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Stallman started the GPL with the idea that ALL SOFTWARE should be free, and the idea that all non-free software is evil.

Its only after something is obviously successful and widespread that such true believers become more of a liability than a benefit (see Capitalism (a good thing with obvious success) and Any Rynd (a true believer who hurts capitalism *because*of* the passion of her beliefs)). But RMS, while a brilliant person, is not the FOSS movement, he's merely a large part of it. My post was about the flaws of the anti-FOSS arguments, not RMS' own flaws of belief, conviction, and dedication.

Interesting point about viruses being a type of parasite. I'm not a biologist myself (any more than high school Biology), but I can see why you would say that. I was referring to larger, multi-celled parasites in my example.

However, you didn't take issue with my assertion that a biological virus is barely alive, and it essentially a bunch of specific DNA in a container. This is much like a computer virus and the biggest distinction between a virus and a worm (though at some point, this analogy becomes stretched). A worm is a piece of malware that is a complete program that is run by the startup scripts (or registry keys) of a system and gernally spreads from one machine to another across a network. A virus is a piece of malware that "infects" other programs and gets *them* to run the virus code whenever the program is run. A computer virus cannot run by itself and generally spreads from program to program (possibly over a network). Of course, a specific piece of malware could exhibit qualities of both (such as a worm that expoits a hole in a server is somewhat like a virus), so the lines can become blurry.

Email "worms" come in two variants -- worms and trojans. Email worms exploit a flaw in the mail handler or mail reader to propogate without user interaction (your brain-dead mail client example). They could be considered true viruses if the exploit was run entirely inside the process space of the exploited program (and didn't download the actual worm code and run that). The second type (MyDoom fits into this category) is a trojan. Much like the Trojan Horse, a trojan program is a program that looks like it should be one thing, but is in fact another. The user is the exploit in this case, and should possibly be beaten with a LART. Trojans are by far the easiest to write, and there is no real defense at the system level against them, since the system must assume that when the user says to run this program, they really want to run this program (though poor interfaces may make it easier to run a trojan).

To get to your question, worms and especially trojans are more independent in computer terms because they execute as separate processes. You say that yourself when you state that the computer virus is only active when you run the infected program. A worm or trojan is active from when it is started. It may use an exploit to get to that point, but that is the crucial difference. This also means that the original program isn't "infected", and thus won't run the malware code if you run the program later (i.e., Outlook won't run MyDoom every time you start Outlook).

HTH!

Please back up your outrageous claims with some real data. I, for one, upgraded to XP only because the IT folks told me I had to. I'm not sure why they decided everyone needed to upgrade, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't because they wanted everyone to have more eye candy. And when I did finally upgrade, I immediately turned off all the silly PreSkool fluff and made it look like Win95/2000 again.

And besides, even if you're right, Linux is in a different place in the "hierarchy of needs" than Windows right now. Windows users haven't had to worry about lack of useful documentation or easy configuration for years, so they can afford to obsess over eye candy more than poor Linux users who have enough trouble just getting their printing to work

More effort should be going to providing more usable and better documented GUIs, not making more eye candy. But this is open source, and people work on what they want to work on. And people don't want to work on making things usable. There's no fun in that. You can't post to Slashdot saying "hey! i was just up programming all night -- check out my new highly usable CUPS setup wizard". No one will care, because the folks reading Slashdot all got CUPS working ages ago. What do they care if it's now easier to do? But you can post "check out these super new transparent menus!" and all the 14-year olds will gasp in awe and amazement and call you a h4X0r 60D.

RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way. If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself (of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)

Spam and worms are not the problem IMHO, they are trivial to handle. Trolls you have anywhere, and they can be dealt with easily as well. The benefits of a fair mode of multi-way communication far outweight these annoyances. It is a general trend to view web-based services as inherently better than other, often older, internet services which is common at least since the start of september - take web forums vs. usenet for example, the web stuff tends to have tons of useless gizmos but be less usable for the actual task, communication. And it shows in the quality of the discussions taking place.

It is a little like the difference between the model of democracy where issues were discussed on the market place of Athens between all citizens (not that many inhabitants of Athens counted as citizens, but that is a different issue...) and the one where the citizens get to vote for a representative every few years. RSS is the TV of online communication.

I did say what's bad about what Stallman does, and since it's comparable to what SCO is doing, I draw the comparison. Yes, there are differences, but there are similarities, and those similarities should be hauled into the light and discussed.

Ignoring RMS's demand has consequences: he will refuse to speak with any journalist that doesn't agree up front to his demand, for example. Yes, it's not in the same league as suing them, but there are consequences just the same. This makes it a bona fide demand.

You are free to consider me a troll, but I am not one by the Jargon File definiition, and so will not agree with you. I will, however, defend to the death your right to say it.

Funny, then, that I was just reading this article on a placebo switch that inexplicably worked!

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Better yet, let's open up your browser and load:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

..and actually READ THE ARTICLE.

~dlb

And to bring us swerving back to the point, while I think there are some problems with the article, this piece does a pretty good job of illustrating what I'm talking about.

> You mean a bunch of volunteers didn't always
> think about the (l)users and created a bad UI?
> Wow, none of us knew that!


And the best part of it is that ESR is as guilty as sin himself. Want to see a really crappy user interface. Ladies and gentlemen I give you:

fetchmail

Tip: dump it and use getmail

Uhm, I guess you've never heard of ESR before. When he talks about the open source community as, "We," he really means "we." He is actually doing the work.

ESR is part of the community. He's not some teenager whining that the software doesn't work - he's a respected figure pointing out a problem in hopes that it will be recognized and fixed.

Search the Fine Web in other words. (Many crude people will substitute other words for fine) This has been covered on ask slashdot before. There are other blind people out there, and they have got around various problems.

Check out How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and follow the instructions. Until you prove you have done some legwork yourself I don't see why I should care. Oh, and once you have done the leg work you questions can actually be of interest and perhaps help us improve. IE, if you install and watch your dad using some accessability thing you can tell us what doesn't work so we can fix it. Or once you have done the obvious things that your work revealed you can tell us what you have done (so we don't go over that ground), and ask about situations that are not covered.

Technically, all slashdottings are instances of a flash mob (or flash crowd).

flash crowd
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story Flash Crowd predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect). It has been pointed out that the effect was anticipated years earlier in Alfred Bester's 1956 The Stars My Destination.

Source: The Jargon File: flash crowd

In this case, /.ers are a flash mob and a swarm of Species 8472

At least the BBC had the decency to call them malicious hackers.

You mean there's another kind?

At least the BBC had the decency to call them malicious hackers.

You mean there's another kind?

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

Wrong kind of magic smoke.

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

Here's the story from the Jargon File (under "casting the runes"): "A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the field circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again immediately upon the replacement."

...you linked to this: http://http//www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/PEBKA C.html

which in my book ain't a valid url, and thus you have proved that in your case PEBKAC

Excellent! Now they just need to develop a chip that protects against id10t and PEBCAK problems.

[The Internet] was designed to withstand nuclear war

Unfortunately, that's a myth. (And it wouldn't survive an all-out one today)

If what you're abbreviating isn't obvious from the abbreviation, and it isn't a standard abbreviation that has already existed for many years, you shouldn't use it.

It is, it is, and it has.

It's now known as Yahoo.





Ha ha, only serious.

Grew up and realised that:

most science fiction sucked

Yes, of course.

May I refer you to Sturgeon's Revelation.

Details of Quake reverse-engineering can be found here. But I'm not so sure obfuscation would have helped in this case. It seems like Quake's design just put too much information in the hands of the client systems; it might have taken a day or two extra to decode, but the question is, why was such data allowed to be controlled by the client in the first place?

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

I don't know ESR the man, but I respect him as an engineer (for lack of better word). And for that matter, I didn't find his Open Letter all that inflammatory--he makes a case for Sun to open Java with only a minimum of drama (the bit about RedHat share piece). As for his position as a leader, the fact that Sun responded suggests he possesses some influence.

Who knew those legal types could produce poetry?
The Legal brief is actually a very fun read.
Plus, you got to give some kudos for a guy that uses the term bogosity.

Wasn't Raymond the guy who decided what the hacker logo should be? I'm still waiting for the ThinkGeek t-shirts...

If you go to RMS's personal webpage you'll see quite a few opinions that he regards as orthogonal to GNU. Apart from that page, I've never heard about RMS's involvement with this stuff beyond a few jokes. RMS promotes GNU, but not the rest of himself.

ESR really does promote himself, not just the OSI. Everyone's heard about his guns, his sex life, his politics.... He considers it valueable for everyone to know about him. This is different.

In ESR's defence, he claims to have "developed an entire theory of media manipulation, which I then proceeded to apply. The theory centers around the use of what I call ``attractive dissonance'' to fan an itchy curiosity about the evangelist, and then exploiting that itch for all it's worth in promoting the ideas." In other words, he needs to be a primadonna to get the mainstream media to notice him, then he can tell them about what matters.

Eric is more than a primadonna, he's also a gun nut.

This is Eric :

Photo

He admits he's a gun nut. Please read what Eric says about his guns; especially the second sentence:

Rig

This man is a nutter, plain and simple. I guess his previous employers understood he was a loose cannon - that's why they gave him the push after his stupid "SUE ME RIAA" stunts.

I never understood what gave Eric the supposed right to stand up as an "Open Source Leader" in the first place.

This is not the first time that Eric has shot his mouth off, and it won't be the last. The only problem is that some people seem to take him seriously...

Eric is more than a primadonna, he's also a gun nut.

This is Eric :

Photo

He admits he's a gun nut. Please read what Eric says about his guns; especially the second sentence:

Rig

This man is a nutter, plain and simple. I guess his previous employers understood he was a loose cannon - that's why they gave him the push after his stupid "SUE ME RIAA" stunts.

I never understood what gave Eric the supposed right to stand up as an "Open Source Leader" in the first place.

This is not the first time that Eric has shot his mouth off, and it won't be the last. The only problem is that some people seem to take him seriously...

Fetchmail is the application that ESR is most well known for, but it's not the one that he has done the most work on. He simply used it as an example in CatB. Pick up any book on programming and you are likely to find examples. These examples are generally trivial, but the book wouldn't be the same without them. CatB was instrumental in explaining how Linux had become such a useful tool in so little time, fetchmail was simply a contrived example to prove the point.

As for the rest of ESR's hacker credentials. Well the initials ESR show up quite a bit in the software that I tend to use. Huge portions of Emacs were done by him (at one point he was the single largest contributor besides RMS, I don't know if that is true today), ESR also has credits in Python, the Linux kernel and piles of other projects that lots of people use everyday (like Nethack or bogofilter).

Here's a more comprehensive list of the ESR's work. Don't forget to click on the "projects" link for work that isn't classified as "software (termcap/terminfo database maintainer, for example, or the fact that he wrote the former Sunsite's Trove software). If you can honestly read that list of software and still come to the conclusion that ESR has done "nothing," then I would love to see your long list of Free Software accomplishments.

Don't get me wrong. I don't always agree with ESR, but I at least know enough about him to know better than to dismiss his credentials as a hacker.

Besides, on this ESR is right. Sun's Java desktop is indicative of the staggering amount of truly good stuff that is coming out of the Free Software community. Free Software hackers want to support Sun in its fight against Microsoft, but they aren't interested in using Sun's non-free Java language to do it. The funny part of Sun's Java Desktop is that there is essentially no Java involved. In fact, some of the same folks that wrote the Gnome desktop that comprises the bulk of Sun's Java desktop are right now working feverishly to finish off the first version of Mono, a .NET-alike for Linux. If Java was Free Software there would be a lot less incentive to do this, but Java isn't Free, and so the Mono hackers are cooking up a set of tools that can take its place for Free Software hackers.

What's worse, it's not like Sun can honestly say that they don't want to Free Java for commercial reasons. Java is currently available as a free download. Sun doesn't really make any money from Java.

I realise you're being humorous, but Phipps does make excellent points. Yes, I'll defend the clean-cut suit against the moustachioed idiotarian.

First off, the only reason SCO are suing IBM isn't because of the relevance of their contribution to the OSS community, but simply because they're bigger and they're a household name -> more publicity.

But Phipps is right : IBM's long term strategy is basically to switch from "big iron" to becoming an IT consulting firm. Linux is a big part of that strategy, so they're advocating Open Source all over the place to get support from the community. But fundamentally they still do behave like an old-fashioned company, no matter how much you and I may love their ads.

But more to the point, I wholeheartedly agree with Phipps. ESR/RMS et al have pretty much become OSS ideologues who see everything as black and white. Open Source means Utopia, absolute freedom, great code and happiness for the people. Closed Source means totalitarian control by blood-sucking suits, kludgy software and the death of dozens of cute, cute kitties.

This is why he proclaims that Sun must choose between ubiquity or control for Java -- when they already made that choice! No other development platform became so predominant so quickly! And why was that? Because the runtime was always free and good tools were cheap or free. Sure, they were free as in beer, not "free as in speech", but Sun did give up control, and now they did get the ubiquity in return. But ESR can't see that distinction, that blurry area of grey, because all is black and white for the President of the Open Source Initiative.

Every company that wants to be successful selling a platform must make the obcious-yet-ballsy choice to give up control for the sake of ubiquity, and Sun have made that choice, and it has profited everyone -- them, the developers and the users. ESR just can't understand that there can be freedom and beauty outside of the Brave New Open Source World. I recognize his great skills as a programmer, writer and thinker, but his ideological tendancies just get the better of him and make him spin out of control into ideological rants that don't make sense in the real world.

Let me just finish by throwing something he wrote in the Jargon File back at him, on the Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality : "Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the Right Thing, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise."

I realise you're being humorous, but Phipps does make excellent points. Yes, I'll defend the clean-cut suit against the moustachioed idiotarian.

First off, the only reason SCO are suing IBM isn't because of the relevance of their contribution to the OSS community, but simply because they're bigger and they're a household name -> more publicity.

But Phipps is right : IBM's long term strategy is basically to switch from "big iron" to becoming an IT consulting firm. Linux is a big part of that strategy, so they're advocating Open Source all over the place to get support from the community. But fundamentally they still do behave like an old-fashioned company, no matter how much you and I may love their ads.

But more to the point, I wholeheartedly agree with Phipps. ESR/RMS et al have pretty much become OSS ideologues who see everything as black and white. Open Source means Utopia, absolute freedom, great code and happiness for the people. Closed Source means totalitarian control by blood-sucking suits, kludgy software and the death of dozens of cute, cute kitties.

This is why he proclaims that Sun must choose between ubiquity or control for Java -- when they already made that choice! No other development platform became so predominant so quickly! And why was that? Because the runtime was always free and good tools were cheap or free. Sure, they were free as in beer, not "free as in speech", but Sun did give up control, and now they did get the ubiquity in return. But ESR can't see that distinction, that blurry area of grey, because all is black and white for the President of the Open Source Initiative.

Every company that wants to be successful selling a platform must make the obcious-yet-ballsy choice to give up control for the sake of ubiquity, and Sun have made that choice, and it has profited everyone -- them, the developers and the users. ESR just can't understand that there can be freedom and beauty outside of the Brave New Open Source World. I recognize his great skills as a programmer, writer and thinker, but his ideological tendancies just get the better of him and make him spin out of control into ideological rants that don't make sense in the real world.

Let me just finish by throwing something he wrote in the Jargon File back at him, on the Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality : "Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the Right Thing, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise."

ESR did a cupl and corc interpreter too. Who cares? I do, many of the earlier languages like these have been lost (eg. bruin, joss) because of bit rot (Ok, so flame away).

I'll be betting on ESR and his martial arts vs your typing ability.

ESR is the person more or less responsible for the trademarking of the term "Open Source" and has been, in a confusing manner, something of a steward for a movement specifically trying to squat on that name and present itself as a contrast to "Free Software". The fact that Mr. Phipps capitalizes "Open Source" here implies that he is not referring to the open source community, but referring specifically to OSI, ESR, and ESR's followers in the "Open Source" movement.

ESR is of course merely a leader in "Open Source"/OSI, and does not speak for all. However the whole issue is messy enough it is difficult to blame Mr. Phipps for being confused.

I don't disagree, but I can't help but think of the Jargon File entry for field circus:

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too.

Are you trying to say those who print money at home with computers aren't "hackers"?

The story may as well have said "an attempt to hinder readheads who try to print money at home.

Yeah, a hacker could try to print money at home, just like a readhead could try to print money at home. It's it's silly to suggest that anyone who tries to print money at home is a hacker or a readhead.

-

Unlike RMS, ESR doesn't seem to differentiate between opinions and facts. He doesn't seem rational.

If you happen to agree with his opinions, fine, but seriously, consider how things like this read to people who don't.

(I wrote this yesterday and tried to post it as an article on /., but apparently there are so many more interesting and better written articles posted on the front page here that mine did not meet the qualifications to be posted. Or maybe it is just so off-topic and does not represent any real new ideas or news for nerds, you know, no stuff that matters is expressed in it, so don't read it.)

I am sure that all of you would agree that the free software community has been facing some bad publicity since the entire SCO incident started about a year ago. I am also sure that when the SCO goes away another publicity stunt will be performed by some other corporation or an entity that could potentially cause more trouble. An earlier article on /. reminded us that there are other dangers that could stall the development of free software projects - an illegally distributed application source base can become the next battlefield for the free source community. Whether this source code could be distributed with an intent to contaminate is not the issue, the issue is that it is important to convey the message to the public that this community does not want to contaminate its source code with proprietary software. We know that the Linux kernel for example is maintained by a group of people who would never want to be faced with the problem of proving in the court of law that their creation is really their own code. What about other projects? How many lawsuits are comming towards this community? I do not know that. But I understand that some preventative measures should be taken, some measures that will clearly display that this community wants free software and free software will not be stolen from other source bases.

How can this be ensured and how can it be easily shown in a court of law that this community takes copyright issues seriously? One way that I see is to set up a server that runs the comparator by ESR against any new submission to any open source project against any code released either by mistake on with malice by a closed source vendor.

This will help to identify copyright problems before they arise. Of course to have a proprietary source code base on this server would probably be illegal in itself but it is unnecessary to have the proprietary source code, all that is needed is a set of hash-keys that identify that source code.

How could this work? A copyright protection server (CPS) would have hash-keys supplied by different vendors of software that falls into various categories and the free software projects are also divided into these categories. Let's say there is a free software project that deals with image manipulations. The CPS would run a hash-key generator on the new code submission and then would compare the generated keys with the keys supplied by Adobe or other companies specialized in image manipulations. Of-course the closed source companies would have to run the hash-key generators on their code and supply their keys, and someone has to tell them to do that, but if it is done right then the following would happen:

1. The Free Software community would have better protection from inappropriate code submissions.

2. This can be publicised and shown that the Free Software community takes their work seriously and goes to the great length, much more than any corporations to make sure that their code is Free and free of inappropriate submissions.

3. In a court of law this can be very useful, it shows good faith on the part of the free software community.

4. This would make it easier to also figure out whether the closed source vendors are misusing GPLed software :)

5. This makes a nice project that can be commercialized (with all the lates IP propaganda and lawsuites.)

6. This hopefully will prevent many possible infringement claims.

Well, this is just a thought, but I think this kind of verification will become part of reality at some point in the future, given more lawsuites.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, ideas?

(I wrote this yesterday and tried to post it as an article on /., but apparently there are so many more interesting and better written articles posted on the front page here that mine did not meet the qualifications to be posted. Or maybe it is just so off-topic and does not represent any real new ideas or news for nerds, you know, no stuff that matters is expressed in it, so don't read it.) I am sure that all of you would agree that the free software community has been facing some bad publicity since the entire SCO incident started about a year ago. I am also sure that when the SCO goes away another publicity stunt will be performed by some other corporation or an entity that could potentially cause more trouble. An earlier article on /. reminded us that there are other dangers that could stall the development of free software projects - an illegally distributed application source base can become the next battlefield for the free source community. Whether this source code could be distributed with an intent to contaminate is not the issue, the issue is that it is important to convey the message to the public that this community does not want to contaminate its source code with proprietary software. We know that the Linux kernel for example is maintained by a group of people who would never want to be faced with the problem of proving in the court of law that their creation is really their own code. What about other projects? How many lawsuits are comming towards this community? I do not know that. But I understand that some preventative measures should be taken, some measures that will clearly display that this community wants free software and free software will not be stolen from other source bases.

How can this be ensured and how can it be easily shown in a court of law that this community takes copyright issues seriously? One way that I see is to set up a server that runs the comparator by ESR against any new submission to any open source project against any code released either by mistake on with malice by a closed source vendor.

This will help to identify copyright problems before they arise. Of course to have a proprietary source code base on this server would probably be illegal in itself but it is unnecessary to have the proprietary source code, all that is needed is a set of hash-keys that identify that source code.

How could this work? A copyright protection server (CPS) would have hash-keys supplied by different vendors of software that falls into various categories and the free software projects are also divided into these categories. Let's say there is a free software project that deals with image manipulations. The CPS would run a hash-key generator on the new code submission and then would compare the generated keys with the keys supplied by Adobe or other companies specialized in image manipulations. Of-course the closed source companies would have to run the hash-key generators on their code and supply their keys, and someone has to tell them to do that, but if it is done right then the following would happen:

1. The Free Software community would have better protection from inappropriate code submissions.
2. This can be publicised and shown that the Free Software community takes their work seriously and goes to the great length, much more than any corporations to make sure that their code is Free and free of inappropriate submissions.
3. In a court of law this can be very useful, it shows good faith on the part of the free software community.
4. This would make it easier to also figure out whether the closed source vendors are misusing GPLed software :)
5. This makes a nice project that can be commercialized (with all the lates IP propaganda and lawsuites.)
6. This hopefully will prevent many possible infringement claims.

Well, this is just a thought, but I think this kind of verification will become part of reality at some point in the future, given more lawsuites.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, ideas?

Ok, so what to do? Well, here is the plan:

Set up a server that runs the comparator by ESR against any new submission to any open source project against any code released either by mistake on with malice by a closed source vendor.

This will help to identify copyright problems before they arise.

Um, perhaps you'd think about that second letter of ASCII for a second?
For all I care, IBM can HAVE EBCDIC. When a-z are non contiguous... shudder. /me misses it not.

I myself would never look at the source code for fear of being tainted, however it would be extremely interesting if someone were to run ESR's comparator on the source tree and post the results to the internet as well. If done right, any results could be used as evidence against Microsoft if GPL'd code were found to be present in their products.

or "get a boxen"

Please use this term correctly or, even, better, don't use this horribly overplayed geekism at all.

You have attempted to invoke Goldwin's law delibrately. The thread will not end. <Evil Laugh>

c:\>spell -b slashdot_submission.txt
Bad command or file name.

apart from spellchecking i forgot to paste this link Welcome to The HTML Hell Page.
for what you should not do ;)

(Wow, great post.)

One of the good parts of Eric Rayrnond's new book The Art of Unix Programming is the discussion of protocol design, and in particular the foolishness of trying to squeeze out every single bit.

In particular, he points out that it's often better to just use a simple encoding, and then run a compressor like LZO or GZIP over the whole thing. This lets you design a simple protocol, and you get the benefit of compression over the whole thing rather than just the metadata. Complexity, of course, is the enemy of security. It is both simpler and gives better compression; and people with more network than CPU can turn compression off or down.

Keith Packard has some similar papers looking at X11, where he concludes that clever tricks like Low Bandwidth X really don't help all that much compared to just using SSH compression.

Latency is a different and harder problem, but one that's often better solved in the high-level design than by bit-banging.