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The Internet Backlash
An AC wrote to say that "telepolis has an article telling you why the DMCA and the companies who pushed it forward are doomed to fail. It's nothing new but a good summary of the neverending copyright discussion." The author's summary is good but I disagree with the conclusion -- there's no reason to believe that some deus ex machina is suddenly going to save net users from a police state.
Why bother with Linux when there are already mature, stable OS's out there. FreeBSD is open source-that is business friendly-and out performs Linux in almost every way. Why are all these Linux fanatics spending time reinventing the wheel?
It has taken Linux 10 years to get to this point and it still isn't near FreeBSD. Imagine what could have been accomplished if all that effort were devoted to improving FreeBSD.
I suppose I'm just whistling into the wind here. The Linux mania never was about what makes sense. But the Linux express doesn't seem to be slowing down either, unless you count all those Linux based companies that are tanking. Linux is the only OS that doesn't come from MS that ever gets any press.
What will happen when all these programmers who have given away their best work, find that no one is willing to pay for their services? At least with the BSD style licence you have the option of giving it away or charging for it. GPL/GNU doesn't offer that choice.