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The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the First Sale Doctrine does not apply to goods copyrighted for sale abroad that are gray marketed back into the United States. The trick is in interpretation of origin of manufacture, IE  “lawfully made under this title” translates into “legally made and sold in the United States.” While it is legal to resell imported goods, the first sale doctrine only applies if they were originally made and sold in the United States.  There is no doubt in my mind that the Supreme Court will have to review it since this is a wide reaching reinterpretation of “lawfully made under this title.” Read the rest of this entry »

Recently discussed on the Runrev list was the value of promoting and selling products using ultra-discount sites like MacZot. MacZot runs single day (or single weekend) sales of software products at a 50% or greater discount. Will you benefit from selling this way, or will you succeed in devaluing your product? Here are some questions to ask.

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Internet connectivity is something you want to just work, and nothing else. I was surprised this morning to find several websites were inaccessible from my remote  Beaverton, Oregon location through Verizon. This can at least provide a lesson on how not to provide customer service and why linking together disparate systems allows for multiple points of failure.  One simple feature could dramatically reduce their overhead. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Widenius certainly has his concerns about the Oracle acquisition of Sun. Michael is the original developer of MySQL and worked on the project for more than 27 years. It is worth reading his posts about the importance of the GPL in MySQL licensing and even goes on to tie the fate of MySQL to the free nature of the Internet. What I find facinating is that his argument is that the open source project requires a strong corporate master invested in making it competitive with closed source databases. Read the rest of this entry »

This is sad and simple. Ad networks sell ads, either page views or click throughs. The Ad network compensates partners that host ads on their sites. Those partners can include intellectual property thieves. The thief posts your intellectual property on their site, or on another site with which they are affiliated (or actually own themselves and just pretend to be a ‘visitor’).

Legitimate search engines go ahead and search sites that, had a human actually visited the site, they’d know immediately is a warez site. They index the stolen material.

Next, more thieves come along, do legitimate searches, then go to the pirate site after they’ve found what they are looking. They download the intellectual property, and they also view the ads. The site owners benefit from the click throughs and page views (however the ad network compensates) generated by the pirate activity. The search engine provider benefits because they are being used to track down the stolen property and get to show ads in the process.

The double losers are the advertisers as well as the intellectual property owners. Advertisers lose because their expectation is that their ads will be matched to sites that are not engaging in theft. Those who use pirate sites may not be the demographic they are looking for when they set up their ads.

The intellectual property owners lose in many ways. There is the actual theft of the intellectual property itself. Secondarily, because their stolen property is being indexed and receiving lots of hits through search engines, the appearance of stolen versions in search engines can make it harder to find the legitimate versions of the product.

If you think this is just a bunch of kids ripping off big music companies you aren’t taking into account the small art and design houses that also create music and designs for a living. Just check out all of the models listed on sites such as DAZ 3D, Content Paradise or Renderosity, created by singular artists; now search for individually named models.

Is there any news source that hasn’t weighed in on the Google Chrome OS, even though there is next to no information available? There are a few tantalizing clues already. Read the rest of this entry »

As president of Paradigma Software with its columnar database technology Valentina, I would like to think that the announced acquisition of Sun By Oracle is about the database market and a response to innovation in the field of databases. Indirectly, I think it is, but it isn’t about the recent acquisition of MySQL by Sun. More so, it is about Oracle’s big iron position in the computer industry and what it learned from the failed shopping trip by IBM. Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama’s inauguration speech finished a few minutes ago, and while I do not like to interject politics into my public writing, I would like to share a few thoughts on American unity, race and progress. President Obama’s message was entirely devoid of blame or rancor, either in the political sense of the last eight years or in the subtext of progress in race relations in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

As a consumer, I will not miss Circuit City as it closes its remaining 567 stores in the United States. But all software industry professionals should mourn its passing. Here’s how its closure impacts software industry professionals. Read the rest of this entry »

Mirye Software Publishing is moving to a new release format for Runtime Revolution, modeling it on a highly successful issue format. This method includes the standard updates to the base software, but also extended benefits to customers that are eligible for software updates. Our first release in this format is Issue 808: What to Do With Your Summer.

Benefits of Mirye Runtime Revolution Issue Format

The new release format offers the following benefits:

• Additional, Permanent Benefits. These are benefits that customers receive regardless of when they are announced. With this first issue, Studio and Enterprise customers receive Valentina for Revolution 3.1 ADK Advanced, the ultra fast database toolkit for Revolution.
• Limited, Timed Benefits. These benefits are only available if you download them within the limited time. With this first issue, Media, Studio and Enterprise customers receive the Business as Unusual Volume 1 collection of 20 royalty free soundtracks.
• News and Articles. With each release, there will be news, articles and tips offered to help enhance your use of Revolution.
• Special Offers. You can get special member offers for other, or third party products that will enhance your use of Revolution.

The Why Behind Mirye Runtime Revolution Format Change

Mirye Runtime Revolution is a professional tool for creating and deploying cross platform applications on all major operating systems: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In many respects, it overlaps and competes with the likes of Adobe Director, REAL Software REALbasic, MS Visual Basic, Java and even Adobe Flash or Microsoft’s .net framework.

Mirye Runtime Revolution overlaps with REALbasic, Java and .net framework in that it can deploy to multiple operating systems using mostly the same code base. But that simply describes features in the last step of a work flow pipeline – not the entire pipeline of a release.

Designers that have experience with Adobe Director, Flash or Microsoft’s new Expression more likely to recognize the pipeline, because these products also excel in aggregating combinations of audio, video and graphics assets. These are elements that are usually developed by someone else and upstream in the workflow pipeline.

Teams though can share more than just assets – but the knowledge of how to best exploit the use of those assets at each point in the work flow.

This brings us back to the format change and the question: Is Mirye Runtime Revolution only a deployment technology, or does it encompass the aggregated assets and knowledge? Even if you are a weekend developer and you wear all the hats of artist, layout designer, sound technician and coder, an additional benefit at any point in your work flow pipeline provides benefits to the entire project.

This brings us back to our new issues format. By providing ongoing knowledge and benefits in an magazine-like issue format – expanded beyond a software only update – a release can deliver benefits that are more timely, and benefit your entire work flow.