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Halloween X Author Mike Anderer Speaks Out
cdlu writes "Mike Anderer, author of the now-famous Halloween X document, has spoken out at NewsForge. Among the highlights is a prediction by Mr. Anderer that Microsoft has many more disruptive lawsuits planned up their sleeves."
Hmmm...maybe it'll go back to the way it was before people could get rich on software. That's what RMS was originally after, all those years ago
C&D's don't mean anything - they're just scare tactics. The thing about the GPL which I suspect he's alluding to, is that you are allowed to redistributed copyrighted works if you stick to the terms. However, the act of redistributing GPL'd works could be argued as also breaching traditional copyright, if a previous contributor has included someone else's copyrighted work. Whether it would stick I don't know, but that's the obvious end-user attack - if they are redistributing the code in question. It doesn't affect Joe User who downloads Mandrake and runs it on his box at home.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
I get the feeling this man has a bitter taste in his mouth writing this. It's as if he's declaring to all the world: 'I did all this!', so that he can tell himself that he can stand by his actions, and convince himself that he's not feeling guilty.
It's the voice of hypocrisy.
Although I have more sympathy for this kind of hidden guilt, than for the greed and stupidity I have heard in many voices lately.
I just know I'm going to get every partisan in the place foamed up by saying this, but the Clinton DOJ was actually pursuing the MS antitrust case, and the Bush people dropped it like a hot rock.
.
To be fair, Bush campaigned openly that he'd instruct the DOJ to seek a settlement. And, to be fair as well, there is a high likelihood that the anti-trust action was brought as a political move, rather than one based on law. That's not to discount the legal merits of the case, but that's the reason the case was brought. Most of the evidence supports the idea that Sun, AOL/Netscape, and other hi-techs with *vast* lobbying efforts in Washington DC consistently lobbied for a harsh line against MS. Both Clinton and Al Gore personally appealed to higher ups during the Clinton re-election for campaign donations - and both were refused. Until this point, MS had no widescale lobbying program, no nationwide political agenda, and no significant history of donations or involvement in DC politics. Not long after the Clinton re-election did the real meat of the DOJ attack start. The strongest likelihood is that MS was being punished for being politically neutral. The result? Now MS learned that lesson and in less than 10 years has the most well-funded lobbying operation in history. Go figure.
IANAL but I know the industry, and so do most of you. Let's be realistic. MS basically got off with a "please don't do it again, OK?"
There is another aspect you might have missed. The DOJ was going for a breakup. Ruling after ruling the DOJ was rebuffed on this issue, at one point the judge saying basically "it ain't ever going to happen with this case". At that point, the DOJ "lost" in terms of public perception. They lost the case by not winning their chosen punishment. Any penalty tha the point was moot - as we know, MS can work around any wording no matter how clever.
The only way in the long run to stop this "compete with anything but quality and price" attitude is for the government to finally enforce the antitrust law. And that may only happen if you all vote
The problem is now, there isn't a reasonable tech saavy person around who can argue that Windows still has a monopoly hold on any market. Linux is an equal or superior product in every possible way, without exception, without question, period. There is nothing MS can do to stop its growth, and its plain as fact for everyone to see. MS is fighting a holding battle as of now. And any future action would require first that MS be proven a current monopoly. Between Linux, MacOSX, and misc. products, it is MOST highly unlikely that MS would face any significant challenge.
Did anyone else read this interview and get the feeling that Anderer spoke a lot but didn't really say anything specific or all that relevant?
Yes. My favorite is:
"I helped build the channels for most of the products that corporate America is currently using and some they will be using soon."
So he builds "channels". To quote Benjy mouse "Sounds very significant without actually tying you down to meaning anything."
The real Ralph Yarro posts as Anonymous Coward. Anyone else is an impostor.
- I have filed more patents and owned/managed more businesses than you can think of. This deal was a microscopic, ultimately forgettable fraction of my business.
- I have nothing to say about the money Microsoft funneled to SCO (my excuse is that they won't let me).
- Everybody licenses Unix and they've been doing so for years. SCO as a licensor is only executing a rational business decision based on current market trends. Microsoft bought SCO licenses for SFU just like everybody else has been doing for years, there's nothing wrong with it.
- Microsoft is actually cooperating with you Linux guys with their SFU. They're good guys!
- The GPL makes IP matters confusing, and we have to leave it to the big companies like Sun and SCO to figure it out for the rest of us. They might even be kind enough to give it all away for free!
- Red Hat is still a bunch of small boys. Do you really think this johnny-just-come company with a few hundred million in the bank can actually indemnify its customers from the devastating effects of a settlement? They will be obliterated in no time! Better leave it to the big guys (Sun, MS, SCO...).
- We used to have all this crap figured out with patents and cross-licensing and stuff. You GPL people came around and messed up the whole thing, and now we're trying to clean up your mess. Stop making noise and let's clean this whole thing up for you.
- Why is everyone picking on me? I've done a lot of good stuff, and nobody says anything about that!
[Wow. I have to give this guy an award for managing to say so little in so many words.]
Am I a hipster-doofus?
You are right but I don't see how this has anything to do with the GPL. It applies to every software distributor out there.
The argument is always that the GPL specifically transfers some liability that other licenses don't. By your argument, Somebody can sue IBM for code it got from Computer Associates.
How does the GPL transfer liability. Liability != Waranty.
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
since he can spew up this load of BS without actually reaching a substantial point even once.
Buy all your crazy japanese videogames from
Up until the mid 90s, Microsoft hadn't initiated a single lawsuit against anybody. If memory serves, the first lawsuit involved one of the larger distributors of bogus Microsoft software, so even that was fairly benign. This is not a litigation-happy company.
That said, they have started to wrap some pretty evil licenses around all technical information disseminated about Windows, its SDKs and technical papers. Furthermore, they're starting to layer gratuitous DRM over the new MS Office file formats even where it doesn't make sense, leaving room to invoke the DMCA when people make Office file format importers/exporters.
MS salespeople have started to tell shops migrating to Linux that there would be "legal issues" preventing Linux from interoperating with future versions of Windows. There may well be a sea change in Microsoft's tactics ahead, or the salesmen may be talking through their hats. Either way, MS is starting to build up an arsenal of twisted legal manipulation every bit as formidable as IBM's patent arsenal.
Linux is an equal or superior product in every possible way, without exception
Even with respect to driver support for more recent desktop peripherals? My scanner didn't come with a SANE driver on its CD, and there exists no such driver in SANE CVS either.
No. He's clearly saying that he believes MS has 50 or more lawsuits that it will back, directly or indirectly, in an attempt to discredit or slow the adoption of FOSS. It doesn't matter if the cases have merit. Most experts see little merit in SCO's case but the FUD IS affecting FOSS. It's costing FOSS companies money to defend against it, and it's making some ITO's pause and at least think about the wisdom of switching to FOSS. That's all MS wants, and it doesn't need a lot of merit in the cases; just lots of sound and fury.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I helped build the channels for most of the products that corporate America is currently using and some they will be using soon. In several cases, I am finally finding or developing ways to solve problems I have been working on for the last 20 years. The only way I can hide is to work so hard that it becomes close to impossible to track all the companies I have owned, bought, sold, rolled up, or sat on the board of. If you include the ones where I helped entrepreneurs and companies through tough times, or sat on non-profit boards, the list would be even tougher to follow.
Modest lad, isn't he? I'm always suspicious about people who feel the need to have such a self-serving description...as there's usually snake oil to follow.
this sentence reveals the author's bias:
Nobody wants to be the ultimate guarantor for software that was free (or close to it).
that's free as in beer, not speech--why is this so hard for $uit$ to understand?
although, given the state of the union, we may be coming to this:
Nobody wants to be the ultimate guarantor for speech that was free (or close to it).;>
really Clinton trashed the economy? and I thought I heard something about the budget being balenced...I even heard some talk of a surplus... I do admit that the DMCA signing was bad but Bush IMO has done very little good for his 4 years so I say OUT.
FWIW, clinton rode the dot-com bubble, during which there were heavy spending and investments, and the economy was moving right along. Its no surprise that there would be a surplus in this case. However, the economy began to drop just as the dot-com bubble burst. The dot-com bubble in itself left several unemployed when it popped, and it didn't help when those people had no money to spend into the economy, resulting in more jobs being lost. Bush happened to come into office just after the crash, so by causality alone, everybody blames the bad economy on Bush taking office.
In case you didn't notice, clinton drafted several things that did pose a threat to our economy, and we are just now feeling the effects of. Want a good example? Try NAFTA.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Eventhough the "responce" of this guy reads like his resume in most parts, the one thing I did pick up on, is how he relates the GPL back to the PublicDomain just as MicroSoft (I blieve) and SCO.
This got me thinking on why these companies would view the GPL this way, when their are obvious and huge differences. However, to the enduser, for example my parents, it is essentially the same as the public domain - for this reason; they will NEVER know who Linux Torvaldi is, or let alone that he is respnsible for bringing them what they rely on - both comercially and privately..
The essence of the GPL is to provdide a protected way to share knowledge and ideas, and to encourage such a freedom. At the intellectual level, this is the best thing to come along since boxed bread. However, at the business level there is no inherent value of the GPL simply because of the fact that the end user(s) of the resulting products, may very well never know who authored the said product and consequently there could conceivably never be any return on the hard work.
Take the revised XFree86 license that essentially just expects acknowledgement of their hard work.
The big difference between XFree and IBM/Novell/Redhat/etc.. is that the later would conceivably see a return from their efforts with supporting the entire system that they help build, while XFree would never see such a return because they only help build it and to the enduser they are never acknowledged.
Perhaps what the open source community needs to consider is a way to acknowledge the given author(s) if so required - for example in the configuration the X server, acknowledgement of XFree86 and the comercial video driver manufacturer (NVidia/ATI/etc..) could be linked back to their respective sites or something.
Without this acknowledgement, the open source community is essentially alienating the software business world (the community itself will figure out how to support the given product and likewise make any business efforts moot to a certain extent), and these tif's and battles with companies such as SCO and Microsoft are going to be inevitable.
The open source community needs to make every effort to bridge this gap between the intellectual and business worlds - other wise these battles and wars will just get worse, and consequently just as threatening...
Not everything is all black and white.
3)Person C is not inocent but its not guilty until it knows about it. Its the job of company B to tell all parties: "Hey you have my code please remove it from you software. And by the way I want compensation from the ones who but the code in there.". Only if company B doesn't comply would it be in danger of litigation.
I even think that it is REQUIRED by B to try to resolve the problem BEFORE going to court. By telling A and C to remove the code. Of course if it can prove A knew it was copying copyrighted material when A did it, B could claim some damages.
I would of though that everyone would know about these things by now with all of the SCO, Growklaw etc... brouhaha
oh and IANAL but I did a project on IP law once. (Canadian IP law, but because of international agreements I think it is very similar to US laws)
But what really bothers me is that people seem to want somebody to hold liable and yet don't want to pay. There is no "contract" of purchase under which somebody should be held liable with Open Source. If you want somebody to hold liable, you need to pay. If you paid for Red Hat Linux, you should be able to hold Red Hat liable for problems with their OS (at least to the same extent you hold MS liable for their problems).
This is really an enterprise server issue, if anything. I've never really heard of a desktop software company successfully being sued for damaging somebody's data, hardware, etc. despite lots of barely working products on the market. Big companies want somebody to point a finger at. I think that's completely fine, but they need to pay an IBM, Red Hat, or somebody else to assume that liability, since without a big chunk of cash in the bank, such guarantees mean nothing. Expecting anybody to assume liability for free and in absence of the formation of a contract by purchase is absurd. Once you've executed a standard purchase, there is a whole bunch of torte and product liability law to back you up, and you should feel just as comfortable if not more so with Open Source as you would with closed source software.
This guy has a messianic complex. I thought it was telling how he describes himself and his incredible career. Also rather naive of him to implicitly threaten companies who don't have billions in cash to defend fake IP lawsuits. Also rather stupid of him not to be able to imagine a world in which GPL protects producers AND consumers. Marianne
However, he is mistaken that "GPL type licence agreements push the liablity to the users." The GPL specifically puts the patent onus on the code contributor.
As far as end-user liability goes, I fail to see the difference between the GPL and the EULAs of closed software. While GPL projects are certainly vulnerable, there have already been significant successful patent infringement claims against closed software that may affect the end-users of that software.
For example, Timeline recently won a patent infringement suit against Microsoft that potentially could require licencing royalties from developers and even end-users of SQL Server.
There is also Eolas' successful suit against Microsoft for Internet Explorer, which Anderer refers to.
BTW, when Anderer says that MSFT has 50 patent lawsuits waiting in the queue, I read that as saying Microsoft will be the defendant in those suits.
This shows a serious lack of understanding. IBM, Sun and many other large contributors to the kernel have a lot of power in the industry, and they each own copyrights over the parts of the Linux kernel that they contributed. But they don't own Linux as a whole: each of them owns pieces of Linux, but the code surrounding what they contributed is licensed to them. The license is the GPL, which does not allow them to re-use the code under a license other than the GPL. So in theory Sun (or one of the others) could take code they contributed to Linux and put it in the public domain, but they couldn't touch the surrounding code, nor revoke the GPL-granted rights of people who licensed the code as it exists in the kernel.
The idea of Linux going into the public domain is wishful thinking that we've heard a few times from people in the industry. They need to get over it, because it's highly unlikely. They also would benefit from learning a bit more about how these collaborative uses of copyright work. Contrary to Mr. Anderer's comments, the economic model of the GPL has actually been thought out in great depth: there is little room for the licensing models employed in the past by priprietary software vendors, but this is intentional and not in need of fixing.
To be perfectly honest, I really haven't been paying enough attention to politics lately.
All I know about Kerry is that he appears to be more "intelligent" than Bush when he's jabbering on TV, ie. he's more articulate, but I don't know what he stands for.
I don't mean to pick on you, specifically, but since you stated, "Kerry's no prize," could you tell me why that is?
I don't particularly like the Democratic party, but neither do I like the Republican party. I would toss out another protest vote, but at this point I have come to the conclusion that Bush has been terrible for this country, and unless his oponent is actually worse, I plan to vote for "anyone but him" this year.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It is the Democrats that are in bed with the Trial Lawyers. It is the Trial Lawyers that getting rich out of this industry destroying legal mess that is copyright/patent law.
Who YOU vote for is irelevant.
I guess you haven't been following much of the electronic voting initiatives. The simple fact is that if you find yourself at an electronic voting booth, you will (by merely showing up) have cast your vote for GWB.
I think I'll vote republican this time. Our system actually needs to get significantly worse before people will get their lasy butts off the couch and throw a molitov cocktail at the nearest judge/preacher/politician.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." - Josef Stalin
If they do this they will force IBM to supply their own IBM-Linux (Or buy Novell) that will be covered by the Gadzillion Cross-licensing deals they have plus anyone that attacks will be counter sued for Patent infringement by IBM.
The "Best" MS can do it nible around Linux as is the case with the Paul Allen funded SCO harrassment case.
IBM-Linux is a nightmare scenario for MS. The only reason IBM has not done this is that they development process of Linux is performing well and IBM do not want to face some of the Patent issues that may be lurking inside Linux. By Lurking I am not implying that Linux has stolen anything but maybe a lot of potential SCOs is watching.
IBM knows this and that's why they will make an example out of SCO. SCO will not only be leveled but the fields around it will be salted. Corporate Veil to Canopy will be ruled broken and they will be forced to admit guilt and settle or face extinction.
IBM has actively collected Patents for the better part of its life for a reason. This is it.
Help fight continental drift.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The real goal here is to strip the GPL away from Linux. Once its free of the severe restrictions of the GPL, they can take it, and start work on MS-Linux.
Remember the tactical situation in which Microsoft finds itself right now. Most of their money is being made selling copies of Microsoft Office, and copies of Windows to run it on. The two are viewed almost as a monolith by the public, because the cost of Windows is usually hidden in a new computer.
They find themselves with stuck with the results of 20 years of marketing driven development as their code base. Any new system has to be backward compatible to the point where most MS-DOS 2.1 programs still work. This severely limits design flexiblity.
With a switch to Linux, they could drop all of their bugs, grab a nice clean codebase from the public domain, and start fresh. They could blame any bugs on the Linux people, and claim their professional team of developers is working to enhance the stability and security of the software to meet the needs of corporate America. (oh, the Irony of it)
What member of the public wouldn't jump at the chance to buy MS-Linux? They would see it as the latest technology, with the Microsoft seal of approval. (We don't want those undesireable "hacker" types writing our software, do we?)
Once they have MS-Linux firmly in place, they can then extend their true monopoly (Microsoft Office) into the Linux space.
I assume this is obvious to some of you, but I wrote this just in case someone hasn't woken up yet to the reality.
To sum up, as long as the GPL holds, we can have a free (as in speach and beer) set of working software to build and share. Once the GPL gets breeched, we're fscked! (Just spend the $1000/machine, and pay for MS-Linux with Office)
--Mike--
1. Microsft will license the Gnu/Linux code from SCO, incorporate that code into Windows then sell it as Microsoft binaries under a non GPL Microsoft license.
2. SCO will lose their license claims in court, thus invalidating the Microsoft licenses.
3. Gnu/Linux lawyers will then sue Microsft and win.
4. Whistle blowers will begin to give evidence that Microsoft engaged in anti competetive practices in attemting to aquire rights to Gnu/Linux.
5. Everyone who was inconvenienced by the SCO lawsuit will then sue Microsoft under the Clayton and Sherman Anti Trust Acts and this Microsoft will be broken up into separate companies. Remember, Microsft was sued by 20 states and they lost! If they're found guilty again of the same offense, a judge will likely have no other option. This will happen around 2008.
Seriously, what's Linux got that MS wants so bad that they can't steal from BSD legally, like Apple did? Rotor's already on FreeBSD, and I'm not sure what MS would want to steal from Linux other than that basic foundation for their CLI, other than brand marketability (which, I suppose, could be enough).
MS doesn't like competition, and that's why they'd help out SCO and have this fellow essentially threaten Red Hat out of business. They don't have to want to have Linux to want to see it gone.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
What he and everyone else on that side haven't realised, is that they could kill Red Hat et al, and Linux would continue:
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We get as much indemnity from a download as MS gives in it's EULA.
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We get more support from the community than we get from Microsoft.
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We get more life from our hardware, because our OS/apps aren't as bloated.
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We get more innovation, no matter what the established people say. I don't know what innovation Microsoft has ever done - everything I can think of, they actually nicked from other people.
Justin.You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
... The strongest likelihood is that MS was being punished for being politically neutral. ...
I really doubt this theory. What is the best way to make a neutral entity to side with your opponent other than using threats and extortion? I really doubt that Democrats are that stupid to do that, especially to a company with a huge financial power. That is like handing the Republicans 10 years of Christmas gift in one day.
It makes more sense that, having learned that Clinton's DoJ were out for blood and knew that the Republicans (especially, Bush's Republicans) side with big corporations and the wealthy (there is no argument about this. Anything from tax cut to EPA regulations point to this), Microsoft made sure that Bush got their campaing support in the election. It wasn't a secret either that MS hoped to draw out the lawsuit so that it extended to after the election.
I am not saying that Democrats are totally clean, but the new Republican officials (i.e. not you Republican individuals) are as dirty as a clogged sewer. They sicced the independent counsel over a cigar in an intern and yet where is the independent counsel in the matter of outting a CIA operative (that is national security, is it not? Something that Bush touts everyday?)?
Look he is wrong about a lot of things.
He is wrong about the GPL. He confuses the GPL with "public domain". He feels that you "have to go after somebody". That last one is quite disturbing actually. Why do you have to go after somebody.
This guy is an evil idiot. All he talks about is how great he is and how busy he is and how he knows so much and how us little old peons don't know what's really going on.
Listen. If open source means guys like this will make less money then that's reason enough to support open source. If this guy is representitive of the enemies of open source then then we should have no problems convincing people to adopt open source.
Just point to his letter and say "see you don't want guys like this running the world do you?"
The best way to support the US war effort is to continue buying American products.
Ok, where are the mass destruction weapons that US had so much proof of?
And the people contained in Guantanamo? If they are guilty of something, why isn't any evidence shown about this? And why aren't any cases presented? What are they contained for? And if they cant even tell them or us why they are there, on what ground are they there?
who shot the cat in the hat to experiment is insane
...then the next security update would have to remove it all, by definition.
IRL, the original author's off his tree. While the sharks could bend it, the law clearly starts out by saying: the person or organisation who did the actual including is entirely at fault.
If the code said something like "stolen from Microsoft" or obviously contained Microsoft headers and such, slap-in-the-face clues that the code was still albatrossed by non-Free copyright, responsibility could easily be pushed out as far as the last entity to compile it (likely the distributor), and more fool them for not knowing what they're compiling.
In order to make end-users vulnerable, the program would have to give out a fairly unmissable clue when run. Announcing Microsoft copyrights in the splash screen would do it, although doing so on an "About" screen that you have to go out of your way (but not know any secrets) to get to would probably be enough.
If such a thing did happen, someone at Microsoft would be in the unenviable position of explaining how the code got loose, and how they know exactly what got loose and what didn't, and how they know that some sour-grapes manager didn't actually release it under a GPL or some such as a parting gift to his/her employer.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...is that he's apparently white-cane-and-glasses blind to a lesson which history should have burned deeply into our collective national psyches by now, one of the major reasons for the founding of the USA, and a problem which even Australia constitutionally recognises (although in practice we are, like the uSA, pretty much ignoring our own Constitution whenever it really counts).
I'm talking about blending religion and politics.
If he wants the Inquisition back, albeit named something harmless-sounding like "the department of Homeland Security", then George's going the right way about it. The Inquisition had a friendly-sounding name as well, "the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith", but that didn't stop it from causing tens (possibly hundreds, they also liked destroying records) of millions of deaths or perverting the government in scores of countries so that competing faiths stood no chance. Mao's and Stalin's faith-based purges weren't as subtle but killed around about as many people and clearly exposed the fallacy of regarding humanism or atheism as in any way benevolent or "safe" faiths.
I think Microsoft counts as a religion, too. Pope Bill and Cardinals Steve, Paul and so on presiding over the congregation of money-worshippers. Whether you take that idea seriously or not, they're distorting government in pretty much the same way a religion does. The irony of them claiming to have any corporate rights should be pretty clear to anyone who's read one of their EULAs.
To say that Anderer's either off his tree or snowing like Alaska in January would be something of an understatement, but it's inumportant compared to the context in which all of this crap is happening. Bush may be unsubtle about how he lets the USA get pushed around by religious and corporate interests, but Clinton didn't exactly raise a rash of red flags against most of the related issues either. If I was a Yank, I'd be voting against both Bush and Clinton.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Put aside for a moment the actual message of his letter. Just for now, pay attention to his writing. The man is practically illiterate.
He is incapable of putting together a coherent paragraph. Forget about getting a cogent argument; you have to struggle to understand what he's trying to express!
OK, back to the content. In my experience, I've met many people like him. They have lots of shady companies. Often, they have had so many that they have lost track of them. Mr. Anderer brags of this trait, but it is a major red flag.
Such people also tend to never stick to one thing; they make "contributions" in countless fields. They can never stay too long in one place, or people will notice that they are bullshitters.
Bottom line, this confirms my guess about him. He's a sleazy, bottom-feeding, undereducated corporate whore, used by Microsoft and TSG only to distance themselves from an unsavory transaction.
I totally agree here. Basically, the present voting system is such that the two-party system is a stable equilibrium. I'm not entirely sure why this is true, but it's not hard to see some of the reasons and history offers the proof. If Nader got any significant votes (and last time even 1% was significant enough), he would ensure Bush's reelection. So to the party he is more closely aligned with (Democratic) he's enemy #1. The only people who should properly be voting for him are those who hate the two leading candidates absolutely equally. Since that's a small number of people, the two front-running parties remain unchallengable. If I end up disliking both front-runners equally this time around, I'll either go with Nader or "Bufgoo" (the google hit is correct).
I herad in Ireland they can vote for a 2nd and 3rd choice (etc?), and if their 1st choice is loosing the vote goes to the 2nd. I think this upsets the equillibrium and would truly allow the public to represent themselves with their votes. Unfortunately I don't see any hope for a system like this one to be established in the US in my lifetime. Another possible way to upset the 2-party system is if someone new suddenly comes on the scene with unbelievable charisma so that they immediately gain a large fraction of votes. They would also have to be a middle-of-the-road type of candidate. Nader is neither immensely popular nor middle-of-the-road. And anyway this kind of singular event would not really upset the equillibrium, it would simply establish a new party/parties and there would still eventually be two. 3 -> 1 -> 2 I think.