hundred academic studies.

[Zoli]

...
Why are you attacking me when I'm agreeing with you?

Also, I'd take the real-world vast success of the iTunes store (and others) as far stronger evidence than a hundred academic studies.

Sorry for the misunderstanding, but I don't consider Apple competition friendly; convenience, yes - competition, no. Compare Itunes and Steam policies as example.

[Nominal Animal]

In a very real sense, convenience is a root cause for code bloat, too.

[Berni]

Yep i might not be a fan of Apple but they have truly revolutionized the music industry.

It has taken a lot of legal work in the background to even allow Apple to implement its iTunes music selling business model. The record labels really really didn't want anything other than selling CDs in physical stores. But eventually Apple made it happen so that they could make music as conveniently accessible as possible at a good price. This has dealt one of the biggest blows to music piracy ever. For a lot of people it became more convenient to buy a song rather than pirate it from P2P networks. So they instead started buying music. All this was all part of the plan for there iPod ecosystem.

In a very real sense, convenience is a root cause for code bloat, too.

Indeed. Throwing in a library or doing it the dirty inefficient way is usually easier so that's what people do.

[madires]

Using third party libs comes now with an additional risk:
 Protestware on the rise: Why developers are sabotaging their own code (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/27/protestware-code-sabotage/)

[PlainName]

Using third party libs comes now with an additional risk:

It shouldn't do. Surely developers download the lib and it's then there forever (or until they forget to do the backup and the disk dies). Only a moroinexperienced wannabe developer would link to the cloud, or auto-download every compile or auto-update without checking out the update first.

[Zoli]

Yep i might not be a fan of Apple but they have truly revolutionized the music industry.

It has taken a lot of legal work in the background to even allow Apple to implement its iTunes music selling business model. The record labels really really didn't want anything other than selling CDs in physical stores. But eventually Apple made it happen so that they could make music as conveniently accessible as possible at a good price. This has dealt one of the biggest blows to music piracy ever. For a lot of people it became more convenient to buy a song rather than pirate it from P2P networks. So they instead started buying music. All this was all part of the plan for there iPod ecosystem.
...

My point of view is a little different: when itunes come out, the music industry business model already was under pressure from the digital formats(and not only P2P); without Apple opportunistic grab, the music situation now would be similar of what is now on the video streaming market. And to remind you about how customer friendly is Apple: DRM had been removed when Amazon started to sell MP3's, lossless option had been added when Bandcamp(IIRC) started doing. Presenting Apple as customer focused company is hypocrisy.

[SiliconWizard]

In a very real sense, convenience is a root cause for code bloat, too.

Yeah. Well, "convenience" is unfortunately a rather loose concept when it comes to managing a project, let alone running a business.

It's much too often a polite way of expressing what is really "instant gratification", which always has hidden costs.

Beyond the "instant gratification" effect, it basically all comes down to what your objective is: is it to minimize time-to-market or is it to minimize long-term operational costs? Both are often pretty much contradictory.

[brucehoult]

My point of view is a little different: when itunes come out, the music industry business model already was under pressure from the digital formats(and not only P2P); without Apple opportunistic grab, the music situation now would be similar of what is now on the video streaming market. And to remind you about how customer friendly is Apple: DRM had been removed when Amazon started to sell MP3's, lossless option had been added when Bandcamp(IIRC) started doing. Presenting Apple as customer focused company is hypocrisy.

Amazon started selling DRM-free MP3s from EMI and Universal on 25/9/2007.

Apple started selling DRM-free AAC songs from EMI on 10/9/2007.

Apple was first, and it was the labels that were the hold-up, not Apple. Apple had been doing the hard work trying to persuafe them to go DRM-free for years.