RE: [Marxism] File sharing: it's the communist thing to do

[Adam <cleon42@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This has actually been in the works for quite some time. This move by
> Venezuela and similar moves by Brazil and --of all places-- Munich
> have been
> covered in the CNN en Español program, "Adelantos," which keeps a
> pretty
> close watch on the intersection of technology, politics and ideology.

A *lot* of countries are looking at Linux and open source-based
alternatives. India, China, South Africa, to name a few.

> Judging by the volume of posts on the ubuntu email lists, it is
> developing a
> large base of people who are at least experimenting with it, because
> it is a
> no-risk way of people with windows boxes to dip their toes in the
> free
> software world.

Every Linux distro is like that. :)

> On the technical side, this is the same sort of idea as Knoppix, and
> I think
> may actually be based on it, i.e., a "live" CD distro -- download,
> burn it
> to CD, then boot from that CD and all of a sudden you have a free (as
> in
> "freedom" as well as in "free beer") software box even if Mr. Bill
> still
> sits on the hard drive.

They have both, an installed distro and a "livecd" bootable version.
(BTW, in case you're interested, Knoppix is apparently moving to a
*dvd*-based version as well as CD.)

Ubuntu is based on Debian, another popular Linux distro. (Knoppix is
based on SuSe.)

What a lot of people do--myself included--is we run dual-boot systems.
Rather than run Linux from a bootable CD or DVD, I have both Linux and
Windows partitions on my hard drive(s). Back in The Day, this was a
royal pain in the ass, but these days most of the solid distros handle
do a lot of the difficult work for you.

> As for the movie studios, they persist in their practice of refusing
> to sell
> their movies on DVD (never mind as files online) until many, many
> moons
> after theatrical release, helping to keep the online file-sharing
> population
> at quite a few million simultaneous users (usually about 3-1/2
> million on
> emule/edonkey and related, 2-1/2 million
> on the FastTrack network (Kazaa, etc.), a hundred thousand on the
> gnutella
> network, and God knows how many on bit torrent, which according to
> packet-sniffing studies, accounts for the biggest portion of the
> traffic.

That's starting to change. Shaun of the Dead, for example, was in
theaters late summer-early fall, and was released on DVD in
mid-December.



Adam


_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism