Censorship-as-in-speech: When a government abridges an individual's inalienable right to freely express their opinions to the public, that's censorship of speech--"speech censorship".
What about a situation in which all the public fora have been privatized? I use our airwaves as an example, although PBS is arguably an exception.
What about situations in which private corporations are more powerful than governments? There is only anectodal evidence that this is true in the United States (Microsoft's purchase of this administration's Dept. of Justice, campaign financing and the failure of every attempt to reform it, etc.), but there are numerous countries in which this is demonstrably the case.
Censorship is censorship. Private property which is touted as, and used as, a public form becomes IMHO subject to certain social expectations (and, arguably, rules of conduct)... including the expectation (in many cases) that unpopular comments and expressions will not be censored. That this isn't a part of our body of law is IMNSHO one of the major "bugs" in our constitution and our legal system, and the source of much of the censorship (of both varieties) we endure.
As an aside, the other major contributing factor is of course copyright law, which was designed and implimented by the British Crown for the express purpose of facilitating censorship of the then-emerging new technology known as the printing press, and has worked remarkably well in achieving that goal in just about every new medium since, including now days public expression on the Internet.
I also find it interesting that the senator promoting this heinous piece of legislation is a Democrat. Aren't the Democrats supposed be the party that sticks up for the common people as opposed to big media interests like Disney and the MPAA?
Bringing up Democrats vs. Republicans in this context is simply asinine. A Republican congress and a Democratic president ratified the DMCA and the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act. Both parties are equally in the pockets of Hollywood's copyright cartels and equally contemptuous of the public commons and, indeed, of their constituents in general.
The same BTW is true when speaking of cryptography restrictions, which were enacted (and enforced) under Democratic and Republican congresses, and by the Republican and Democratic chief executives.
I don't see, anywhere in the liscense, a timeline specified as to when any changes to source code must be supplied.
The timeline is very clear and obvious, at least to anyone who can read english, namely:
You have to make the source code available the moment you begin distributing the GPLed software.
Even if you choose option (b) or (c), the source code has to be available, and provided on request, the moment you begin distributing your derivative work.
I know this is rhetorical, and I am underscoring the point you wish to make:
Do you own a car? A boat? An airplane? A kitchen knife?
All of these have been used as weapons... the first three in historically documented mass murders, the last in countless individual "crimes of passion."
Banning weapons means banning everything, up to and including manditory amputation of everyone's arms and legs and, if headbutting is included, decapitating everyone in the world altogether. Banning tools, or even single purpose weapons, is pointless as a means of reigning in violence. Just as it is pointless and counterproductive to start banning technology as a means of reigning in copyright violation.
This is about a threefold increase in factoring speed.. not an order of magnitude.
No. This is wrong. Read the paper.
For large keys, this method reduces the difficulty of factoring keys by a factor of ~3.009, i.e. the diffuclty of factoring a 90,000 byte key is now comparable to factoring a 30,0000 byte key using traditional methods.
It is unknown if this applies to smaller keys currently in widespread use, i.e. if your 2048 key will now have a factorization cost equivelent to that of a 683 byte key using traditional methods. That is what they guy wants funding for... to find out.
So yes, this makes cracking keys orders of magnitude easier and faster.
Hardly suprising when you don't have to read too far into it to find descriptions of murder, child abuse, rape, genocide, etc...
IAAA (I Am An Athiest), but having read the bible cover to cover I do think it should be pointed out that the Bible itself is a censored work. The early catholic editors chucked several gospels out of the new testament as well as several books out of the old testament that didn't jibe with their political goals and theology at the time. If you're really interested in what the old testament looked like prior to its modifications, may I suggest reading the jewis torah (sp?), from whence it was taken. Even that has probably not gone without modification over the last several thousand years, but it is closer to the source, and less heavilly edited, than the old testament.
Add to that biases in translations, and mistranslations from hebrew to greek to latin to [insert your language here] and you end up with something that doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblence to the original works.
Cool... so how many people are going to report that whole moderation mess in the Oracle thread where the editors kept bitchslapping people who posted in there?
If that is true, please provide links to the thread(s) in question or, if they have been removed, archives or caches of the material (if they exist).
As a longtime slashdot reader I would be very interested in this. Finally, if this can be documented in any way, why don't you report it. Censorship is censorship, and some of the worst forms of censorship come not from governments, but from corporations (such as the one slashdot is beholden to[1])
[1]Though I have no personal knowledge slashdot's parent company has ever engaged in this, beyond reading these allegations.
... and it violates some rather deep tabus in the American psyche that are as close to a State Religion as we have over here:
Nationalize all of the local copper, indeed all of the "last mile" fibre, copper, and communicaitons infrastructure. Coax cable included.
Treat our communications infrastructure the way we treat highways: a publicly funded transportation system that all users and providors use under the same conditions and restraints.
That is how you foster competition among telcos, cable companies, and internet service providors... not by giving up and granting the very perpetrators of dishonest business practices and corporate sabatage (there really is no other term for how the telcos handle third party DSL providors) an unfettered (or even fettered, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine) monopoly.
The telcos have deliberately sabataged their competitors and done everything legal (and illegal but "unprovable) to undermine the law and its intent. Only a completely incompetent, or corrupt, government would ever reward such behavior. Far better to nationalize their wire and make them just anothre bit player, like everyone else.
And if they try to sabatage the infrastructure being nationalized, jail the bastards. A few years playing bitch to bubba will make even the most arrogant CEO rather compliant.
Actually I will lobby my congresscritters to repeal the broken law that all of these anti-consumer actions have been taken under.
Fair enough.
But you should really do both. Your congresscritter may not listen to you (hell, if you live in Florida your vote may very well not be counted. In fairness to Florida, the same may be true if you live in Chicago as I do, or any number of other places).
However, your vote with your dollars will always be counted by the beancounters who work for Blizzard, or whomever. Multiply yourself by the other hundreds of thousands who think likewise, and will purchase products from entities they know are actively lobbying against their interests, and you begin to glimps the magnitude of the problem, where your purchases do far more to undermine your position (providing real capital to your opponent) than your letter or phone call to your congressperson does to promote it.
At least one person downloading your free commercial laden programs will decide that a dollar is worth more than five minutes of his time, and the commercial-free copy he makes will then be available for everybody else as well.
[...]
This is called a "watermark", and the recording industry is putting a lot of research into failed attempts to figure out how to make such an embedding unremovable
You make my point for me. The recording industry, indeed all of the copyright cartels, have their heads placed firmly, and deeply, within their intestinal tracts.
Call it a watermark if you like... such embedding of licensing information has been used by commercial software manufacturers for over a decade. They don't have to be impossible to remove! If it is merely non-trivial, that will suffice. You will never stop determined copyright violators who are technically savvy. Never. Not with a thousand DMCAs, not with a million Hague Conventions, not with a billion lawsuits. Probably not even with summary execution (and even if you could, who would want to live in such a world, merely to protect the profits of a few outdated cartels?).
99% of the users would not be willing to share their recorded copies of broadcasts or movies with anyone other than a close friend or family member (which is legal in most jurisdictions outside of the ever-more-draconian United States), if their name is attached to the recording. 99% of said users won't have the knowledge, patience, or inclination to go hacking into a video or audio stream to remove their identity.
It is simply a license stamp, as has been done for years. It works remarkably well with software, despite the fact that a hex editor will allow you to remove most such identifiers.
Why? First, because there is possibly a record of sale of such and such serial number to such and such a credit card, so removing the identity, or "watermark" if you really want to use that inaccurate term, doesn't guarantee the software can't be tracked back to you if a copy appears somewhere else and, two, people would rather feel secure and just not distribute something illegally if there is even a small chance they'll get caught.
The DMCA, Watermarking, encryption, all that nonsense is unnecessary. It won't stop the serious copyright violators, and the casual violators will be stopped by something much simpler: a serial numbered copy of the software sold to them, with the explicit inclusion of their identity to drive home the fact that, if a copy of their recording appears somewhere on the net, the might be tracked down and held accountable. It has worked for years, in a medium where copyright violation is trivial and has been a fact of life for years.
And that is why you will remain, all of your life, little more than a product to be harvested by corporations such as this, with your rights, priveleges, and opportunities trampled at their merest whim. In short, little more than a corporate slave.
Go on, escape into your little War3 playworld and continue giving money to the very people who wish to destroy your freedom of choice, indeed all of your freedems, in order to add a few percent to their next quarterly profits. Flee the real world, which you have helped, through this sort of mindless foolishness, to make a little worse not only for yourself, but for all of us.
Whether it is DVDs, Adobe products, or games from these jackasses (I will never purchase another Blizzard game for as long as I live... and that will cost them a tidy sum in lost revinue), it is the Bread and Circuses junkies like you, who cannot deny even the least of your petty appetites to protect your own diminishing freedoms, that are largely responsible for the decline in all of our liberties over the last two decades.
In short, this sort of attitude which you express is at least as responsible for the ever increasing number of debacles and tramplings of indivudual rights we see today as the corporate fearmongers (read: legal departments) such as this one, and you, like they, are worthy only of the deepest contempt of free thinking, pricipled people.
I would urge you to reconsider, and really think about what you are doing... while you still have the freedom to do so.
A simple solution would be for the TV Network's to make the shows avaliable (with adds) on a bunch of fast servers.
Absolutely right.
The reason the Copyright Cartels (specifically the Television, Movie, and Recording industries) are running scared is because none of their current leadership has any skills at running a business in anything other than a coercive, cartel form.
Alternatives do exist, but they either don't have the imagination to explore them, or are so addicted to their own coercive power that they would rather destroy the most promising, democratizing and empowering technology to emerge in the last 100 years, the Internet, and our constitutional rights to free expression, rather than change their business models.
What business model(s) would work, you ask? For television (and, for that matter, movies) offering commercia laden television programs for free, exactly as they do now. Only, except requiring cable providors or broadcast stations to disseminate their product, they can do so via the internet (and without middlemen).
Offer the same content for a nominal fee (say $1.00, or 1 Euro) without any commercial content.
Mark each downloaded copy with registration information (the user's name and IP address they downloaded to). That is all the copy protection that is required, and it works beautifully (if not perfectly) in the digital world of software. People are much more reluctant to share illegal copies of software that are marked with their identity in some fashion than they are anonymous products (such as clean rips from a firewire port).
None of this is perfect, but it is very workable and people would eat it up. Their revinues would, if anything, increase over time.
Similar approaches could be used by the recording industry, if they were intelligent enough to get their heads out of their asses and stop persuing copy prevention schemes which have been demonstrated both empirically and mathematically to NOT work, and instead embed the purchaser's name and/or ip in the audio stream itself.
Unfortunately this requires imagination, flexibility, and both business and technical savvy, something that is woefully lacking at the upper levels of the copyright cartels. They would rather simply purchase laws from our cheaply sold congress, and shred the constitution in the process.
Nothing. But remember, the monopoly itself isn't bad. It's the abuse of it that's the problem
Nonsense. Monopolies are bad. In a market controlled by a monopoly there is by definition no competition. Competition is critical for a free market to function as it is supposed to, creating the best products at the lowest reasonable price.
The fact that we are foolish enough to allow monopolies to exist legally doesn't make them any less bad, it just underscores the foolishness, and the hypocracy, inherent in our economics and our politics.
Then again, bad practices by the music/movie industry probably never killed anyone, whereas Union Carbide has a death count worse than Ted Bundy.
Well, yes, that is certainly true WRT Union Carbide, not to mention Monsanto's recent poisoning of a small town in the sourthern United States (and with Monsanto it was deliberate and premeditated, unlike the Union Carbide case). But don't kid yourself that no one has been killed over copyright.
At one time the British Crown had a man drawn and quartered for violating copyright (remember, copyright was created by the crown to facilitate censorship of the then-emergent printing press. America adopted the system more or less unchanged because there were publishers involved in writing the constitution and, frankly, no one had given any thought to any alternatives, except perhaps Thomas Jefferson). More recently, copyright vilators in London around the turn of the (19th to 20th) century were brutally beaten and clubbed by private henchmen working for the copyright holders of sheet music; their businesses burned and destroyed en mass, many of the individual proprieters maimed and some even killed. (They were selling copies of sheet music in violation of copyright).
While these sorts of atrocities are lost in the historical noise, certainly in comparison to the millions dead in various world wars, ethnic cleansings, and idealogical pogroms, they are by no means non-existent.
Now that it's become popular for other companies to sue Microsoft, who will the next one be? Novell seems to be a possibility. IBM should for the same reason as Be, due to OS/2.
Since Microsoft is a convicted monopolist who has been proven to have abused its market position to destroy competition (and thus numerous companies, disrupting countless lives), calling this "fashion" marks you clearly as a Microserf, at least, and quite possible a paid PR lackey (as so many who pollute open source and free software sites such as this with their nonsensical "astroturfing" campaigns).
This isn't fashion, it is justice, and long overdue.
I know you're kidding, but Corel is still doing interesting things in the Unix community that the Slashdot crowd will probably be very interested in, particularly the port of.NET to FreeBSD [com.com], which is a very big deal.
If Corel has jumped on the.NET bandwagon, it, like Gnome, can IMHO indeed be written off, at least as far as the free software world is concerned.
As others have pointed out, the only way to win Microsoft's game is not to play... and to offer a free, unencumbered alternative. You cannot do this if you are chasing standards Microsoft sets... the target will move constantly (and deliberately, as the last 10 years of history has shown) and you will never catch up.
Corel blew it a long time ago... I'm just glad I sold all those shares at $20.00 (and wish I'd sold 'em at $40.00).
Just as a question, if the US becomes non competetive with the rest of the world due to DMCA, will this not destroy the profit that the DMCA backers want?
Entertainment money is an interesting thing. Hollywood made bocoup bucks during the great depresseion, a time when, in the United States at least, people were scrounging for enough to eat and many were actually starving.
The same has held true during every recession: spending on entertainment has stayed steady even as spending on basics (like food) declines. Faced with a good meal or two hours of escape from our tepid reality, a great many of us seem to choose two hours of escape.
So, even if most of the other segments of our economy are depressed as a result of gutting our high-tech industry, which is what laws like the DMCA, the proposed SSSCA and UCITA, are essentially designed to do in order to protect some outdated but deeply entrenched interests, it is likely the Bread and Circuses Industry, if you will, will continue to do well. What this means is that this problem is not self-correcting at all, unfortunately.
Bread and Circuses was more to distract the population from changing thier leaders whereas the DMCA backers do not get replaced by a change in governement.
I won't get into a debate about who is actually governing in a system where politicians can be purchased so inexpensively (relative to even a small corporations annual profits), but I will point out that Bread and Circuses are there to distract the populace, pure and simple. Whether it is distraction from an expansion of an unconstitutional (but popular) war on drugs to an even more unconstitutional (and even more popular) war on terrorism, distraction from inept leadership granting monopolies to telcos and refusing to enforce the law against software monopolies, or simply distraction from the emptiness of one's own existence isn't so much the point as it is a distraction. It is intended to be, it is designed to be, and it serves the purposes of many levels of power and influence in our governance, including our formal government as well as the large corporations that appear to be calling the shots more and more blatently.
It is likely for this reason, as much as any other, that congress, the white house, and the judiciary are willing to overlook inconvinient portions of the constitution and threaten entire industries which are in no small part responsible for our affluence in the last two decades simply to protect the purveyors of said Bread and Circuses.
It would require worldwide cooperation and at every level of computing. It would be difficult to draft an international law AND define what a computer was. Does my digital watch need DRM?
We, all of us, tend to concentrate more on our own domestic politics than international political trends, especially when thinking and discussing things like privacy, encryption, and yes, the digital copy prevention technology euphemisticly referred to as digitial rights management (DRM).
But keep in mind that the Hague convention is already passing and allows, indeed requires, any national law regarding copyright (and via the DMCA that includes copy protection, i.e. DRM) to be applied to every signatory country.
And there are other treaties being railroaded through Geneva by the Copyright Cartels as we discuss this.
I too once hoped that the DMCA would make the United States so uncompetetive that the problem would be self-solving. This would be true, were it not for the fact that the corporate interests pushing these sorts of things are doing so internationally (both locally in various parliaments, eg. the UK, the EU as a whole, and Australia and at the international treaty level).
In five or ten years Americans unilateral rewrite of copyright law into criminal law would make it uncompetetive in the new, digital economy (with ripple effects into other parts of the economoy most likely), but we are not going to have five or ten years before things like the DMCA become international law and the playing field levelled once more, at a much lower common denominator.
You wanna get bandwidth with a company that provides services to spammers and relocates spammers to IP addresses to avoid blocking of single IP addresses, don't come whining to/. when the rest of the world wants nothing to do with your ISP.
Thank you.
The only way you get blacklisted is if you (or your ISP) is stupid enough to run a promiscuous mail server that allows anyone to use it as a maildrop/forwarder. Fix the problem (either getting a new ISP, closing up your server, or highering competent people to run your service) and you will be de-blacklisted.
If you cannot be bothered to do any of these things you (and your company) don't deserve to be on the internet, and certainly don't diserve to have any contact whatsoever with me.
Since all of these lists are voluntary, if I have chosen to shun you on the basis of one that is my choice. You do not have a right to be able to contact me if I don't wish to allow it, so get over it, learn from your mistakes, and don't make them again. If you can't be bothered to learn, then, well, enjoy being a component particle of the Black Hole.
It is terrible to see this effect from the DMCA. Basically it is destroying technical education in the US. Long term this could be a very bad thing and just turn the US into a nation of consumers and not producers,
You are absolutely, 100% correct up to this point, and indeed make an excellent point too many people overlook.
However:
which will eventually destroy the market that the DMCA backers are trying to protect.
Or I could be totally wrong.
Yes, and here's why:
The DMCA backers have absolutely no interest in protecting the computer industry, or indeed any of the markets which will be destroyed by the DMCA over the next five or ten years. Indeed, they could really care less (and in some cases would welcome such destruction, particularly of the internet and computer-related products that allow such easy, and to them unwholesom, copying).
They are solely interested in protecting our Bread and Circuses, in particular the Media and Copyright Cartels that have diluted and dumbed down our once-rich culture into mass-disseminated least-common-denominator pop.
If you will recall from your history, the Bread and Circuses industry can survive, even thrive in an economy which has otherwise completely imploded, and will generally continue to do so until the entire civilization falls and is destroyed. I refer you to the last centuries of the Roman Empire as an historical example (by no means unique, but certainly the most widely known example of this), when leaders would choose to use their distribution networks (ships) to ship sand rather than desperately needed food or other goods, for the sake of the games.
The DMCA was designed to protect the entrenched media interests by outlawing much of basic science and engineering, and indeed much of the technology, integral to continuing the "information revolution." They know this, we know this, and they just don't care, so long as their business models are protected. Indeed, as things get worse people are likely to seek more escape, not less, so they can reasonably expect to see their profits soar as a result.
Amazing. Now I understand why the slashdot editors really appear to not "get" a lot of fundamental things, like the ongoing, direct harm the Copyright Cartels (Hollywood and the music industry in particular) are doing to free software.
"You get what you pay for," is demonstrably a myth. (c.f. GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, non-paid sex, love be it familial or romantic, and as a counter example underscoring the very same point, Windows vis-a-vis quality, used cars, enron stock, and so on ad nauseum.). Air is the most valuable substance to any living, breathing human. Don't believe me? Try going ten minutes without it. Yet it costs nothing.
With free software you don't "get what you pay for," you get what many thousands have contributed to a public commons to give themselves and you, with a resulting value far greater than any single enterprise could possibly offer. These contributions are often completely unrelated to any economic value as defined in the traditional market sense, and are only very indirectly related to any sort of free market or monetary value at all.
If you don't understand this (because of your libertarian bent of capitalism ueber alles, perhaps... and I can relate, as I have some libertarian leanings myself), then I suggest you consider, with an open mind, the implications of applying one set of assumptions (scarcity and greed driving a free, self-organizing market) vs. the actual conditions (a fundamental lack of scarcity in the electronic world) which may well make those assumptions invalid in the context in which you are trying to apply them.
In this particular case the area is more gray... we are dealing with an area that interfaces the (cyber)world of virtually unlimited abundance (virtually zero-cost copying) and the physical world of scarcity. It is along this interface that the most interesting problems and opportunities are going to arise (and the area the copyright cartels would be concentrating on if they had any intelligence, rather than trying to use authoritarian laws to impose their business model on a world which lacks the scarcity they require).
I should point out that the Free Software Foundation's GNU project offers a similar service to sourceforge called Savannah, which I highly recommend. Will the laws of supply and demand as created out of scarcity apply, or are there enough willing donars, and enough inexpensive (or free) resources available that the laws of plenty will apply? In this gray area the answer is probably both yes, and no, depending on local circumstances and conditions.
In any event, the notion that "you get what you pay for" has been disproven numerous times in the physical world of scarcity-driven capitalism (ask any number of people who have purchased property or used automobiles, only to have their worth drop to zero, or climb insanely, in no relation to "what they paid for"), and in the abundant sphere of free software is demonstrably inapplicable in nearly every case.
Does everything have to be on topic around here? The beowulf thing is a standing Slashdot.org joke and I find it humorous.
It was humorous the first time. Moderately amusing the next 100 times perhaps. Now it is merely tired, trite, cliched, and asinine... and above all, about as original as Microsoft "innovation".
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that X would be in far *worse* shape today, if it were GPL'd. Before Linux and FreeBSD sprang into popularity, X was kept alive largely by closed-source commercial concerns (Sun, HP, SCO, etc.), who very possibly would not have used it, were it to have the "forced openness" of GPL.
You would probably have been proven wrong, but since we are dealing with hypotheticals there is no way to know for certain.
What we do know is that Sun introduced two different windowing systems before finally switching to X (SunView, Openlook), so X11's permissive license wasn't an incentive at all. It was popular demand that eventually forced them to use X, and such demand would have been present regardless of which free license was used. Then Sun released openwindows, which was their semi-incompatible hack of X (allowed by the X license, would have been disallowed by the GPL unless they released said changes for possible inclusion in the main tree). Many customers, ourselves included, promptly downloaded the more compliant sources from the X consortium and compiled them instead, dumping openwindows because, despite being based on X, it had too many nonstandard incompatabilities that simply weren't worth the hassle.
Contrast this to Sun's widespread promotion of gcc as the recommended c compiler until they released their own proprietary compiler years later, and your hypothesis that the GPL would somehow have been detrimental is weakened even further.
Finally, the balkinization of UNIX was due in no small part to the lack of a GPLed reference base (including X11), and the incompatible, proprietary extentions that resulted (and were never required to be released openly for inclusion in others products). Then comes GNU/Linux... less mature and less widely adopted than BSD, and in a very short time it united and began to dominate the UNIX world, even over another free UNIX that is arguably better on technical merits, namely FreeBSD. Why? Because vendors (IBM, SGI, etc.) are actually protected by the GPL in ways licenses like X11's and BSD's cannot:
* incompatible changes must be released, meaning incompatibilities will not persist. This means the balkinazation of before will tend not to happen, as the GPL encourages any forks to reintegrate their changes.
* no one can take their work and incorporate it in proprietary competing products... such competing products must also be open. I.e. no corporate intellectual property in a free project can be "stolen" by another, merely "borrowed."
* vendors and competitors are actually assisting one another by default. This has significant technical (and social) advantages over the destructive behavior of early unix vendors which are obvious and accepted by scientists and engineers but foreign to many business managers. The license actually facilitates, even requires, the sharing inherent in solid scientific and engineering methodology and discourages, in some cases actually disallows, the kinds of self-defeating secrecy often practiced by less informed management by default (often without thought, as a rote behavior often substituting for strategic thinking or imagination).
The historical evidence not only doesn't support your hypothesis that X11 would have been harmed by the GPL, it even offers anectdotal evidence that the opposite is quite possibly true: X11 might well have been helped by the GPL.
As we spend more and more time in virtual worlds issues like this will become more important. It is not inconcievable that, in five or ten years, most communication and interaction will happen in virtual space. Should people interacting in virtual worlds be limited in their rights and choices any more than those operating in the physical world? This question may sound silly, but there are important social and political ramifications as we spend more and more of our lives online.
What about communications? Does a private company running a virtual world have the right to tell you what you can and cannot say to another person in that world? Under current law, perhaps. Is this desirable or, if and when we are spending most of our time communicating with one another in that sort of context, acceptable. Probably not, if you really think about it.
The telephone company is a private corporation that owns most of the equipment and infrastructure necessary for one person to talk to another over any but the most trivial distances. For many people, most of their interpersonal communication takes place over the telephone.
We decided early on that, despite the fact that the phone company is a private corporation, they may not deny service to anyone on the basis of what they say, may not in any way limit what one person may say to another using their equipment, and so on. In exchange they were granted "common carrier" status, meaning they bore no liability for the content of communication over their lines.
These game worlds are precursors to a form of virtual reality (I hate the term, but cannot think of a more accurate one, assuming the original, unmarketdroid meaning is used) many of us may be spending much of our lives in down the road. Doubly true when we are extremely elderly and bedridden. As long as we've paid for the service, should we really be subjected to draconian TOS that decide if and how we may interact with others?
Right now it is just a game, and most of us snicker at those who take it so seriously as to buy and sell virtual items with real money. But the precedents being set here will most likely have very far reaching ramifications into our own lives down the road, in contexts that are much more significant than a mere fantasy game. Do we really want non-democratic corporate Terms of Service dictating our rights and limits?
The knee-jerk, libertarian response of "the TOS is paramount," go elsewhere if you don't like it shows that these people really haven't given much deep thought at all to where the technology is going, what the social implications are, and what the consiquences of allowing unfettered and unchecked corporate authority to trump individual liberties (remember those constitutional checks and balances? They don't exist in the corporate context, and only exist minimally in competetive markets... and not at all once those markets become dominated by oligarchies or monopolies).
Today it is about buying and selling virtual toys outside of a gaming context, i.e. regulating how consenting players may interact with one another and trade items they value amongst themselves. Tommorow it could be a much more compelling concern, but if so it is likely to be affected in no small part by the precedents we set today. It would be advisable if we thought long and hard on just what we want those precedents to be, rather than simplisticly dismissing the entire debate with "the company's Terms of Service are paramout, all other concerns are irrelevant."
Slashdot Mirror
Censorship-as-in-speech: When a government abridges an individual's inalienable right to freely express their opinions to the public, that's censorship of speech--"speech censorship".
... including the expectation (in many cases) that unpopular comments and expressions will not be censored. That this isn't a part of our body of law is IMNSHO one of the major "bugs" in our constitution and our legal system, and the source of much of the censorship (of both varieties) we endure.
What about a situation in which all the public fora have been privatized? I use our airwaves as an example, although PBS is arguably an exception.
What about situations in which private corporations are more powerful than governments? There is only anectodal evidence that this is true in the United States (Microsoft's purchase of this administration's Dept. of Justice, campaign financing and the failure of every attempt to reform it, etc.), but there are numerous countries in which this is demonstrably the case.
Censorship is censorship. Private property which is touted as, and used as, a public form becomes IMHO subject to certain social expectations (and, arguably, rules of conduct)
As an aside, the other major contributing factor is of course copyright law, which was designed and implimented by the British Crown for the express purpose of facilitating censorship of the then-emerging new technology known as the printing press, and has worked remarkably well in achieving that goal in just about every new medium since, including now days public expression on the Internet.
I also find it interesting that the senator promoting this heinous piece of legislation is a Democrat. Aren't the Democrats supposed be the party that sticks up for the common people as opposed to big media interests like Disney and the MPAA?
Bringing up Democrats vs. Republicans in this context is simply asinine. A Republican congress and a Democratic president ratified the DMCA and the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act. Both parties are equally in the pockets of Hollywood's copyright cartels and equally contemptuous of the public commons and, indeed, of their constituents in general.
The same BTW is true when speaking of cryptography restrictions, which were enacted (and enforced) under Democratic and Republican congresses, and by the Republican and Democratic chief executives.
I don't see, anywhere in the liscense, a timeline specified as to when any changes to source code must be supplied.
The timeline is very clear and obvious, at least to anyone who can read english, namely:
You have to make the source code available the moment you begin distributing the GPLed software.
Even if you choose option (b) or (c), the source code has to be available, and provided on request, the moment you begin distributing your derivative work.
Where is the rocket science in this?
Is it legal to be allowed to own a weapon ?
... the first three in historically documented mass murders, the last in countless individual "crimes of passion."
I know this is rhetorical, and I am underscoring the point you wish to make:
Do you own a car? A boat? An airplane? A kitchen knife?
All of these have been used as weapons
Banning weapons means banning everything, up to and including manditory amputation of everyone's arms and legs and, if headbutting is included, decapitating everyone in the world altogether. Banning tools, or even single purpose weapons, is pointless as a means of reigning in violence. Just as it is pointless and counterproductive to start banning technology as a means of reigning in copyright violation.
This is about a threefold increase in factoring speed.. not an order of magnitude.
... to find out.
No. This is wrong. Read the paper.
For large keys, this method reduces the difficulty of factoring keys by a factor of ~3.009, i.e. the diffuclty of factoring a 90,000 byte key is now comparable to factoring a 30,0000 byte key using traditional methods.
It is unknown if this applies to smaller keys currently in widespread use, i.e. if your 2048 key will now have a factorization cost equivelent to that of a 683 byte key using traditional methods. That is what they guy wants funding for
So yes, this makes cracking keys orders of magnitude easier and faster.
Hardly suprising when you don't have to read too far into it to find descriptions of murder, child abuse, rape, genocide, etc...
IAAA (I Am An Athiest), but having read the bible cover to cover I do think it should be pointed out that the Bible itself is a censored work. The early catholic editors chucked several gospels out of the new testament as well as several books out of the old testament that didn't jibe with their political goals and theology at the time. If you're really interested in what the old testament looked like prior to its modifications, may I suggest reading the jewis torah (sp?), from whence it was taken. Even that has probably not gone without modification over the last several thousand years, but it is closer to the source, and less heavilly edited, than the old testament.
Add to that biases in translations, and mistranslations from hebrew to greek to latin to [insert your language here] and you end up with something that doesn't bear a whole lot of resemblence to the original works.
Cool... so how many people are going to report that whole moderation mess in the Oracle thread where the editors kept bitchslapping people who posted in there?
If that is true, please provide links to the thread(s) in question or, if they have been removed, archives or caches of the material (if they exist).
As a longtime slashdot reader I would be very interested in this. Finally, if this can be documented in any way, why don't you report it. Censorship is censorship, and some of the worst forms of censorship come not from governments, but from corporations (such as the one slashdot is beholden to[1])
[1]Though I have no personal knowledge slashdot's parent company has ever engaged in this, beyond reading these allegations.
... and it violates some rather deep tabus in the American psyche that are as close to a State Religion as we have over here:
... not by giving up and granting the very perpetrators of dishonest business practices and corporate sabatage (there really is no other term for how the telcos handle third party DSL providors) an unfettered (or even fettered, I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine) monopoly.
Nationalize all of the local copper, indeed all of the "last mile" fibre, copper, and communicaitons infrastructure. Coax cable included.
Treat our communications infrastructure the way we treat highways: a publicly funded transportation system that all users and providors use under the same conditions and restraints.
That is how you foster competition among telcos, cable companies, and internet service providors
The telcos have deliberately sabataged their competitors and done everything legal (and illegal but "unprovable) to undermine the law and its intent. Only a completely incompetent, or corrupt, government would ever reward such behavior. Far better to nationalize their wire and make them just anothre bit player, like everyone else.
And if they try to sabatage the infrastructure being nationalized, jail the bastards. A few years playing bitch to bubba will make even the most arrogant CEO rather compliant.
Actually I will lobby my congresscritters to repeal the broken law that all of these anti-consumer actions have been taken under.
Fair enough.
But you should really do both. Your congresscritter may not listen to you (hell, if you live in Florida your vote may very well not be counted. In fairness to Florida, the same may be true if you live in Chicago as I do, or any number of other places).
However, your vote with your dollars will always be counted by the beancounters who work for Blizzard, or whomever. Multiply yourself by the other hundreds of thousands who think likewise, and will purchase products from entities they know are actively lobbying against their interests, and you begin to glimps the magnitude of the problem, where your purchases do far more to undermine your position (providing real capital to your opponent) than your letter or phone call to your congressperson does to promote it.
At least one person downloading your free commercial laden programs will decide that a dollar is worth more than five minutes of his time, and the commercial-free copy he makes will then be available for everybody else as well.
... such embedding of licensing information has been used by commercial software manufacturers for over a decade. They don't have to be impossible to remove! If it is merely non-trivial, that will suffice. You will never stop determined copyright violators who are technically savvy. Never. Not with a thousand DMCAs, not with a million Hague Conventions, not with a billion lawsuits. Probably not even with summary execution (and even if you could, who would want to live in such a world, merely to protect the profits of a few outdated cartels?).
[...]
This is called a "watermark", and the recording industry is putting a lot of research into failed attempts to figure out how to make such an embedding unremovable
You make my point for me. The recording industry, indeed all of the copyright cartels, have their heads placed firmly, and deeply, within their intestinal tracts.
Call it a watermark if you like
99% of the users would not be willing to share their recorded copies of broadcasts or movies with anyone other than a close friend or family member (which is legal in most jurisdictions outside of the ever-more-draconian United States), if their name is attached to the recording. 99% of said users won't have the knowledge, patience, or inclination to go hacking into a video or audio stream to remove their identity.
It is simply a license stamp, as has been done for years. It works remarkably well with software, despite the fact that a hex editor will allow you to remove most such identifiers.
Why? First, because there is possibly a record of sale of such and such serial number to such and such a credit card, so removing the identity, or "watermark" if you really want to use that inaccurate term, doesn't guarantee the software can't be tracked back to you if a copy appears somewhere else and, two, people would rather feel secure and just not distribute something illegally if there is even a small chance they'll get caught.
The DMCA, Watermarking, encryption, all that nonsense is unnecessary. It won't stop the serious copyright violators, and the casual violators will be stopped by something much simpler: a serial numbered copy of the software sold to them, with the explicit inclusion of their identity to drive home the fact that, if a copy of their recording appears somewhere on the net, the might be tracked down and held accountable. It has worked for years, in a medium where copyright violation is trivial and has been a fact of life for years.
I will be buying War3 despite this BS
... and that will cost them a tidy sum in lost revinue), it is the Bread and Circuses junkies like you, who cannot deny even the least of your petty appetites to protect your own diminishing freedoms, that are largely responsible for the decline in all of our liberties over the last two decades.
... while you still have the freedom to do so.
And that is why you will remain, all of your life, little more than a product to be harvested by corporations such as this, with your rights, priveleges, and opportunities trampled at their merest whim. In short, little more than a corporate slave.
Go on, escape into your little War3 playworld and continue giving money to the very people who wish to destroy your freedom of choice, indeed all of your freedems, in order to add a few percent to their next quarterly profits. Flee the real world, which you have helped, through this sort of mindless foolishness, to make a little worse not only for yourself, but for all of us.
Whether it is DVDs, Adobe products, or games from these jackasses (I will never purchase another Blizzard game for as long as I live
In short, this sort of attitude which you express is at least as responsible for the ever increasing number of debacles and tramplings of indivudual rights we see today as the corporate fearmongers (read: legal departments) such as this one, and you, like they, are worthy only of the deepest contempt of free thinking, pricipled people.
I would urge you to reconsider, and really think about what you are doing
A simple solution would be for the TV Network's to make the shows avaliable (with adds) on a bunch of fast servers.
Absolutely right.
The reason the Copyright Cartels (specifically the Television, Movie, and Recording industries) are running scared is because none of their current leadership has any skills at running a business in anything other than a coercive, cartel form.
Alternatives do exist, but they either don't have the imagination to explore them, or are so addicted to their own coercive power that they would rather destroy the most promising, democratizing and empowering technology to emerge in the last 100 years, the Internet, and our constitutional rights to free expression, rather than change their business models.
What business model(s) would work, you ask? For television (and, for that matter, movies) offering commercia laden television programs for free, exactly as they do now. Only, except requiring cable providors or broadcast stations to disseminate their product, they can do so via the internet (and without middlemen).
Offer the same content for a nominal fee (say $1.00, or 1 Euro) without any commercial content.
Mark each downloaded copy with registration information (the user's name and IP address they downloaded to). That is all the copy protection that is required, and it works beautifully (if not perfectly) in the digital world of software. People are much more reluctant to share illegal copies of software that are marked with their identity in some fashion than they are anonymous products (such as clean rips from a firewire port).
None of this is perfect, but it is very workable and people would eat it up. Their revinues would, if anything, increase over time.
Similar approaches could be used by the recording industry, if they were intelligent enough to get their heads out of their asses and stop persuing copy prevention schemes which have been demonstrated both empirically and mathematically to NOT work, and instead embed the purchaser's name and/or ip in the audio stream itself.
Unfortunately this requires imagination, flexibility, and both business and technical savvy, something that is woefully lacking at the upper levels of the copyright cartels. They would rather simply purchase laws from our cheaply sold congress, and shred the constitution in the process.
Nothing. But remember, the monopoly itself isn't bad. It's the abuse of it that's the problem
Nonsense. Monopolies are bad. In a market controlled by a monopoly there is by definition no competition. Competition is critical for a free market to function as it is supposed to, creating the best products at the lowest reasonable price.
The fact that we are foolish enough to allow monopolies to exist legally doesn't make them any less bad, it just underscores the foolishness, and the hypocracy, inherent in our economics and our politics.
Then again, bad practices by the music/movie industry probably never killed anyone, whereas Union Carbide has a death count worse than Ted Bundy.
Well, yes, that is certainly true WRT Union Carbide, not to mention Monsanto's recent poisoning of a small town in the sourthern United States (and with Monsanto it was deliberate and premeditated, unlike the Union Carbide case). But don't kid yourself that no one has been killed over copyright.
At one time the British Crown had a man drawn and quartered for violating copyright (remember, copyright was created by the crown to facilitate censorship of the then-emergent printing press. America adopted the system more or less unchanged because there were publishers involved in writing the constitution and, frankly, no one had given any thought to any alternatives, except perhaps Thomas Jefferson). More recently, copyright vilators in London around the turn of the (19th to 20th) century were brutally beaten and clubbed by private henchmen working for the copyright holders of sheet music; their businesses burned and destroyed en mass, many of the individual proprieters maimed and some even killed. (They were selling copies of sheet music in violation of copyright).
While these sorts of atrocities are lost in the historical noise, certainly in comparison to the millions dead in various world wars, ethnic cleansings, and idealogical pogroms, they are by no means non-existent.
Now that it's become popular for other companies to sue Microsoft, who will the next one be? Novell seems to be a possibility. IBM should for the same reason as Be, due to OS/2.
Since Microsoft is a convicted monopolist who has been proven to have abused its market position to destroy competition (and thus numerous companies, disrupting countless lives), calling this "fashion" marks you clearly as a Microserf, at least, and quite possible a paid PR lackey (as so many who pollute open source and free software sites such as this with their nonsensical "astroturfing" campaigns).
This isn't fashion, it is justice, and long overdue.
I know you're kidding, but Corel is still doing interesting things in the Unix community that the Slashdot crowd will probably be very interested in, particularly the port of .NET to FreeBSD [com.com], which is a very big deal.
.NET bandwagon, it, like Gnome, can IMHO indeed be written off, at least as far as the free software world is concerned.
... and to offer a free, unencumbered alternative. You cannot do this if you are chasing standards Microsoft sets ... the target will move constantly (and deliberately, as the last 10 years of history has shown) and you will never catch up.
... I'm just glad I sold all those shares at $20.00 (and wish I'd sold 'em at $40.00).
If Corel has jumped on the
As others have pointed out, the only way to win Microsoft's game is not to play
Corel blew it a long time ago
Just as a question, if the US becomes non competetive with the rest of the world due to DMCA, will this not destroy the profit that the DMCA backers want?
Entertainment money is an interesting thing. Hollywood made bocoup bucks during the great depresseion, a time when, in the United States at least, people were scrounging for enough to eat and many were actually starving.
The same has held true during every recession: spending on entertainment has stayed steady even as spending on basics (like food) declines. Faced with a good meal or two hours of escape from our tepid reality, a great many of us seem to choose two hours of escape.
So, even if most of the other segments of our economy are depressed as a result of gutting our high-tech industry, which is what laws like the DMCA, the proposed SSSCA and UCITA, are essentially designed to do in order to protect some outdated but deeply entrenched interests, it is likely the Bread and Circuses Industry, if you will, will continue to do well. What this means is that this problem is not self-correcting at all, unfortunately.
Bread and Circuses was more to distract the population from changing thier leaders whereas the DMCA backers do not get replaced by a change in governement.
I won't get into a debate about who is actually governing in a system where politicians can be purchased so inexpensively (relative to even a small corporations annual profits), but I will point out that Bread and Circuses are there to distract the populace, pure and simple. Whether it is distraction from an expansion of an unconstitutional (but popular) war on drugs to an even more unconstitutional (and even more popular) war on terrorism, distraction from inept leadership granting monopolies to telcos and refusing to enforce the law against software monopolies, or simply distraction from the emptiness of one's own existence isn't so much the point as it is a distraction. It is intended to be, it is designed to be, and it serves the purposes of many levels of power and influence in our governance, including our formal government as well as the large corporations that appear to be calling the shots more and more blatently.
It is likely for this reason, as much as any other, that congress, the white house, and the judiciary are willing to overlook inconvinient portions of the constitution and threaten entire industries which are in no small part responsible for our affluence in the last two decades simply to protect the purveyors of said Bread and Circuses.
It would require worldwide cooperation and at every level of computing. It would be difficult to draft an international law AND define what a computer was. Does my digital watch need DRM?
We, all of us, tend to concentrate more on our own domestic politics than international political trends, especially when thinking and discussing things like privacy, encryption, and yes, the digital copy prevention technology euphemisticly referred to as digitial rights management (DRM).
But keep in mind that the Hague convention is already passing and allows, indeed requires, any national law regarding copyright (and via the DMCA that includes copy protection, i.e. DRM) to be applied to every signatory country.
And there are other treaties being railroaded through Geneva by the Copyright Cartels as we discuss this.
I too once hoped that the DMCA would make the United States so uncompetetive that the problem would be self-solving. This would be true, were it not for the fact that the corporate interests pushing these sorts of things are doing so internationally (both locally in various parliaments, eg. the UK, the EU as a whole, and Australia and at the international treaty level).
In five or ten years Americans unilateral rewrite of copyright law into criminal law would make it uncompetetive in the new, digital economy (with ripple effects into other parts of the economoy most likely), but we are not going to have five or ten years before things like the DMCA become international law and the playing field levelled once more, at a much lower common denominator.
No, they're not unreasonable.
/. when the rest of the world wants nothing to do with your ISP.
[...]
You wanna get bandwidth with a company that provides services to spammers and relocates spammers to IP addresses to avoid blocking of single IP addresses, don't come whining to
Thank you.
The only way you get blacklisted is if you (or your ISP) is stupid enough to run a promiscuous mail server that allows anyone to use it as a maildrop/forwarder. Fix the problem (either getting a new ISP, closing up your server, or highering competent people to run your service) and you will be de-blacklisted.
If you cannot be bothered to do any of these things you (and your company) don't deserve to be on the internet, and certainly don't diserve to have any contact whatsoever with me.
Since all of these lists are voluntary, if I have chosen to shun you on the basis of one that is my choice. You do not have a right to be able to contact me if I don't wish to allow it, so get over it, learn from your mistakes, and don't make them again. If you can't be bothered to learn, then, well, enjoy being a component particle of the Black Hole.
It is terrible to see this effect from the DMCA. Basically it is destroying technical education in the US. Long term this could be a very bad thing and just turn the US into a nation of consumers and not producers,
You are absolutely, 100% correct up to this point, and indeed make an excellent point too many people overlook.
However:
which will eventually destroy the market that the DMCA backers are trying to protect.
Or I could be totally wrong.
Yes, and here's why:
The DMCA backers have absolutely no interest in protecting the computer industry, or indeed any of the markets which will be destroyed by the DMCA over the next five or ten years. Indeed, they could really care less (and in some cases would welcome such destruction, particularly of the internet and computer-related products that allow such easy, and to them unwholesom, copying).
They are solely interested in protecting our Bread and Circuses, in particular the Media and Copyright Cartels that have diluted and dumbed down our once-rich culture into mass-disseminated least-common-denominator pop.
If you will recall from your history, the Bread and Circuses industry can survive, even thrive in an economy which has otherwise completely imploded, and will generally continue to do so until the entire civilization falls and is destroyed. I refer you to the last centuries of the Roman Empire as an historical example (by no means unique, but certainly the most widely known example of this), when leaders would choose to use their distribution networks (ships) to ship sand rather than desperately needed food or other goods, for the sake of the games.
The DMCA was designed to protect the entrenched media interests by outlawing much of basic science and engineering, and indeed much of the technology, integral to continuing the "information revolution." They know this, we know this, and they just don't care, so long as their business models are protected. Indeed, as things get worse people are likely to seek more escape, not less, so they can reasonably expect to see their profits soar as a result.
"Open and Free" has nothing to do with the amount you pay. Especially for a service.
They most certainly do if you subscribe to the notion that "you get what you pay for."
You get what you pay for after all.
... and I can relate, as I have some libertarian leanings myself), then I suggest you consider, with an open mind, the implications of applying one set of assumptions (scarcity and greed driving a free, self-organizing market) vs. the actual conditions (a fundamental lack of scarcity in the electronic world) which may well make those assumptions invalid in the context in which you are trying to apply them.
... we are dealing with an area that interfaces the (cyber)world of virtually unlimited abundance (virtually zero-cost copying) and the physical world of scarcity. It is along this interface that the most interesting problems and opportunities are going to arise (and the area the copyright cartels would be concentrating on if they had any intelligence, rather than trying to use authoritarian laws to impose their business model on a world which lacks the scarcity they require).
Amazing. Now I understand why the slashdot editors really appear to not "get" a lot of fundamental things, like the ongoing, direct harm the Copyright Cartels (Hollywood and the music industry in particular) are doing to free software.
"You get what you pay for," is demonstrably a myth. (c.f. GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, non-paid sex, love be it familial or romantic, and as a counter example underscoring the very same point, Windows vis-a-vis quality, used cars, enron stock, and so on ad nauseum.). Air is the most valuable substance to any living, breathing human. Don't believe me? Try going ten minutes without it. Yet it costs nothing.
With free software you don't "get what you pay for," you get what many thousands have contributed to a public commons to give themselves and you, with a resulting value far greater than any single enterprise could possibly offer. These contributions are often completely unrelated to any economic value as defined in the traditional market sense, and are only very indirectly related to any sort of free market or monetary value at all.
If you don't understand this (because of your libertarian bent of capitalism ueber alles, perhaps
In this particular case the area is more gray
I should point out that the Free Software Foundation's GNU project offers a similar service to sourceforge called Savannah, which I highly recommend. Will the laws of supply and demand as created out of scarcity apply, or are there enough willing donars, and enough inexpensive (or free) resources available that the laws of plenty will apply? In this gray area the answer is probably both yes, and no, depending on local circumstances and conditions.
In any event, the notion that "you get what you pay for" has been disproven numerous times in the physical world of scarcity-driven capitalism (ask any number of people who have purchased property or used automobiles, only to have their worth drop to zero, or climb insanely, in no relation to "what they paid for"), and in the abundant sphere of free software is demonstrably inapplicable in nearly every case.
Does everything have to be on topic around here? The beowulf thing is a standing Slashdot.org joke and I find it humorous.
... and above all, about as original as Microsoft "innovation".
It was humorous the first time. Moderately amusing the next 100 times perhaps. Now it is merely tired, trite, cliched, and asinine
In fact, I'd hazard a guess that X would be in far *worse* shape today, if it were GPL'd. Before Linux and FreeBSD sprang into popularity, X was kept alive largely by closed-source commercial concerns (Sun, HP, SCO, etc.), who very possibly would not have used it, were it to have the "forced openness" of GPL.
... less mature and less widely adopted than BSD, and in a very short time it united and began to dominate the UNIX world, even over another free UNIX that is arguably better on technical merits, namely FreeBSD. Why? Because vendors (IBM, SGI, etc.) are actually protected by the GPL in ways licenses like X11's and BSD's cannot:
... such competing products must also be open. I.e. no corporate intellectual property in a free project can be "stolen" by another, merely "borrowed."
You would probably have been proven wrong, but since we are dealing with hypotheticals there is no way to know for certain.
What we do know is that Sun introduced two different windowing systems before finally switching to X (SunView, Openlook), so X11's permissive license wasn't an incentive at all. It was popular demand that eventually forced them to use X, and such demand would have been present regardless of which free license was used. Then Sun released openwindows, which was their semi-incompatible hack of X (allowed by the X license, would have been disallowed by the GPL unless they released said changes for possible inclusion in the main tree). Many customers, ourselves included, promptly downloaded the more compliant sources from the X consortium and compiled them instead, dumping openwindows because, despite being based on X, it had too many nonstandard incompatabilities that simply weren't worth the hassle.
Contrast this to Sun's widespread promotion of gcc as the recommended c compiler until they released their own proprietary compiler years later, and your hypothesis that the GPL would somehow have been detrimental is weakened even further.
Finally, the balkinization of UNIX was due in no small part to the lack of a GPLed reference base (including X11), and the incompatible, proprietary extentions that resulted (and were never required to be released openly for inclusion in others products). Then comes GNU/Linux
* incompatible changes must be released, meaning incompatibilities will not persist. This means the balkinazation of before will tend not to happen, as the GPL encourages any forks to reintegrate their changes.
* no one can take their work and incorporate it in proprietary competing products
* vendors and competitors are actually assisting one another by default. This has significant technical (and social) advantages over the destructive behavior of early unix vendors which are obvious and accepted by scientists and engineers but foreign to many business managers. The license actually facilitates, even requires, the sharing inherent in solid scientific and engineering methodology and discourages, in some cases actually disallows, the kinds of self-defeating secrecy often practiced by less informed management by default (often without thought, as a rote behavior often substituting for strategic thinking or imagination).
The historical evidence not only doesn't support your hypothesis that X11 would have been harmed by the GPL, it even offers anectdotal evidence that the opposite is quite possibly true: X11 might well have been helped by the GPL.
As we spend more and more time in virtual worlds issues like this will become more important. It is not inconcievable that, in five or ten years, most communication and interaction will happen in virtual space. Should people interacting in virtual worlds be limited in their rights and choices any more than those operating in the physical world? This question may sound silly, but there are important social and political ramifications as we spend more and more of our lives online.
... and not at all once those markets become dominated by oligarchies or monopolies).
What about communications? Does a private company running a virtual world have the right to tell you what you can and cannot say to another person in that world? Under current law, perhaps. Is this desirable or, if and when we are spending most of our time communicating with one another in that sort of context, acceptable. Probably not, if you really think about it.
The telephone company is a private corporation that owns most of the equipment and infrastructure necessary for one person to talk to another over any but the most trivial distances. For many people, most of their interpersonal communication takes place over the telephone.
We decided early on that, despite the fact that the phone company is a private corporation, they may not deny service to anyone on the basis of what they say, may not in any way limit what one person may say to another using their equipment, and so on. In exchange they were granted "common carrier" status, meaning they bore no liability for the content of communication over their lines.
These game worlds are precursors to a form of virtual reality (I hate the term, but cannot think of a more accurate one, assuming the original, unmarketdroid meaning is used) many of us may be spending much of our lives in down the road. Doubly true when we are extremely elderly and bedridden. As long as we've paid for the service, should we really be subjected to draconian TOS that decide if and how we may interact with others?
Right now it is just a game, and most of us snicker at those who take it so seriously as to buy and sell virtual items with real money. But the precedents being set here will most likely have very far reaching ramifications into our own lives down the road, in contexts that are much more significant than a mere fantasy game. Do we really want non-democratic corporate Terms of Service dictating our rights and limits?
The knee-jerk, libertarian response of "the TOS is paramount," go elsewhere if you don't like it shows that these people really haven't given much deep thought at all to where the technology is going, what the social implications are, and what the consiquences of allowing unfettered and unchecked corporate authority to trump individual liberties (remember those constitutional checks and balances? They don't exist in the corporate context, and only exist minimally in competetive markets
Today it is about buying and selling virtual toys outside of a gaming context, i.e. regulating how consenting players may interact with one another and trade items they value amongst themselves. Tommorow it could be a much more compelling concern, but if so it is likely to be affected in no small part by the precedents we set today. It would be advisable if we thought long and hard on just what we want those precedents to be, rather than simplisticly dismissing the entire debate with "the company's Terms of Service are paramout, all other concerns are irrelevant."