Slashdot Mirror

Who runs egovos.org and what makes you think it's the government? According to whois, the registrant and administrative contact is Tony Stanco (don't know if that's really the same person).

How about we implement the Street Performer Protocol? There's already an expression of interest on FreeDevelopers.net. The hard part would be getting artists to sign up initially, but I may have a solution.

I saw an A&E Biography show about David Bowie recently that said: a) he has a 30-year history of seeing trends (albiet musical ones) and jumping in early, and b) that he has $900 million. Surely, money is no longer a driver for him... let's see if we can get him to help us usher in a new economic model.

True, megastars with megabucks (like Bowie) will probably be less likely to occurr the SPP, but I expect that there will be *FAR* more musicians that can make a living ($50k-$80k per year) under SPP than under RIAA.

Does anyone have any links for an SPP project that's been started? Does anyone want to start one?

correct link = FreeDevelopers.net

To juxtapose the Patent against:

The Declaration of Software Freedom

(read the whole thing!) of which a subpart is:

"Current Software Commercial Organizations ...
hide source code to keep developers divided, disenfranchised and
dependent; tie inferior products to dominant ones; defiantly violate and
avoid court orders; quash promising competitive start-ups; leverage
dominant products into other, unrelated businesses; carve up markets to
eliminate real competition; utilize predatory pricing practices to
foreclose competition; commoditize and objectify their customers by making
them captive; cause developers to constantly re-invent the wheel by hiding
the source code; exercise general thuggish behavior in business dealings;
compel weak competitors to destroy their own innovative products to
protect established profitable ones; fail to respond to customer requests
and needs in a timely fashion; exploit natural "choke-holds" in the
economy for their own advantages; manipulate and delay technological
progress to maintain supremacy; hide coding bugs thereby jeopardizing
stability and security; de-humanize software developers by considering
them as "inputs" or "assets"; stifle innovation; "embrace and extend" or
otherwise pollute open standards in order to break and appropriate them;
use exclusionary contract provisions to enforce censorship over disclosure
of bugs and defects; shut-off or block channels of distribution to
legitimate competitors; announce vaporware to foreclose adoption of real
competitive products; frustrate, taunt and antagonize governmental
officials protecting the public interest; truncate choices; create
confusion and frustration in users by selling inferior code; take the
innovations developed by others as their own; practice differential
pricing to punish those that oppose them; misinform and exploit users;
use undocumented features as an anti-competitive device; suppress the
open, efficient and free nature of the scientific method by keeping the
code secret; purposefully break the code of competitors so that there are
code inoperabilities across products; prohibit friends from sharing
software with friends; coerce their users to fore-go promising competitive
technologies; use overly restrictive and exclusionary contracts against
weaker competitors; and perform other anti-social, anti-competitive and
improper acts to establish, maintain and extend their software
monopolies." ....well does this mean the above needs modification of does it mean the
Patent, being a public accessiable document, can be turn into evidence
against MS, for which they cannot remove from public access?

Provide a secure and private system

Create scalable and reliable software

Offer a non-commercial, non-partisan voting alternative

Use the GPL to create an open system that Internet users will trust

Release a system that can be used to support the growth of effective democracy anywhere in the world Additionally, in support of our wider development community, the project aims to:-

• Advocate the free software paradigm
• Evangelise the use of technology to strengthen democracy within a holistic understanding of the current malaise i.e. Internet voting alone isn't going to solve turnout problems

I think the dot GNU folks at FreeDevelopers have the right idea... "clean room" implementation that doesn't involve MS in any way. Once MS has become involved, they have the right to cry "IP foul", because of their own involvement! I thought of this a few days after reading the original MS working with Ximian article, but by then it would have been lost in the noise.

Well, your fingers weave quick minarets; Speak in secret alphabets;

This post will probably just get lost in all the noise, but here we go anyway.

To me, this clash of the titans represents the modern day equivelant of Washington and friends telling the British to go stick an egg up their nose. Those original Americans (no offence meant to Native Americans) left an opressive government to start their own that made more sense for the common man. A direct analogy can be made between Microsoft in it's current form and the sovereignty in 18th century England. [ you will use our sotware vs. you will worship our god ]

This monopoly will be tackled someday. I believe with all my heart that if anyone can lead such a rebellion, it is Richard Stallman. Such a battle will inevitably crush some peoples fortunes, and create new fortunes. The GNU GPL ensures that no one entity in the Free Software future possess all power. This scares the bejesus out of Microsoft, and with good reason.

Sorry for the rant, but this is the reason I volunteer my time to work with the Free Software Foundation, and watch Free Developers with interest.

Maybe the FBI can get FreeDevelopers.net to build a solution people would find less offensive. It would be the ultimate peer review for carnivore.

What do you think about FreeDevelopers.net? It's in embryo, but I wonder when it will be feasible to carry this democracy idea to FreeDevelopers.net's extreme.