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And if you were starting your own business you'd be doing that all the time...

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How a company treats it's workforce has nothing to do with the way it is organized and everything to do with its ethics.

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Siggy's idea is that the ONLY legal structure for a company should be a cooperative with a collective ownership of assets and collective decision making. I am specifically trying to discover what happens to a person's preinvested assets when he maditarily "incorporates" in the new system and his personal capital becomes communial. That is my only issue.

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Originally posted by rue:

What I object to are u-soft's less than sterling business practices as pursued by Bill Gates (of which the company has been found guilty on at least two continents; and something you seem to be purposefully blind to) and which form the basis of its success. I hail and applaud innovation. I loathe illegal business practices and a 'money above all' philosphy, as you SHOULD have gathered from all of my previous posts.
."

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Originally posted by SignyM:

Now, I know that's not your ONLY problem, because there are also issues of authority... who gets to say what about what. So I guess I'd like to hear more about some of your individual examples to see exactly what the nub is.

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Originally posted by rue:
UUhhmm,

you seem to be using 'ambition' in a more limited sense than as defined:

"an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, ..."

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(Didn't you know ? Bill Gates is a god b/c he figured out a way to get all that money !)

If he is the nicest, most concerned, friendliest person in the world then you might not have a problem (unless you are concerned with that concentrated power per se). But what if he is not ? What if he is a Bill Gates ?

Fletch, just to let you know, Bill Gates wrote dick.

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Originally posted by rue:
BTW, here are some of my comments abut Bill Gates.

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(Didn't you know ? Bill Gates is a god b/c he figured out a way to get all that money !)

If he is the nicest, most concerned, friendliest person in the world then you might not have a problem (unless you are concerned with that concentrated power per se). But what if he is not ? What if he is a Bill Gates ?

Fletch, just to let you know, Bill Gates wrote dick.

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And up to now, you STILL haven't shown me he's written --- anything.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
So, to reiterate....

The ownership of the assets turns over to the cooperative, and the cooperative "owes" the individual value for that/ those item(s).

Now, I know that's not your ONLY problem, because there are also issues of authority... who gets to say what about what. So I guess I'd like to hear more about some of your individual examples to see exactly what the nub is.


---------------------------------
Always look upstream.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Well Fletch2, I'm not sure I understand the problem(s) you pose. Your friend who develops chips certainly isn't going to bang one together on a kitchen table.... he needs a chip fab.

Is that his personal item? Doubtful!

So.... what are you talking about?

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Originally posted by rue:
"I showed you the source code, and you say that doesnt prove anything."

It doesn't prove anything. I can show you all sorts of source code, mine, other people's - it doesn't prove who wrote it. What would be the minimum for a copyright, do you think ? And, do you think what you posted would meet that standard ?

***************************************************************
"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."

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There's my brother the Fireman. In his spare time he does gardening work, landscaping, that kind of thing. He can do it and keep his regular job because when he's on call he lives in the stationhouse day and night for a few weeks then has a week off, which is handy because that tends to be how long it takes grass to grow and plants to do their thing. He has about ten thousand pounds worth of equipment bought out of his day job. They don't pay firemen big bucks so that's a big deal for him. In your world those assets become communal property once employee #1 comes on board.

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Rob buys up used and excess stock from company auctions. The computers are refurbished and sold on, most other things are sold though small adds in a British computer paper. He's started to get into Ebay. He's currently renting premises and hoping to buy somewhere once the stupid price of real estate drops a little in the UK. He's also trying to import cheap tech from China and market it in the UK. First attempt wasn't so successful and it probably cost him around 20,000 pounds so it was an expensive mistake. Of course employee number one in your system didn't take any of that loss. He's self financed using money from a severance package though his wife still works.

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Richard's dad came up with the paper system that UK doctors used to keep patient records. Since Richard was a computer science grad he set about computerizing that method back in the 1980's. Since dads business was never that great Richard financed the software development himself with bank loans taken out on his assets. After he got the company up to 7 people and about 200 systems installed he was bought out by a larger company.

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Garry and a partner built up a bespoke software firm that wrote operations software for companies looking to computerise. This was a onestop "requirements to software" type business. He had about six programmers working as full time employees. He and the partner started out coding themselves, built up good will for the business and started hiring junior programmers straight out of college.

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Naren worked in the Indian office of a US satellite equipment maker, selling their equipment to Indian telecoms firms. In this way he came to know their business. When the US firm pulled out of the Indian market Naren started offering services to the Telecoms directly, acting as an installation and system integration subcontractor. His business is built on personal capital, on good will, personal knowledge and his own reputation. he has about 20 employees.

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Originally posted by rue:
Sigh.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#hsc
"NOTE: Before 1978, federal copyright was generally secured by the act of publication with notice of copyright, assuming compliance with all other relevant statutory conditions. U. S. works in the public domain on January 1, 1978, (for example, works published without satisfying all conditions for securing federal copyright under the Copyright Act of 1909) remain in the public domain under the 1976 Copyright Act."

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Nitpick as usual....

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"I know you won't accept their word."
WHERE IS IT ? You kepp saying they said it, you said you posted it, sorry it aint there. All you have is your CLAIM that it's there.

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BTW Look up "programable logic" these use pre-fabricated chips that you can program on the fly, you can even make specialist microprocessors on them. You can use them to prototype a chip before you move to mass production or even use them as the basis of a production design.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Wow, that’s a lot of equipment! The cooperative “owes” him 10,000 pounds, and must pay him back. The cooperative “owns” both assets AND liabilities.

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Rob buys up used and excess stock from company auctions. The computers are refurbished and sold on, most other things are sold though small adds in a British computer paper. He's started to get into Ebay. He's currently renting premises and hoping to buy somewhere once the stupid price of real estate drops a little in the UK. He's also trying to import cheap tech from China and market it in the UK. First attempt wasn't so successful and it probably cost him around 20,000 pounds so it was an expensive mistake. Of course employee number one in your system didn't take any of that loss. He's self financed using money from a severance package though his wife still works.

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Ouch! Once again, the cooperative owns both assets and liabilities. From your description, I can’t tell whether Rob has any employees or if he’s a single-person entity. Now, there are two ways to think about doing this: He can become an “individual co-op” immediately on forming his “business” or he can do the conversion later when he takes on his first hire. It would be a little like having a personally-owned business versus incorporating yourself. (The smart business move would be to incorporate yourself or form an LLC, but most people don’t want to deal with the paperwork!)

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Naren worked in the Indian office of a US satellite equipment maker, selling their equipment to Indian telecoms firms. In this way he came to know their business. When the US firm pulled out of the Indian market Naren started offering services to the Telecoms directly, acting as an installation and system integration subcontractor. His business is built on personal capital, on good will, personal knowledge and his own reputation. he has about 20 employees.

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Naren built his business on the back of another business. HIS initial investment sounds quite small- accidental, almost. But again, where he has invested HIS time and money the cooperative “owes” him.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

I don't work with thme but my SO uses them often. Gets 98% utilization. what about your friend?

.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Believe me, my SO's designs are blazing.

Usually he uses them as timing devices for scientific equipment, typically for laser- studies of molecular reactions. (Blast the molecule with a laser and "read" it with another.) I THINK he said pico-second pulses and data acquisition... but I'd have to talk to him again.

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To answer your more substantive question: I don't know how a co-op would pay someone for the time they spend developing a business. I haven't thought thru the accounting but I can see that it's possible to devise a formula for it.

I would have thought that you would object to loss of certain aspects of control (expansion, sale, contraction) to "the cooperative".
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However, serious leadership conflicts developed between them, and in 1891 Abbe convinced the younger Zeiss to withdraw from the company. This experience with problems stemming from personal ownership of a company motivated Abbe to put the Zeiss company, as well as his 50 per cent share of the Schott glass works, into the hands of an impersonal owner, the Carl Zeiss foundation.

...Abbe draws an interesting implication from his emphasis on the firm’s historically accumulated
organization. He proposes that a part of the firm’s yield cannot be attributed to the effort of individual workers and shareholders, but is simply due to the ongoing existence of the
organization itself. Consequently, this part of the firm’s yield cannot legitimately be claimed by its present members. Its legitimate recipient is the organization itself

... To attain this goal, the Zeiss foundation statutes demand that the firms are not to
maximize short-term profits, but rather to increase their long-term “total economic yield”
(wirtschaftlicher Gesamtertrag, Abbe 1896a, p. 280). This provision is explicitly set in contrast to the behavior of joint stock companies.

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even though the cooperative benefits from the business

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Originally posted by rue:
Well, to pick up where we left off ...

"In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment."


Now here we have an interesting case of Bill Gates claiming copy-rights without ever having satisfied the law in existence at the time, which required publication etc.

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"So if I post it you will admit you are wrong?"
Sure - but I hope you anticipate the reply, b/c it's not the slam-dunk answer you think it is.

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Originally posted by rue:

And here "In July 1981, a month before the PC's release, Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS from SCP for $50,000" we see that 86-DOs which was copyrighted by SCP under the newer, laxer conditions was purchased by u-soft *, not licensed.

According to the copyright office "Any or all of the copyright owner’s exclusive rights or any subdivision of those rights may be transferred, but the transfer of exclusive rights is not valid unless that transfer is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent." By everyone's account u-soft purchased 'full rights' to QDOS but the transfer of copyrights was not specifically spelled out. Despite that, u-soft sold a version to IBM as PC-DOS, and sold it under its own name MS-DOS as well.

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Originally posted by rue:
"Gate's company was "publishing" a binary machine file, not the source for the binary."

So. what you're saying that that any text supplied by anyone is NOT the basis for a copyright. Unlike your previous claims. Are you sure ? Or are you going to make a different claim later on ? I just want to know so we can get somewhere. You're staking your claim on the binary code - right ?

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"I would provide quotes from all the people involved in writing MS Basic, that shows that Bill did indeed writes parts of it."

But you never do. All I can conclude is you don't got it. For the last time, put up or shut up.

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00400 -------------------------------------------
00410 COPYRIGHT 1975 BY BILL GATES AND PAUL ALLEN
00420 -------------------------------------------

It also says 'written originally on the PDP-10 at Harvard from February 9 to April 27.' Remember that the spooler output (above) showed that this printout was made on 30th April 1975.

Interestingly, another comment tells us that :

00560 PAUL ALLEN WROTE THE NON-RUNTIME STUFF.
00580 BILL GATES WROTE THE RUNTIME STUFF.
00600 MONTE DAVIDOFF WROTE THE MATH PACKAGE.

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How did the collaboration between the two of you work in those early days?

We split the programming tasks. I was familiar with the software that ran on mainframes and minicomputers that will let you emulate chips. And Bill bit off some of the really complicated stuff and did a great job architecting the overall design of the Basic program. Bill was always very focused on the external relationships and the business management part of it, whereas I was more attracted toward seeing where the leading edge of the technology was going. So we were a good complement to each other.

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And does the scurrilous rumor that Allen and himself did all the work, while Bill played poker hold true?
Not at all, he says. "We were both working pretty hard. The maths routines are a part of the interpreter, not all of it, and Bill and Paul wrote the rest."
The software was lauded for its efficiency and small foot print. But execution time wasn't uppermost in the authors minds, says Monte:-
"We weren't too concerned about efficiency. Even the 8088 then was a pretty fast processor. And we were running it over an ASR 33 Teletype running at 110 baud!"
The main constraint, back then, was memory.
"It had to run in 4k. In fact the 8k version had algorithms that were more efficient but that took up more space. By the time the 4k BASIC was done, the 8k version was out." Incredibly, the three of them produced the interpreter without seeing the MITS Altair itself - the coding and debugging was done entirely on a simulator.
Along with other pioneers of the time, component shortages weren't as challenging as what they could do with the chip, says Davidoff.
"The memory producers were churning out memory at a constant rate - what was new was the microprocessor itself. The 8080 wasn't the first - Intel had the 8008 and the 404 before that - but the 8080 was the real breakthrough."
Davidoff was a Harvard student at the time, writing the BASIC interpreters over two summers in 1975 and 1977, and returning to study Applied Maths and Science.

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Originally posted by rue:
"This is probably why no successful legal case could be brought by the authors later."

Ahem. There was a successful case brought later, which the larger and more powerful corporation - u-soft - lost to the tune of appx $1 M.

***************************************************************
"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."

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