[clug] Linux Google OS coming..

[Paul Wayper]

On 08/07/09 20:38, Jason Stokes wrote:
> Google is a corporation.  I expect it to do whatever maximizes its profits,
> corporate culture notwithstanding.

Humans are evil.  I expect you to try and murder me as soon as look at me, no 
matter how nice you've said you'll be in the past.

Really, this kind of 'corporations are inherently evil' thing is 
misunderstanding the whole thing.  Corporations are only as good or as bad as 
their leaders.  In the 1920s corporations looked after their employees - in 
Japan they still do.  I see corporations as a manifestation of the saying "in 
order for evil to triumph it is only necessary for good people to do nothing" 
- i.e. only by the thoughtful effort of everyone at Google, especially upper 
management, does it uphold its 'do no evil' motto.

> Google is much less secure than I think people realize.  It has played
> fast and loose with copyright issues.  By buying Youtube, it has inherited
> a potentially incredibly huge copyright liability case and its google
> books service, despite some agreements, is also a massive exposure
> (I've read the guts of entire books for free on its "book preview" service.)
>   Its pockets are not infinite and it has spent zillions on products like
> Chrome, gmail and google docs that have given it next to no
> return at all.  As the last of the dot-coms, there will be a crunch
> time where it all has to pay, and at that point, expect a serious
> time of reckoning.

Well, I for one would love to see some of those alleged submarine patents on 
the Theora codec come out and try their hand at suing Google for putting 
Theora in Chrome.  Because you can bet dollars to cents that it will be on for 
all players and the result will not be go well for the patent holder, just as 
the SCO affair finally went down by trying to take on Novell and IBM.

I think what's happening here is that we're seeing the real proof of the law 
system - that what can you do is what you can get away with.  When you're a 
very large company that can afford good lawyers, you tend to move the law 
around you.  Put simply, no-one's going to sue Google for previewing books and 
hosting videos because no-one can construct a case so water-tight that Google 
can't get out of it.

And, ultimately, what everyone knows is that even though the book preview 
service is showing people copyrighted pages, it increases book sales (look, 
for example, at Baen's increasing sales by offering its first editions of 
series online for free - even sales of those books offered for free on its 
website are up!)  Videos on YouTube increase exposure of TV shows, music 
tracks, ads and movies.  The media corporations are at last vaguely realising 
that generating buzz is more important than wringing every last drop from an 
industry they no longer control.  The authors union tried to sue Google for 
the book preview thing, as I recall, and they ended up looking like grasping 
morons versus a company that just wanted to put information in front of people.

Anyway, I for one welcome our new Google overlords... :-)

Have fun,

Paul