How about people who don't know the difference between patents and trademarks? Should they be killed as well?
Well, since my post basically said that, while it would probably benefit humanity if IP lawyers were killed doing so could well be pointless, not to mention ethically and morally wrong, it would seem follow that killing Patent Lawyers who send cease and desist letters to individuals for alleged trademark violations probably isn't a great idea either. Satisfying, yes. Useful, perhaps. But still wrong, morally and ethically, alas, and quite likely pointless as well.
While I do not advocate taking human life in general, or in particular, I do not think killing all of the lawyers would be a service. They are an unfortunate necessity if we are to have a society governed by laws rather than people/cult images.
However, killing each and every Intellectual Property lawyer (of which these "patent" attourneys are a part) would be a tremendous service to humankind in general. Then again, putting them out of business by repealing said laws would have the same effect and be much more socially acceptable.
Unfortunately, in a world with governments by, of, and for the corporations things probably won't change until some sort of bloody revolution does take place (possibly resulting in the aforementioned bloodbath). Alas, even then nothing of substance will have changed... merely the names and faces of those oppressing the public, stripping us of our freedoms, and actively inhibiting technological and social progress.
So, in the end, killing all, or even some, of the lawyers will have no effect, other than making a whole hell of a lot of us feel a whole hell of a lot better. Reason enough, perhaps.
[ For the humor impaired, the preceeding was meant toung in cheak, as humor. If it offended all you law-types, so much the better. If it encouraged you to go out and take human life, please go get some psychological health before you hurt yourself or anyone else. Unless, of course, you are an "intellectual property" attourney, in which case you are encouraged to hurt yourself... severely. ]
It is ironic that there exists a country whose civil law is even more screwed up than that of the United States (I lived in Germany for several years and was thankfully unaware of this particular protection racket), something I would have found unlikely after reading about the recent FBI detainment of a Russian software engineer at the behest of Adobe for making public the woefully inadeqaute state of their much-touted PDF copy protection scheme.
This begs the question, though, namely, can the German firm in question be sued for their unilateral actions by Adobe, for (perhaps irreperably) harming Adobe's reputation among libre software users (who number in the tens of millions at this point). Can they be sued in Germany for their actions? How about the United States? And would the suit hold up, given how much Adobe's own actions against those who expose consumer fraud on their part (and yes, the content providors are "consumers" of their flawed copy protection schemes in a very real sense, and are IMHO being sold a bill of goods fraudulantly) harms their reputation among reasonably well informed IT professionals both inside and outside of the Free Software Community?
I like the gist of your suggestion, but would contend that a "Lawyer as street thug" (complete with baseball bat) would be a more accurate representation of the grim reality, what with the plethora of stories we see reporting the sorts of litigious thuggary seen here.
Whether or not the law actually supports the actions, these types of threats and intimidation as a preface to an amicable resolution and in the absence of beligerance on the part of the victim are entirely indefensible on a moral and ethical level. Refusing to do business with entities which engage in this behavior is the only legal recourse we as individual consumers have, and we should not be talking ourselves out of using it simply because those who are without principle or ethics happen to be so numerous. Indeed, continued financial support of such entities, be they corporations or individuals, will only make such occurances more commonplace as it becomes plain that there are no public reactions to such behavior.
Neither have I. However, due to the name, and having known the name Adobe Illustrator (though not having used it), I assumed that the two were very similar in function and form. This, to me, seems to be the very purpose behind trademark law, to prevent confusion.
You make a valid point, but I suspect many will draw an IMHO incorrect conclusion from it, namely that this justifies both the trademark and Adobe's extremely heavy-handed tactics in enforcing it (threatening, or rather demanding, that a free software volunteer pay a $2000+ penalty).
Trade Mark law is designed to prevent product confusion. This is the very reason that trademarking a single, common english word is an unacceptable perversion and misuse of the law, and should not be permitted, period. If the trademark beaurocracies of the world can't be bothered to use discretion and restraint in granting trademarks, then we need to get an intelligent and reasonably uncorrupt judicial system (yeah, I know, fat chance of that happening within our lifetimes) to overturn these sorts of things.
"Adobe Illustrator" and "KDE Killustrator" are not easilly confused. Indeed, "Adobe Illustrator" and "Killustrator" would be difficult for anyone to confuse, familiar or not with the KDE GNU/Linux product. "Illustrator" can be confused with many things, killustrator included. It is a common English word, and has no place in an even remotely sane world as someone's private intellectual property.
Flash content is currently viewable by more net users than Java is This is why you are starting to see Flash ads all over the place...
That in my book is the most compelling reason to disable flash, and plugins in general: vastly improved signal to noise ratio.
I use blender for some film projects ...
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The Blender Book
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... and it is outstanding.
Yes, it took me a couple of weeks to learn (3-4 hours / evening) surfing the online tutorial sites and trying stuff out, but this is not unreasonable for a piece of software of this sophistication and power.
DivX v. 3 files (viewable under xmms-avi and xine using the most excellent avifile library) of some of my work can be seen here (freely available under the Free Media License)... what one can do with Blender in a very short time is truly amazing.
I bought "The Official Blender 2.0 Guide" from NaN in order to support the free (as in beer) nature of Blender and encourage the making of blender GPLed, i.e. free (as in speech). Whether or not NaN choose to do so is of course up to them, although I think with their business model of giving away the software and charging for the documentation GPLing the software would give them much wider exposure (e.g. availability in all Linux distributions, etc.).
However, although my initial purchase of the book was somewhat alturistic, I have found it to be an invaluable reference. The same can be said for "The Blender Book" which I purchased later in order to learn some of the more advanced modelling techniques.
Very cool software, and very excellent documentation... contrary to what some anti-free software bigots are saying (it shouldn't be necessary, but I will point out that Blender is not, I repeat, not free software, although NaN currently doesn't charge for it, making such anti-free software criticisms doubly misguided).
I have a Linux system, so I use pdf2ps and ghostview. They could use the Acrobat Reader or something else if they don't want to install Linux. I could of course use StarOffice, but this seems to work just as well.
You could also use acroread 4.0, or xpdf, or konqueror, or ghostscript. All work great for reading PDF files under GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There is definitely no shortage of readers for reading PDFs, nor of word processors capable of writing PDFS (staroffice, applix to name just two).
Although it is most certainly distasteful, it is (under current law) their right to do so.
Stictly speaking, it isn't a "right," such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not testify against yourself, etc. It is a privelege bestowed by law, for which the constitution explicitly allows but does not grant outright.
The mistake of calling such priveleges "rights" is a common one and an understandable one... another example of how the English language has been manipulated by the use of such terms as "copyright" rather than "copy restriction," which is a more accurate and descriptive term for what the law is designed to accomplish. Very similar to other forms of linguistic manipulation and propaganda, such as calling those who violate the copy restrictions placed on software by law "pirates" or "thieves," in direct opposition to the reality of their actions (nothing is being stolen, merely replicated, and no acts of violence are being committed at sea).
It behooves us to, where possible, refrain from adopting their choice of language, as language does by in large define the parameters of our thoughts and to some degree the limits of what we can think. Certainly in this context it biases the conversation to the self-serving point of view the Copyright Cartels wish to promote and to some degree undermines our ability to discuss the topic with anything even remotely resembling an unbiased or criticial perspective.
You make some good points, but I think your conclusion is wrong... not because your reasoning is wrong, but because you overlook, or perhaps just ignore, the underlying economic reality: the free software community doesn't have the money or legal resources to burn in order to fight this battle.
Why draw the line at Illustrator? Why hasn't MS taken issue with KWord? Maybe because it's clearly not an MS product? (Hello Adobe? Paying attention? "KIllustrator" != "Adobe Illustrator"; nobody with a shred of sense would confuse the two.) Why hasn't Corel taken issue with KPresenter or StarOffice Draw?
Somebody rein in the Adobe litigators. They seem to have too much time on their hands.
Yes, despite the nonsense pro-intellectual property zealots have been spewing, Adobe is ethically, morally, and perhaps even legally in the wrong. But, as I said before, it is a waste of our community's limited resources to persue this sort of thing in court, especially when the legal outcome is uncertain. Keep in mind that it is large corporations, of the sort Adobe is, that purchased the original trademark laws and their subsequent "enhancements." Whether or not they've actually purchased the courts is an open question, although the DeCSS and Microsoft Appeals decisions would indicate that even the judicial branch has been largely undermined.
Whatever one's personal beliefs on these issues, I think it stands to reason that our efforts would be far better spent coming up with a witty and unassailable naming scheme. It doesn't have to fit every kde app ever made, just the ones whose names are vulnerable to this sort of litigious thuggary.
Of course, (re)naming KVideoEditor Spielberg might have problems all its own.:-)
All in all, I quite like the DaVinci, Monet, and Virgil suggestions, but one need not enforce it religiously across the entire board. Kivio could for example simply be renamed KCharts... descriptive and to the point. I would stop short of digging up famous specialists who are only famous in their field, but would argue no one would confuse the likes of Monet or DaVinci.
Yes, and it's doing such a good job at it that even *you* can't exploit it commercially.
That is, of course, complete FUD and has been refuted so many times that I need to (re)do it here. Suffice it to say that the GPL does allow for commercial exploitation, and indeed numerous companies make a very nice (if not obscenely Microsoft-style monopolistic) profit doing so (Cygnus, Red Hat, TiVo, Caldera, IBM, CheapBytes, and countless smaller consultancies, ISP, etc.). What is does not allow you to do is to deny others access to the software's code, or to close the source of a derivative product. You can sell the software for whatever the market will bear, provide value added services, incorporate the product into other products (so long as any derivative software is GPLed).
The American people are pretty radical? We don't accept authority as proof for a claim?
What I actually said was "[...] as a whole the American people are pretty practical [...]" I said nothing at all about the American people being radical, liberal, conservative, or reactionary. Indeed, you can't justifiably say any such thing, since the land is composed of numerous radicals, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries, with none of those groups having a majority (as evidenced by the results of the last election).
It sounds like you need to talk to some Europeans, or at the very least see what other countries are like before assuming we're a bunch of progressive radicals with the human race's best interests at heart. Seriously.
It seems you need to take a remedial course in reading comprehension, and stop putting words into my mouth which I never said (nor typed). I not only have spoken with Europeans, I have lived many years in various places all over the world, including Europe. I too find the United States to be annoyingly conservative, even reactionary, but that does not change what I said one bit. Americans as a whole, be they liberal or conservative, radical or ractionary, are generally a fairly practical people and need some convincing before they will simply accept something at face value. Once convinced of something they may be less inclined to change their views than others...then again, they may not.
And fetishization of property only suits those with property, which may explain why I'm not as enchanted with the notion of sacred property as you seem to be.
I never called property sacred. It isn't, any more than anything else in this world is. Life isn't sacred either... we consume it on a daily basis, whether we are omnivores or vegitarians, every cell in our bodies is constructed from materials taken from the destruction of other lifeforms.
What I did say was that I would defend my property if some clown like you tries to steal or vandalize it. And that if some clown such as you were to attack my fundamental freedoms then you'd better be prepared to kill me, because that is the only way I would willingly submit to the kind of authoritarian autocracy the sort of "eco-terrorism" being espoused by these imbecils implies.
You can accuse me of fetishizing my freedom, and perhaps even be correct, but of property, merely because I deny you the privelege of taking or destroying what is mine? Please.
And that is the final morsel I shall feed you, troll.
Koffice -> KDE Office Suite
Killistrator -> VectorDraw
kword -> Scribe
kpaint -> Artiste
and so on. Rather than fighting this sort of battle on their turf (yes, it is rediculous that generic words like, oh, say, "word," "illustrator," "paint," and so on are trademarked, but these large corporations have already purchased all three branches of our government rather cheaply and hold the home-court advantage in an excess of funds and lawyers to win even the most unfair and indefensible of legal fights.
Far better to just make up unique names and spend the money that would have been spent on legal duels filing trademarks for those names instead. I'm sure numerous people would donate to such a cause.
Anyone have any better ideas for names... perhaps famous sketchers or draftsmen for Killustrator, famous authors for kword, famouse painters for kpaint, and so on...
We are not "happy" with our inferior service
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SMS vs. E-mail?
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Comparing the communications charges I'm paying now compared to what I was, I can assure you the US system is very much NOT a better deal. Given the economies of scale that should be possible here it's very surprising how much more people seem to be happy to pay for a substandard service.
People here are NOT happy with substandard service or high prices. Just ask any Chicagoan how they feel about Ameritech (hint: I switched entirely to AT&T wireless, with its additional cost, simply to not have to ever deal with Ameritech again. I made the switch 3 years ago and haven't regretted it for a second... the extra money is money well spent, at least paying for a service rather than subsidizing a disservice. But I digress...).
The problem is that our market really isn't as free as you think. The last mile of wire is almost always owned by the local telco monopoly, with a complex web of regulations dictating how and for how much access to that wire will be "sold" to competitors (assuming a particular area has competitors for local service... many do not.) Building a free market with privately owned wire and cabling, without having the owners of the wire and cabling use unfair tactics to destroy their competition, is hideously complex. Perhaps not even really possible. It is akin to trying to have a free market with privately owned toll roads everywhere you drive, and having those roads owned by one or another of the major car manufactuerers or trucking companies and then hoping to achieve "fair" competition through regulations.
Far, far easier to nationalize the roads and create a level playing field for all of the players, be they car manufacturers, trucking companies, private buslines (e.g. Greyhound), or taxi services. Ironic, isn't it, that only the most extreme of free market zealots call for privatization of roads, while everyone accepts the privatization of other basic infrastructures that lead to the kinds of telecommunications horrors we have in the US.
It is no coincidence that so many DSL services are going under, and that none of them are the local telcos providing the last mile of wire. Sometime's the FCC manages the balancing act moderately well and a semblance of a free market can exist, even if it is very overpriced. Other times, such as with DSL, they don't get it right and providors die off like flies.
Fortunately, with our highway system, this sort of misguided notion that government has no role to play in owning the infrastructure (it's socialism... oh no!) is absent and our physical economy works rather well. Unfortunately this basic concept is missing from the realm of electricity and communications, so instead of a relatively simple system to build and manage we end up with a web of unmaintainable and incomprehensible regulations to try and simulate the same results. This is a lesson that will probably take at least another generation or two for the United States to learn, possible now only because communism in its authoritarian form is dead and the need for mindless propaganda against the very concept of a public commons is diminished. Unfortunately, a people fed on a steady diet of such propaganda will only be able to reevalute some of the more absurd implications of such propaganda over time... certainly not overnight, and probably not anytime soon.
If the end user chooses it isn't censorship
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ORBS Forks
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As long as it is the end user, and not ISPs, that are filtering based upon the ORBs databases, then it isn't censorship, rather it is simply filtering based upon another's suggestion.
One could argue that personal email is not a public forum, such as USENET and places like slashdot, and that any form of filtering, at any point along the way, is not censorship in the real sense of the word.
In any event, as long as the end user is informed, and has a choice, it isn't the kind of institutional censorship so often, and so correctly, decried here, it is merely voluntary filtering of what those who subscribe to it view as noise, as is their right.
As for slashdot being united about anything, a quick perusal of any discussion, on any topic, should dissuade you of that erroneous assumption.
I'm one of the first (and probably loudest) to complain about the current intellectual property cartels and government enforced monopolies that threaten our free market system and, more importantly, our basic freedoms themselves. And while at some point revolution may be required to set things right, espousing such, much less persuing it in violent fashion, before every other nonviolent, legal means has been exhausted is just plain irresponsible and self-defeating.
Say what you like about Americans because they don't fawn all over your particular radical agenda, but as a whole the American people are pretty practical, and if you are to convince them of your views you must, in turn, provide practical proof, or at least strong evidence, of what you espouse. And no, appealing to authority isn't enough -- American's are notoriously unwilling to believe authorities for authority's sake -- you must provide cold, hard facts.
When the Boston Tea Party took place a majority (not all, but a majority) of the people were already convinced that they were being taxed into bankrupcy without representation, and with no means within the system to do anything about it. They were left with only two options: revolt, or be taxed into starvation. They chose revolt.
You, and those who espouse your, shall we say, questionable views, have many choices. You can speak out (freedom of speech is under attack, but not yet dead), you can protest, you can lobby government, you can raise consumer awareness.
But if you ever try to torch one molecule of my property I will do everything in my power to destroy you financially, physically, and mentally. As a citizen of a nominally free country there is nothing that compells me to adopt your point of view, and if you are thinking of using violence to coerce me into adopting your point of view you'd better be prepared to use deadly force, because that is exactly what I will use to defend my freedom against such an attack.
What is sad, really, are the people who can't be bothered to vote, can't be bothered to educate themselves on how our (still nominally) democratic system works and how to be effective in it, who choose instead to escalate every little cause to violent revolution before having even bothered trying any more peaceful and reasonable approaches in getting their views heard. Or, having had their views rejected, feel somehow that this gives them the right to undemocratically coerce the unbelieveing majority to adhere to their notions anyway through force of violence.
In a democratic system, even a nominally democratic system such as exists in much of the world today, the majority sets policy. If that majority happens to be wrong about a particular policy (e.g. the War on Drugs, allowing obscene copyright terms, allowing patents, etc.) then that is indeed a problem. However, I will take our dysfunctional democracy over your terrorism and autocracy any day, no matter how stupid the resulting policies are.
I'm beginning to wonder where our moral responsibility to protect an idiot from himself kicks in...
There is absolutely no moreal responsibility to protect idiots from themselves, and in trying to do so you will end up trampling the rights, and dreams, of those who you misidentify as idiots and who would otherwise choose to take a big risk in order to achieve an even bigger payback.
In addition, by protecting "idiots" from themselves you do a disservice to the entire human race, by preventing nature's own cure for stupidity... the natural deselection of the idiots and corresponding gradual improvement of the breed.
Seriously, though, anyone should have the right to follow their dream, no matter how foolish or stupid the rest of us think it to be. Had humans incorporated a "moral responsibility" to protect idiots from themselves any earlier than the second half of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers would have never flown, Columbus (and before him the Vikings) would have never sailed to America, and countless other risky inventions and undertakings would never have been permitted. The aversion to risk we have somehow incorporated into a misguided ethos of "big daddy protecting the small minded people from themselves" in the last century is second only to the Patent system in stifling the progress we could have otherwise made.
It is past time we put and end to this nonsense once and for all. If RocketDude wishes to launch, let him launch. If he dies (the probable outcome) then the species is rid of one more fool. If he lives, he will have accomplished something remarkable, upon which he and others can build. It is by taking such risks, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, that enduring progress is truly made.
Yes, Napster can do what it likes with their servers, up to and including actions like this which make the service vastly less useful to their customers, and unusable by anyone using a real OS.[1]
What you imply in your statement (however inadvertantly) is that, because Napster may do what they like with their own servers, their customers should not speak up when they do something those customers don't like. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the key ingredients to a healthy and successful free market is customer awareness, and the ability of consumers, and groups of consumers, to share their experiences and complaints with one another and to find a competing product when the service they are getting is of poor quality, overpriced, or has other drawbacks (environmentally unfriendly, invades ones privacy, whatever).
Consumers informing one another that a particular product or service sucks, and letting each other know about better alternatives... kind of like, no, exactly what is happening here.
[1](Gratuitious anti-MS Jab as counterpoint to the recent plethora of gratuitious pro-MS Jabs at Free Software): Real Os defined to be one not written or sold by Microsoft.
Oh, grow up. I've been buying O'Reilly books for years and I don't recall ever getting them for free. Just like Microsoft, O'Reilly is in business to make money.
I always find it amusing how people, Americans in particular, find it perfectly acceptable to apply one set of ethical standards to everyday life, and a very different, much more lax, set of ethical standards to activities engaged in in the persuit of wealth. The notion that actions which would be almost universally condemned in private life are accepted, even lauded, when conducted in the context of business, is perhaps one of the most noxious, yet enduring cultural legacies of the Regan/Bush era.
There are some few of us who do still adhere to the notion that actions which are wrong when conducted in one's private life remain wrong even when the goal persued happens to be the almighty dollar. Tim O'Reilly represents himself as a leader and friend of the Open Source and Free Software movements, then betrays that role, and the trust he has garnered playing it, by providing some of its most zealous foes with a forum to espouse their own propoganda, under the very auspices of a conference perporting to support that very movement. Only someone very gullible would equate the marketing propaganda of Mundie and others with "information," and only a fool would be blind to the implications of what Tim O'Reilly is helping Microsoft do.
I'll say it again. Tim O'Reilly is not a friend of the Free Software movement. He is not a friend of the Open Source movement. He is a friend of Tim O'Reilly, and will persue his own interests to the detriment of those of both of the aforementioned movements if he believes doing so will move his own personal agenda, in this case the accumulation of wealth, forward. It would behoove anyone inclined to look to him as an ally or leader to remember that hard, cold fact.
The fact that many people -- not just Microsoft -- see the GPL as an impediment to their right to sell software at a profit shouldn't surprise anyone anymore than the fact that O'Reilly expects you to pay for thier books.
And here you reveal yourself to be the troll that you are. "Many people" indeed. Some few, relatively speaking, feel threatened by the plethora of free software making their expensive and often inferior products obsolete. Certainly those whose business models rely on the incarceration of the customer into their product line by denying them freedom of choice and the basic consumer freedoms granted them by the GPL do. However, once again, only a fool incapable of managing their own codebase would feel at all threatened by the GPL alone, for it nowhere compells one to use GPL code in their project. Indeed, the default situation provided by copyright law is that no code other than one's own may be incorporated into one's project. Microsoft, and others like them, need only continue to do as they purport to have always done: write their own code and leave the GPLed code being given away to the rest of us.
If you're real issue is a denial of the right to own and sell software, then cut to the chase and declare yourself.
This is truely the most amusing sentence of a very amusing troll. I point out that the actions of one who sells himself as an Open Source / Free Software leader are detrimental to those movements, and that although he is aware of it he knows he'll get more business (in the form of $500 (or whatever $) / person attendees flocking to hear what Microsoft will say in an Open Source conference) and so is willing to do such harm regardless, and that in light of this the community should be wary of him, his motives, and most particularly his actions, and you immediately extrapolate from that the absurd notion that I somehow reject the concept of property, merely because I object to someone using unethical means to accumulate more of it.
Thank you. I haven't been quite so entertained for some time.
Why does he keep treating these people like they are legititmate, in the face of such palpable absurdities as Alchin/Ballmer/Mundie on the GPL and the recent MIT EULA? MS cannot make an honest public statement
Tim O'Reilly is not a friend of Free Software, nor is he a friend of Open Source. He is a friend of Tim O'Reilly, and he has discovered that merely getting rich off of Free Software and Open Source isn't enough to satisfy his appetites... he'd like to get into the (currently much larger) Microsoft market and become giga-rich.
He gave Microsoft shill's a forum at his Open Source conference to spread their anti-free software fud and legitimize their proprietary "shared source" as though it were somehow "open source" (it isn't).
He is now lending support (and percieved legitimacy) to Microsoft's most serious intellectual (I use the term very loosely) attack on free software through his publishing company by promoting interviews such as this.
In short, he is selling us all down the river, open source and free software advocates alike, for his own personal profit. It is past time that we stopped giving him the time of day and started treating him in a manner appropriate to his behavior: as an erstwhile colleague who has betrayed us, who worthy of little respect and absolutely no trust.
StarOffice, Sun's open source productivity application suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database applications for the Solaris, Windows and Linux platforms,
would replace Applix on more than 10,000 of DISA's Unix workstations at 600 client organizations worldwide, said Susan Grabau, the product line manager for StarOffice.
What is interesting is what isn't said. To whit, 25,000 licenses bought. 10,000 are replacing existing Solaris Applix installations. Where are the other 15,000 licenses going? Quite likely, numerous installations on Windows or other boxes, replacing MS Office in those locations. Why? Because of price, performance, but most importantly, because of guaranteed compatability between Windows SO, GNU/Linux SO, and Solaris SO, and the ability for IT soldiers and/or civil servants to get at the source and fix a problem if a show stopper should arise.
This does open the possibility of replacing Windoze boxes with GNU/Linux or FreeBSD boxes down the road, and the DoD almost certainly took this into account when making their decision. Bottom line, they will no longer be held hostage by a single, powerful vendor. Standard military doctorine requires a decision like this be made, whenever such a possibility arises. The alternative is a single point of failure and an unacceptable exposure to coercion (possibly, but not necessarilly, by Microsoft, either). Star Office is Free Software, which means that the DoD also retains the freedom to dump Sun if and when they choose, without losing access to their data and documents because of a proprietary storage format.
I hate the term 'Viral Software' as applied to open-source licenses, by the way.
The please, please don't use the term. It is not only a negative connotation, it is entirely wrong, a denigrative label applied to the GPL back during the early BSD vs GPL flamefests and rebutted very thoroughly in those threads (search groups.google.com for gpl bsd license if you're interested in dredging up old grudges). Since those early, volite days both RMS and the BSD folks have chilled out quite a bit and done as much as they could to reconcile their differences, and to respect those differences where reconciliation was not possible. This includes the changes to the BSD license making it GPL compatible as well as the recent endorsement by the Free Software Foundation for releasing the ogg/vorbis specification under the BSD license (to facilitate widespread implimentation in embedded hardware. think: portable ogg/vorbis players).
The GPL is not a virus, it is a vaccine, an innoculation against later abuse of your code by having someone, such as Microsoft, take your hard work, incorporate it into a proprietary product which is then extended and kept closed, marginalizing your project in the process.
The BSD license lacks this protection, but it does have an advantage in that it more straighforwardly allows code to be (re)implemented in hardware and combined with other proprietary works where it makes sense. It is obvious to all but the most zealous that both licenses have their place, and are appropriate in some situations and inappropriate in others.
Freedom is important, and in my opinion today's climate, as epitomized by the anti-freedom dishonesty and FUD Microsoft and its lackeys are spreading, we need all the innoculation against abuse we can get. That is why I prefer the GPL in most instances to the FreeBSD license, and why I based my own Free Media License on aspects of the GNU GPL (and GNU FDL).
Don't kid yourselves. We may not think of this as a war, and certainly if we take the rhetoric of the Microsoft lurkers in the crowd here and at K5 seriously we will continue to not think of it as a war, but make no mistake about it: Microsoft considers it a war and they will not stop until our freedom to use, modify, copy, and distribute the software we write is gone. Either through legal maneuvers, or by cutting us off from developers, users, and (perhaps most importantly) hardware manufacturers. This is a battle for our very freedom, and we should be neither complacent nor shy in informing others of exactly what is at stake.
Slashdot Mirror
How about people who don't know the difference between patents and trademarks? Should they be killed as well?
Well, since my post basically said that, while it would probably benefit humanity if IP lawyers were killed doing so could well be pointless, not to mention ethically and morally wrong, it would seem follow that killing Patent Lawyers who send cease and desist letters to individuals for alleged trademark violations probably isn't a great idea either. Satisfying, yes. Useful, perhaps. But still wrong, morally and ethically, alas, and quite likely pointless as well.
While I do not advocate taking human life in general, or in particular, I do not think killing all of the lawyers would be a service. They are an unfortunate necessity if we are to have a society governed by laws rather than people/cult images.
... merely the names and faces of those oppressing the public, stripping us of our freedoms, and actively inhibiting technological and social progress.
... severely. ]
However, killing each and every Intellectual Property lawyer (of which these "patent" attourneys are a part) would be a tremendous service to humankind in general. Then again, putting them out of business by repealing said laws would have the same effect and be much more socially acceptable.
Unfortunately, in a world with governments by, of, and for the corporations things probably won't change until some sort of bloody revolution does take place (possibly resulting in the aforementioned bloodbath). Alas, even then nothing of substance will have changed
So, in the end, killing all, or even some, of the lawyers will have no effect, other than making a whole hell of a lot of us feel a whole hell of a lot better. Reason enough, perhaps.
[ For the humor impaired, the preceeding was meant toung in cheak, as humor. If it offended all you law-types, so much the better. If it encouraged you to go out and take human life, please go get some psychological health before you hurt yourself or anyone else. Unless, of course, you are an "intellectual property" attourney, in which case you are encouraged to hurt yourself
It is ironic that there exists a country whose civil law is even more screwed up than that of the United States (I lived in Germany for several years and was thankfully unaware of this particular protection racket), something I would have found unlikely after reading about the recent FBI detainment of a Russian software engineer at the behest of Adobe for making public the woefully inadeqaute state of their much-touted PDF copy protection scheme.
This begs the question, though, namely, can the German firm in question be sued for their unilateral actions by Adobe, for (perhaps irreperably) harming Adobe's reputation among libre software users (who number in the tens of millions at this point). Can they be sued in Germany for their actions? How about the United States? And would the suit hold up, given how much Adobe's own actions against those who expose consumer fraud on their part (and yes, the content providors are "consumers" of their flawed copy protection schemes in a very real sense, and are IMHO being sold a bill of goods fraudulantly) harms their reputation among reasonably well informed IT professionals both inside and outside of the Free Software Community?
I like the gist of your suggestion, but would contend that a "Lawyer as street thug" (complete with baseball bat) would be a more accurate representation of the grim reality, what with the plethora of stories we see reporting the sorts of litigious thuggary seen here.
Whether or not the law actually supports the actions, these types of threats and intimidation as a preface to an amicable resolution and in the absence of beligerance on the part of the victim are entirely indefensible on a moral and ethical level. Refusing to do business with entities which engage in this behavior is the only legal recourse we as individual consumers have, and we should not be talking ourselves out of using it simply because those who are without principle or ethics happen to be so numerous. Indeed, continued financial support of such entities, be they corporations or individuals, will only make such occurances more commonplace as it becomes plain that there are no public reactions to such behavior.
Neither have I. However, due to the name, and having known the name Adobe Illustrator (though not having used it), I assumed that the two were very similar in function and form. This, to me, seems to be the very purpose behind trademark law, to prevent confusion.
You make a valid point, but I suspect many will draw an IMHO incorrect conclusion from it, namely that this justifies both the trademark and Adobe's extremely heavy-handed tactics in enforcing it (threatening, or rather demanding, that a free software volunteer pay a $2000+ penalty).
Trade Mark law is designed to prevent product confusion. This is the very reason that trademarking a single, common english word is an unacceptable perversion and misuse of the law, and should not be permitted, period. If the trademark beaurocracies of the world can't be bothered to use discretion and restraint in granting trademarks, then we need to get an intelligent and reasonably uncorrupt judicial system (yeah, I know, fat chance of that happening within our lifetimes) to overturn these sorts of things.
"Adobe Illustrator" and "KDE Killustrator" are not easilly confused. Indeed, "Adobe Illustrator" and "Killustrator" would be difficult for anyone to confuse, familiar or not with the KDE GNU/Linux product. "Illustrator" can be confused with many things, killustrator included. It is a common English word, and has no place in an even remotely sane world as someone's private intellectual property.
Flash content is currently viewable by more net users than Java is This is why you are starting to see Flash ads all over the place...
That in my book is the most compelling reason to disable flash, and plugins in general: vastly improved signal to noise ratio.
... and it is outstanding.
... what one can do with Blender in a very short time is truly amazing.
... contrary to what some anti-free software bigots are saying (it shouldn't be necessary, but I will point out that Blender is not, I repeat, not free software, although NaN currently doesn't charge for it, making such anti-free software criticisms doubly misguided).
Yes, it took me a couple of weeks to learn (3-4 hours / evening) surfing the online tutorial sites and trying stuff out, but this is not unreasonable for a piece of software of this sophistication and power.
DivX v. 3 files (viewable under xmms-avi and xine using the most excellent avifile library) of some of my work can be seen here (freely available under the Free Media License)
I bought "The Official Blender 2.0 Guide" from NaN in order to support the free (as in beer) nature of Blender and encourage the making of blender GPLed, i.e. free (as in speech). Whether or not NaN choose to do so is of course up to them, although I think with their business model of giving away the software and charging for the documentation GPLing the software would give them much wider exposure (e.g. availability in all Linux distributions, etc.).
However, although my initial purchase of the book was somewhat alturistic, I have found it to be an invaluable reference. The same can be said for "The Blender Book" which I purchased later in order to learn some of the more advanced modelling techniques.
Very cool software, and very excellent documentation
I have a Linux system, so I use pdf2ps and ghostview. They could use the Acrobat Reader or something else if they don't want to install Linux. I could of course use StarOffice, but this seems to work just as well.
You could also use acroread 4.0, or xpdf, or konqueror, or ghostscript. All work great for reading PDF files under GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. There is definitely no shortage of readers for reading PDFs, nor of word processors capable of writing PDFS (staroffice, applix to name just two).
Although it is most certainly distasteful, it is (under current law) their right to do so.
... another example of how the English language has been manipulated by the use of such terms as "copyright" rather than "copy restriction," which is a more accurate and descriptive term for what the law is designed to accomplish. Very similar to other forms of linguistic manipulation and propaganda, such as calling those who violate the copy restrictions placed on software by law "pirates" or "thieves," in direct opposition to the reality of their actions (nothing is being stolen, merely replicated, and no acts of violence are being committed at sea).
Stictly speaking, it isn't a "right," such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to not testify against yourself, etc. It is a privelege bestowed by law, for which the constitution explicitly allows but does not grant outright.
The mistake of calling such priveleges "rights" is a common one and an understandable one
It behooves us to, where possible, refrain from adopting their choice of language, as language does by in large define the parameters of our thoughts and to some degree the limits of what we can think. Certainly in this context it biases the conversation to the self-serving point of view the Copyright Cartels wish to promote and to some degree undermines our ability to discuss the topic with anything even remotely resembling an unbiased or criticial perspective.
And if we ever get an Open Source version of FrameMaker running, it ought to be called Manual Labor!
Or simply FBI, famous for numerous frameups of innocents for everything from subversion to murder ("Frame 'em Before Investigating")
You make some good points, but I think your conclusion is wrong ... not because your reasoning is wrong, but because you overlook, or perhaps just ignore, the underlying economic reality: the free software community doesn't have the money or legal resources to burn in order to fight this battle.
:-)
... descriptive and to the point. I would stop short of digging up famous specialists who are only famous in their field, but would argue no one would confuse the likes of Monet or DaVinci.
Why draw the line at Illustrator? Why hasn't MS taken issue with KWord? Maybe because it's clearly not an MS product? (Hello Adobe? Paying attention? "KIllustrator" != "Adobe Illustrator"; nobody with a shred of sense would confuse the two.) Why hasn't Corel taken issue with KPresenter or StarOffice Draw?
Somebody rein in the Adobe litigators. They seem to have too much time on their hands.
Yes, despite the nonsense pro-intellectual property zealots have been spewing, Adobe is ethically, morally, and perhaps even legally in the wrong. But, as I said before, it is a waste of our community's limited resources to persue this sort of thing in court, especially when the legal outcome is uncertain. Keep in mind that it is large corporations, of the sort Adobe is, that purchased the original trademark laws and their subsequent "enhancements." Whether or not they've actually purchased the courts is an open question, although the DeCSS and Microsoft Appeals decisions would indicate that even the judicial branch has been largely undermined.
Whatever one's personal beliefs on these issues, I think it stands to reason that our efforts would be far better spent coming up with a witty and unassailable naming scheme. It doesn't have to fit every kde app ever made, just the ones whose names are vulnerable to this sort of litigious thuggary.
Of course, (re)naming KVideoEditor Spielberg might have problems all its own.
All in all, I quite like the DaVinci, Monet, and Virgil suggestions, but one need not enforce it religiously across the entire board. Kivio could for example simply be renamed KCharts
That is, of course, complete FUD and has been refuted so many times that I need to (re)do it here...
should read
That is, of course, complete FUD and has been refuted so many times that I shouldn't need to (re)do it here...
argh!
Yes, and it's doing such a good job at it that even *you* can't exploit it commercially.
That is, of course, complete FUD and has been refuted so many times that I need to (re)do it here. Suffice it to say that the GPL does allow for commercial exploitation, and indeed numerous companies make a very nice (if not obscenely Microsoft-style monopolistic) profit doing so (Cygnus, Red Hat, TiVo, Caldera, IBM, CheapBytes, and countless smaller consultancies, ISP, etc.). What is does not allow you to do is to deny others access to the software's code, or to close the source of a derivative product. You can sell the software for whatever the market will bear, provide value added services, incorporate the product into other products (so long as any derivative software is GPLed).
Scribe was a text-document processing system.
... well, the comment was off the cuff and not researched, which I hope any final choice of anternative name would be.
...
Oops
For Killustrator, taking from another comment discussing Hershey Kisses, why not:
KDE Illustrations Software System - Kiss. Unless, of course, some trademark has already been filed for smooching software
The American people are pretty radical? We don't accept authority as proof for a claim?
... we consume it on a daily basis, whether we are omnivores or vegitarians, every cell in our bodies is constructed from materials taken from the destruction of other lifeforms.
What I actually said was "[...] as a whole the American people are pretty practical [...]" I said nothing at all about the American people being radical, liberal, conservative, or reactionary. Indeed, you can't justifiably say any such thing, since the land is composed of numerous radicals, liberals, conservatives, and reactionaries, with none of those groups having a majority (as evidenced by the results of the last election).
It sounds like you need to talk to some Europeans, or at the very least see what other countries are like before assuming we're a bunch of progressive radicals with the human race's best interests at heart. Seriously.
It seems you need to take a remedial course in reading comprehension, and stop putting words into my mouth which I never said (nor typed). I not only have spoken with Europeans, I have lived many years in various places all over the world, including Europe. I too find the United States to be annoyingly conservative, even reactionary, but that does not change what I said one bit. Americans as a whole, be they liberal or conservative, radical or ractionary, are generally a fairly practical people and need some convincing before they will simply accept something at face value. Once convinced of something they may be less inclined to change their views than others...then again, they may not.
And fetishization of property only suits those with property, which may explain why I'm not as enchanted with the notion of sacred property as you seem to be.
I never called property sacred. It isn't, any more than anything else in this world is. Life isn't sacred either
What I did say was that I would defend my property if some clown like you tries to steal or vandalize it. And that if some clown such as you were to attack my fundamental freedoms then you'd better be prepared to kill me, because that is the only way I would willingly submit to the kind of authoritarian autocracy the sort of "eco-terrorism" being espoused by these imbecils implies.
You can accuse me of fetishizing my freedom, and perhaps even be correct, but of property, merely because I deny you the privelege of taking or destroying what is mine? Please.
And that is the final morsel I shall feed you, troll.
Koffice -> KDE Office Suite
... perhaps famous sketchers or draftsmen for Killustrator, famous authors for kword, famouse painters for kpaint, and so on...
Killistrator -> VectorDraw
kword -> Scribe
kpaint -> Artiste
and so on. Rather than fighting this sort of battle on their turf (yes, it is rediculous that generic words like, oh, say, "word," "illustrator," "paint," and so on are trademarked, but these large corporations have already purchased all three branches of our government rather cheaply and hold the home-court advantage in an excess of funds and lawyers to win even the most unfair and indefensible of legal fights.
Far better to just make up unique names and spend the money that would have been spent on legal duels filing trademarks for those names instead. I'm sure numerous people would donate to such a cause.
Anyone have any better ideas for names
Comparing the communications charges I'm paying now compared to what I was, I can assure you the US system is very much NOT a better deal. Given the economies of scale that should be possible here it's very surprising how much more people seem to be happy to pay for a substandard service.
... the extra money is money well spent, at least paying for a service rather than subsidizing a disservice. But I digress...).
... many do not.) Building a free market with privately owned wire and cabling, without having the owners of the wire and cabling use unfair tactics to destroy their competition, is hideously complex. Perhaps not even really possible. It is akin to trying to have a free market with privately owned toll roads everywhere you drive, and having those roads owned by one or another of the major car manufactuerers or trucking companies and then hoping to achieve "fair" competition through regulations.
... oh no!) is absent and our physical economy works rather well. Unfortunately this basic concept is missing from the realm of electricity and communications, so instead of a relatively simple system to build and manage we end up with a web of unmaintainable and incomprehensible regulations to try and simulate the same results. This is a lesson that will probably take at least another generation or two for the United States to learn, possible now only because communism in its authoritarian form is dead and the need for mindless propaganda against the very concept of a public commons is diminished. Unfortunately, a people fed on a steady diet of such propaganda will only be able to reevalute some of the more absurd implications of such propaganda over time ... certainly not overnight, and probably not anytime soon.
People here are NOT happy with substandard service or high prices. Just ask any Chicagoan how they feel about Ameritech (hint: I switched entirely to AT&T wireless, with its additional cost, simply to not have to ever deal with Ameritech again. I made the switch 3 years ago and haven't regretted it for a second
The problem is that our market really isn't as free as you think. The last mile of wire is almost always owned by the local telco monopoly, with a complex web of regulations dictating how and for how much access to that wire will be "sold" to competitors (assuming a particular area has competitors for local service
Far, far easier to nationalize the roads and create a level playing field for all of the players, be they car manufacturers, trucking companies, private buslines (e.g. Greyhound), or taxi services. Ironic, isn't it, that only the most extreme of free market zealots call for privatization of roads, while everyone accepts the privatization of other basic infrastructures that lead to the kinds of telecommunications horrors we have in the US.
It is no coincidence that so many DSL services are going under, and that none of them are the local telcos providing the last mile of wire. Sometime's the FCC manages the balancing act moderately well and a semblance of a free market can exist, even if it is very overpriced. Other times, such as with DSL, they don't get it right and providors die off like flies.
Fortunately, with our highway system, this sort of misguided notion that government has no role to play in owning the infrastructure (it's socialism
As long as it is the end user, and not ISPs, that are filtering based upon the ORBs databases, then it isn't censorship, rather it is simply filtering based upon another's suggestion.
One could argue that personal email is not a public forum, such as USENET and places like slashdot, and that any form of filtering, at any point along the way, is not censorship in the real sense of the word.
In any event, as long as the end user is informed, and has a choice, it isn't the kind of institutional censorship so often, and so correctly, decried here, it is merely voluntary filtering of what those who subscribe to it view as noise, as is their right.
As for slashdot being united about anything, a quick perusal of any discussion, on any topic, should dissuade you of that erroneous assumption.
I'm one of the first (and probably loudest) to complain about the current intellectual property cartels and government enforced monopolies that threaten our free market system and, more importantly, our basic freedoms themselves. And while at some point revolution may be required to set things right, espousing such, much less persuing it in violent fashion, before every other nonviolent, legal means has been exhausted is just plain irresponsible and self-defeating.
Say what you like about Americans because they don't fawn all over your particular radical agenda, but as a whole the American people are pretty practical, and if you are to convince them of your views you must, in turn, provide practical proof, or at least strong evidence, of what you espouse. And no, appealing to authority isn't enough -- American's are notoriously unwilling to believe authorities for authority's sake -- you must provide cold, hard facts.
When the Boston Tea Party took place a majority (not all, but a majority) of the people were already convinced that they were being taxed into bankrupcy without representation, and with no means within the system to do anything about it. They were left with only two options: revolt, or be taxed into starvation. They chose revolt.
You, and those who espouse your, shall we say, questionable views, have many choices. You can speak out (freedom of speech is under attack, but not yet dead), you can protest, you can lobby government, you can raise consumer awareness.
But if you ever try to torch one molecule of my property I will do everything in my power to destroy you financially, physically, and mentally. As a citizen of a nominally free country there is nothing that compells me to adopt your point of view, and if you are thinking of using violence to coerce me into adopting your point of view you'd better be prepared to use deadly force, because that is exactly what I will use to defend my freedom against such an attack.
What is sad, really, are the people who can't be bothered to vote, can't be bothered to educate themselves on how our (still nominally) democratic system works and how to be effective in it, who choose instead to escalate every little cause to violent revolution before having even bothered trying any more peaceful and reasonable approaches in getting their views heard. Or, having had their views rejected, feel somehow that this gives them the right to undemocratically coerce the unbelieveing majority to adhere to their notions anyway through force of violence.
In a democratic system, even a nominally democratic system such as exists in much of the world today, the majority sets policy. If that majority happens to be wrong about a particular policy (e.g. the War on Drugs, allowing obscene copyright terms, allowing patents, etc.) then that is indeed a problem. However, I will take our dysfunctional democracy over your terrorism and autocracy any day, no matter how stupid the resulting policies are.
I'm beginning to wonder where our moral responsibility to protect an idiot from himself kicks in...
... the natural deselection of the idiots and corresponding gradual improvement of the breed.
There is absolutely no moreal responsibility to protect idiots from themselves, and in trying to do so you will end up trampling the rights, and dreams, of those who you misidentify as idiots and who would otherwise choose to take a big risk in order to achieve an even bigger payback.
In addition, by protecting "idiots" from themselves you do a disservice to the entire human race, by preventing nature's own cure for stupidity
Seriously, though, anyone should have the right to follow their dream, no matter how foolish or stupid the rest of us think it to be. Had humans incorporated a "moral responsibility" to protect idiots from themselves any earlier than the second half of the 20th century, the Wright Brothers would have never flown, Columbus (and before him the Vikings) would have never sailed to America, and countless other risky inventions and undertakings would never have been permitted. The aversion to risk we have somehow incorporated into a misguided ethos of "big daddy protecting the small minded people from themselves" in the last century is second only to the Patent system in stifling the progress we could have otherwise made.
It is past time we put and end to this nonsense once and for all. If RocketDude wishes to launch, let him launch. If he dies (the probable outcome) then the species is rid of one more fool. If he lives, he will have accomplished something remarkable, upon which he and others can build. It is by taking such risks, sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, that enduring progress is truly made.
Yes, Napster can do what it likes with their servers, up to and including actions like this which make the service vastly less useful to their customers, and unusable by anyone using a real OS.[1]
... kind of like, no, exactly what is happening here.
What you imply in your statement (however inadvertantly) is that, because Napster may do what they like with their own servers, their customers should not speak up when they do something those customers don't like. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the key ingredients to a healthy and successful free market is customer awareness, and the ability of consumers, and groups of consumers, to share their experiences and complaints with one another and to find a competing product when the service they are getting is of poor quality, overpriced, or has other drawbacks (environmentally unfriendly, invades ones privacy, whatever).
Consumers informing one another that a particular product or service sucks, and letting each other know about better alternatives
[1](Gratuitious anti-MS Jab as counterpoint to the recent plethora of gratuitious pro-MS Jabs at Free Software): Real Os defined to be one not written or sold by Microsoft.
Oh, grow up. I've been buying O'Reilly books for years and I don't recall ever getting them for free. Just like Microsoft, O'Reilly is in business to make money.
I always find it amusing how people, Americans in particular, find it perfectly acceptable to apply one set of ethical standards to everyday life, and a very different, much more lax, set of ethical standards to activities engaged in in the persuit of wealth. The notion that actions which would be almost universally condemned in private life are accepted, even lauded, when conducted in the context of business, is perhaps one of the most noxious, yet enduring cultural legacies of the Regan/Bush era.
There are some few of us who do still adhere to the notion that actions which are wrong when conducted in one's private life remain wrong even when the goal persued happens to be the almighty dollar. Tim O'Reilly represents himself as a leader and friend of the Open Source and Free Software movements, then betrays that role, and the trust he has garnered playing it, by providing some of its most zealous foes with a forum to espouse their own propoganda, under the very auspices of a conference perporting to support that very movement. Only someone very gullible would equate the marketing propaganda of Mundie and others with "information," and only a fool would be blind to the implications of what Tim O'Reilly is helping Microsoft do.
I'll say it again. Tim O'Reilly is not a friend of the Free Software movement. He is not a friend of the Open Source movement. He is a friend of Tim O'Reilly, and will persue his own interests to the detriment of those of both of the aforementioned movements if he believes doing so will move his own personal agenda, in this case the accumulation of wealth, forward. It would behoove anyone inclined to look to him as an ally or leader to remember that hard, cold fact.
The fact that many people -- not just Microsoft -- see the GPL as an impediment to their right to sell software at a profit shouldn't surprise anyone anymore than the fact that O'Reilly expects you to pay for thier books.
And here you reveal yourself to be the troll that you are. "Many people" indeed. Some few, relatively speaking, feel threatened by the plethora of free software making their expensive and often inferior products obsolete. Certainly those whose business models rely on the incarceration of the customer into their product line by denying them freedom of choice and the basic consumer freedoms granted them by the GPL do. However, once again, only a fool incapable of managing their own codebase would feel at all threatened by the GPL alone, for it nowhere compells one to use GPL code in their project. Indeed, the default situation provided by copyright law is that no code other than one's own may be incorporated into one's project. Microsoft, and others like them, need only continue to do as they purport to have always done: write their own code and leave the GPLed code being given away to the rest of us.
If you're real issue is a denial of the right to own and sell software, then cut to the chase and declare yourself.
This is truely the most amusing sentence of a very amusing troll. I point out that the actions of one who sells himself as an Open Source / Free Software leader are detrimental to those movements, and that although he is aware of it he knows he'll get more business (in the form of $500 (or whatever $) / person attendees flocking to hear what Microsoft will say in an Open Source conference) and so is willing to do such harm regardless, and that in light of this the community should be wary of him, his motives, and most particularly his actions, and you immediately extrapolate from that the absurd notion that I somehow reject the concept of property, merely because I object to someone using unethical means to accumulate more of it.
Thank you. I haven't been quite so entertained for some time.
Why does he keep treating these people like they are legititmate, in the face of such palpable absurdities as Alchin/Ballmer/Mundie on the GPL and the recent MIT EULA? MS cannot make an honest public statement
... he'd like to get into the (currently much larger) Microsoft market and become giga-rich.
Tim O'Reilly is not a friend of Free Software, nor is he a friend of Open Source. He is a friend of Tim O'Reilly, and he has discovered that merely getting rich off of Free Software and Open Source isn't enough to satisfy his appetites
He gave Microsoft shill's a forum at his Open Source conference to spread their anti-free software fud and legitimize their proprietary "shared source" as though it were somehow "open source" (it isn't).
He is now lending support (and percieved legitimacy) to Microsoft's most serious intellectual (I use the term very loosely) attack on free software through his publishing company by promoting interviews such as this.
In short, he is selling us all down the river, open source and free software advocates alike, for his own personal profit. It is past time that we stopped giving him the time of day and started treating him in a manner appropriate to his behavior: as an erstwhile colleague who has betrayed us, who worthy of little respect and absolutely no trust.
What is interesting is what isn't said. To whit, 25,000 licenses bought. 10,000 are replacing existing Solaris Applix installations. Where are the other 15,000 licenses going? Quite likely, numerous installations on Windows or other boxes, replacing MS Office in those locations. Why? Because of price, performance, but most importantly, because of guaranteed compatability between Windows SO, GNU/Linux SO, and Solaris SO, and the ability for IT soldiers and/or civil servants to get at the source and fix a problem if a show stopper should arise.
This does open the possibility of replacing Windoze boxes with GNU/Linux or FreeBSD boxes down the road, and the DoD almost certainly took this into account when making their decision. Bottom line, they will no longer be held hostage by a single, powerful vendor. Standard military doctorine requires a decision like this be made, whenever such a possibility arises. The alternative is a single point of failure and an unacceptable exposure to coercion (possibly, but not necessarilly, by Microsoft, either). Star Office is Free Software, which means that the DoD also retains the freedom to dump Sun if and when they choose, without losing access to their data and documents because of a proprietary storage format.
I hate the term 'Viral Software' as applied to open-source licenses, by the way.
The please, please don't use the term. It is not only a negative connotation, it is entirely wrong, a denigrative label applied to the GPL back during the early BSD vs GPL flamefests and rebutted very thoroughly in those threads (search groups.google.com for gpl bsd license if you're interested in dredging up old grudges). Since those early, volite days both RMS and the BSD folks have chilled out quite a bit and done as much as they could to reconcile their differences, and to respect those differences where reconciliation was not possible. This includes the changes to the BSD license making it GPL compatible as well as the recent endorsement by the Free Software Foundation for releasing the ogg/vorbis specification under the BSD license (to facilitate widespread implimentation in embedded hardware. think: portable ogg/vorbis players).
The GPL is not a virus, it is a vaccine, an innoculation against later abuse of your code by having someone, such as Microsoft, take your hard work, incorporate it into a proprietary product which is then extended and kept closed, marginalizing your project in the process.
The BSD license lacks this protection, but it does have an advantage in that it more straighforwardly allows code to be (re)implemented in hardware and combined with other proprietary works where it makes sense. It is obvious to all but the most zealous that both licenses have their place, and are appropriate in some situations and inappropriate in others.
Freedom is important, and in my opinion today's climate, as epitomized by the anti-freedom dishonesty and FUD Microsoft and its lackeys are spreading, we need all the innoculation against abuse we can get. That is why I prefer the GPL in most instances to the FreeBSD license, and why I based my own Free Media License on aspects of the GNU GPL (and GNU FDL).
Don't kid yourselves. We may not think of this as a war, and certainly if we take the rhetoric of the Microsoft lurkers in the crowd here and at K5 seriously we will continue to not think of it as a war, but make no mistake about it: Microsoft considers it a war and they will not stop until our freedom to use, modify, copy, and distribute the software we write is gone. Either through legal maneuvers, or by cutting us off from developers, users, and (perhaps most importantly) hardware manufacturers. This is a battle for our very freedom, and we should be neither complacent nor shy in informing others of exactly what is at stake.