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I was paid by academics to enhance a web annotation enhancement for several open source projects. They were using the software for research and could pick and choose their browser, so they weren't interested in paying extra to make the enhancements work with IE. So that's what they got - I targeted standards compliance and ensured Firefox compatibility. Since the software is open source, many other users would have benefited from IE compatibility, but neither they nor I had the resources at the time to provide it (IE support in the initial release had increased development time by about a third). Safari, on the other hand, with some minor extra testing on the side, spontaneously worked one day when Apple implemented a missing feature (something I anticipated would happen at some point).

By the way, this work was supported by three different groups. For every one of them, IE support was far enough down their priority list that it didn't get done. Until now: following about 2 years without it, I emphasized the importance and it's in the latest release.

How many projects and features like this don't break through to wider visibility and use because of IE's failings? I bet it's more than you think.

1) I can't remember anyone being sued for non-commercial distribution of GPL-ed software, and it's safe to assume that anyone distributing it commercially is trying to distribute it as much as possible, since every distribution is profitable.

2) The FSF, at least, will gladly settle for the distribution of the source code (in the case of GPL2 --- at least, this is what Eben Moglen claims were RMS's instructions to him while he was counsel to the FSF). This isn't "many times the damages they actually perceive".

FSF and gpl-violations.org are co-operating closely. gpl-violations and FSF have handled some cases regarding busybox before and have handled them successfully (i.e., out-of-court settlements have been achieved).

And a settlement resulting in GPL compliance - that's what enforcing the GPL is all about.

As Eben Moglen, legal counsel to the FSF for many years, put it (in a keynote address in October 2006):

---
When I went to work for Richard Stallman in 1993, he said to me at the first instruction over enforcing the GPL, "I have a rule. You must never let a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance."

I thought about that for a moment and I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone conversation with a violator of the GPL with magic words: We don't want money. When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was, We don't want publicity.

The third thing I said was, We want compliance. We won't settle for anything less than compliance, and that's all we want.

Now I will show you how to make that ice in the wintertime. And so they gave me compliance.
---

http://www.geof.net/blog/2006/12/10/eben-moglen

You're right to compare music to software. The key characteristic of software is that it's infrastructure: when software becomes cheap and plentiful, we are able to use it for more things. Even if the software industry shrank in dollar terms, the overall benefit on the economy would be positive. But it won't shrink in dollar terms because software is infrastructure for more software: the more useful software we can have, the more useful software we can - and will - make.

Music is similar. It is used in movies, videogames, TV shows, YouTube videos. It's used at restaurants, clubs, schools, and so on. When music goes down in price, it makes these other activities more efficient, benefiting the economy. And, like software, new music is made of old music. It becomes easier to make more music. It is not obvious that the overall music industry will shrink.

Music has one other clear benefit. It is a social good. People use it to cope with stress, to relate to others, to communicate. They play music to learn, to engage their minds, to express themselves. When these uses are more accessible, we all benefit - economically, but even more importantly in other ways. It improves human well-being.

The digital economy isn't going to collapse because of an abundance of music any more than science will collapse because of an abundance of mathematics.

You can find a list of the main actors, plus contact information for members of Parliament and news organizations here (scroll down).

The most important person to contact is your MP. I've heard it's better to get him or her to forward your letter to the minister responsible (Jim Prentice) than it is to send it to Prentice directly. Doing both can't hurt. Paper mail and faxes are the best, though phone calls are good too. Don't forget to contact newspapers big and small. In all cases, be polite and to the point.

You can find your MP's contact information by typing in your postal code here.

If you need sample letters, check out the Facebook group's list. My non-technical explanation of why this is a terrible law is here. I'll quote it in a reply to this post.

The problem with IP is that it isn't scarce.

This is certainly one problem - and it's the one that causes real headaches for the recording industry and others trying to create artificial scarcity. But it isn't the only problem with the ownership of ideas. I'll mention two others.

First, in order to operate efficiently the market requires a free flow of information about quality, prices, etc. Thus assigning exclusive rights to ideas is in direct conflict with the needs of the market. For example, the practice in EULAs of forbidding the publication of software test results reduces market efficiency.

Second, and I believe more importantly, property rights over ideas require that those ideas be treated as discrete packages. Of course they're not: not only does all innovation and creativity build on and incorporate previous work and ideas, but the value and significance of ideas is further appropriated and added to by society. Thus the ownership of ideas transforms the ideas themselves, hinders the process by which further creation and innovation takes place (e.g. through the "tragedy of the anti-commons"), and depends on a fiction that ideas are independent. (See Owned Ideas are Different Ideas.)

Similar difficulties afflict environmental resources. When we turn land into property, we transform it by fencing it off and pretend that control over it is now independent of surrounding land. It is not: if I pollute my stretch of river, the effects will flow to others downstream. Furthermore, better management of the resource is hindered because even if I wish to improve the situation effectively I must coordinate with all other users of the water - each of whom has effective veto over participation, and in many cases an interest in not taking part. It is easy to describe a similar situation with patent ownership.

The market can be very effective for managing some kinds of resources (e.g. fungible commodities like wheat, pork bellies, and oil). But it has flaws and entails costs; in some cases it is tremendously inefficient compared to the alternatives.

Nobody has ever accidentally freed their code.

"We have never, in the history of free software, despite everything that has been said by lawyers and flaks and propagandists on the other side - we have never forced anybody to free any code."
http://www.geof.net/blog/2006/12/10/eben-moglen

If you want a non-proprietary format, I have transcribed Moglen's speech.

This (from my transcription) is what he means by social justice:

There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay.

His vision has no government or other enforcer. It is realized due to a restructuring of economic production around products based on software which is free. Here is how he describes past efforts to achieve social justice:

the greatest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. . . . We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to maintain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting.

An information economy based on free software, however, can be different:

We find ourselves now in a very different place. . . . It's a place where the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. . . . We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produced for private exclusive proprietary benefit. . . . a world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us, not because we coerced them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared. Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing.

If you want true separation, use XML for the data, and XSLT to transform it into HTML.

That's what I used to do too, until I read Zeldman. I loved it. One of the big disadvantages, however, is that you lose the semantics of HTML (such as they are). Those semantics are valuable - for search engines (clean HTML can make a big difference) and for other applications. There aren't a lot of data formats as well-understood and universal as HTML; that's worth taking advantage of. Remember, your HTML is likely to outlast whatever data source you're pulling your content from.

These days I depend on those semantics. I've been doing DOM work with Javascript to add dynamic annotation with margin notes and highlighting to web pages. I need to know the content model so I can determine where I can insert tags to add highlighting (<em> can go in <p> but not in <style>, for example). I locate highlights by counting words, so I need to know where words break. Block-level elements break words, while inline elements don't (so in your example you need a minimum of div, a, and span). I also collect other metadata, like the title and author of the annotated content, and so on. I do that by looking for elements in the document tagged with specific microformat classes.

What are the benefits? Well, if you look at my code, the output of my Javascript or my Atom feed, the information is all meaningful in a standard way. This can reduce or simplify glue code if you need to work with my data - and I think the universal experience with glue code is that although it seems simple and brainless, it gets heavier and heavier until it places serious limits on application complexity. Over time, I hope this kind of standardization can slowly lead to apps and libraries being easier to plug together. The standardization of HTML, and the shared meaning of some of its elements has already proved a huge win on the Web, messy, inconsistent, and broken as it is.

But I'm a geek of simple pleasures. Right now, I'm just thrilled that my transport format I picked - Atom (with embedded HTML) - is machine readable and shows up with sensible formatting in a generic feed reader. (I couldn't afford to use HTML if were a layout language, because then changing the look would break my machine parsing.) It's not rocket science - but that's kind of the point.

Or, you could convert all those Word docs to Writer and use Ant like this guy did to xsl transform the xml into a website. I discovered this website because I'm starting to write a CMS in PHP5 which automatically adds content from OO.o documents.

Alternately, you could use Writer2Latex to generate XHTML 1.0 strict for yourself.

Those two methods seem the easiest.

I've spent the past few weeks porting code from Firefox to IE. It's been hell. I need to find the location of user-selected text in the document: Firefox supports (mostly) the W3C Range object, which provides a DOM node and offset, but IE's proprietary implementation provides only the pixel location (!). I tried using a trick with copy & paste to locate it, but when IE provides the content of the selection it tries to be clever: it adds tags. It also adds tags when you paste. So if you copy the selection and paste it right back where it came from, you'll get a broken document!

Both browsers also corrupt whitespace. The Firefox DOM collapses multiple spaces in a text node to a single space (sort-of - they're also still there, which is very puzzling). The IE implementation goes one step further and collapses spaces across element boundaries. So, for example, a leading space following a start or end tag may vanish (or not, depending on whether it preceded by whitespace). It also inserts newlines following tags for block elements. Oh yeah, and it capitalizes tag names and drops some close tags while it's at.

One more appalling bug: the DOM normalize function in IE crashes the browser. But only sometimes.

I've solved my problems, but it has taken longer than it did to get the whole system working in Firefox in the first place. (It's a web annotation system that allows for highlighting and margin comments for arbitrary HTML - I need to find the selection when the user creates a highlight.) The world would be a better place if IE crawled off and died.

I can only hope that makes a difference. My personal site already looks better in Firefox; I'm considering hiding entire menus from users of IE - they'll get the core functionality, but not the full experience.

I'm also working on a web annotation engine. I have no desire to lock out IE users, but this requires the W3C text range standard - which IE, needless to say, does not support (plus I'm on a Mac, so IE isn't even an option). So it's Firefox only for now. With the current excitement around so-called AJAX applications, like Google Maps, I may not be the only one picking the browser with the standards support.