Ah but lets not forget that even in countries where soccer is the usual term, football would be an unambiguous synonym for it. Almost anywhere outside the US, no one is going to get confused...
Well, except for in Canada, Australia, and Ireland, each of which, like the US, has its own native game called "football". So that's like, four of the five biggest primarily-English-speaking countries in the world. (The fifth, the UK, doesn't call it "soccer".)
But, if you ignore the overwhelming majority, I suppose you're right. If your definition of "anywhere outside the US" is "Jamaica and only Jamaica", then you're indisputably correct!:)
Music doesn't become popular because it's free to use or anything like that. It becomes popular because it's "catchy".
Catchy music is a dime a dozen. Music doesn't become popular because it's catchy (although not being catchy can hinder its popularity). Music becomes popular because it's promoted, normally by large companies with plenty of money to throw around, who promote it in return for a (generally obscenely large) share of the profit.
Releasing (some of) your music for free is a form of promotion! It may be a lot less effective than a massive media blitz and payola, but if you can't persuade (or don't want) the big companies to buy your soul in return for some more traditional promotion, it may be one of the most effective forms of self-promotion available to you. So yes, copyleft could become a competitive advantage. Not only does it increase your exposure by providing a broader potential audience, it also increases good will, making it more likely that people will think you're the kind of artist they want to support.
Here's an exercise for you: two bands, both play fairly similar music, so they're competing for the same audience. Both have a modest audience that likes them about equally. Then one begins releasing some of its music for free. Which one is likely to start growing its audience?
Here's another exercise. Two musicians who refuse to leave their parent's basement. One posts his music on the Internet, the other one is only ever heard by his parents and his cat. Which one is likely to find some fans?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go serenade the cat.:)
In Dutch, I'm sure that's true, but if this word were to enter English as a term meaning "illuminated intergalactic dust cloud", then it might well follow English rules of pluralization, as so many borrowed words do (e.g. "ninjas" or "octopuses"[*]).
The real problem is that the stupid summary treats "voorwerp" as if it really were already adopted into English with the given meaning. The statement "Voorwerps are so rare" is simply false, because voorwerp means object, and objects are not rare.
[*] And no, "octopi", while also an acceptable pluralization in English is not a counterexample, because it uses pluralization rules of a different language (Greek v. Latin), which is a distinctly English sort of thing to do.
Technically, "voorwerp" is simply a dutch word meaning "object", so, while you could say that "looks like a voorwerp," technically, so does this car, or this shell.
Of course, it is possible that "voorwerp" will now enter the English language as a word meaning "illuminated intergalactic dust cloud", but let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?:)
Football is a game where you move the ball with your feet, not with your hands.
Actually, some games called "football" forbid moving the ball with your feet. The etymology is not clear, but there's a strong case that the term refers to the fact that the players are on foot (as opposed to, say, being on horseback).
Really? You're using India, Chad and the Sudan as counterexamples? Let's take a look at countries where English is the primary language, and...whoops, there goes just about every blue spot on your map! Anyway, what they really call it in India is "not cricket so who cares?":)
(To be fair, I've seen sources that suggest that Australia and Ireland should be in the "disputed category" rather than the "soccer" category.)
I also note that the article linked to that map you referenced says of those countries that call it "football", "In many of these countries, the term "soccer" is also widely used." This leads to the possible conclusion that both the statements "most of the English-speaking world calls it 'soccer'" and "most of the English-speaking world calls it 'football'" are both true. Without further hard evidence, I have to conclude that both you and the person you're responding to are talking out your asses.:)
Umm, "atom" != "molecule". And even if you think that's a quibble, original poster's point that "hydrophilic" means "water-loving" is important. Oil, a hydrocarbon, contains an awful lot of hydrogen (atoms) as well. (Of course, the "hydro-" in "hydrocarbon" does refer to hydrogen, just to confuse matters.)
So far as I can tell, it just means that now the BIOS is going to consist of a complicated, semi-unintelligible set of menus
Well, I didn't RTFA (Slashdot is too prone to link to content-free blogs or PR pieces), but I did google some of the key terms, and and from what I can tell, EFI sounds like it could be Big Win. Little things like CPU-independent drivers, extensibility (hence the 'E' in the name), and a built-in shell(!) and boot manager all sound like bonuses to me. Personally, I wish they'd just gone ahead and used OpenBoot, but NIH is a powerful force, and this sounds similar enough that I'm definitely willing to take a wait-and-see attitude. (I once wrote a version of Life for OpenBoot--but enough about my obsessive geekiness.)
I'm not quite sure why you think replacing one set of arcane menu options with another set of arcane menu options is such a disimprovement, no matter which one uses simple text, but I assure you that anyone who has used OpenBoot/OpenFirmware will be more than happy to see the bios go the way of the dodo, even if the replacement is still a bit less than ideal.
Still, from what I gather by reading other comments, it does sound like the article linked by Slashdot is more of a puff-piece aimed at computerphobic idiots than an informative article aimed at techies, and I don't actually know enough about EFI to be absolutely sure that it's a good thing, so I understand your trepidation. But still, this is slashdot--you should know better than to trust the summary or the linked article!:)
For some reason, America just doesn't understand how to do proper regulation. Every attempt at regulation ends up causing more problems than it manages to fix, or the lack of regulation ends up allowing horrid behavior to occur.
"Every attempt"? Nice rhetorical device, but I think you seriously underestimate how many regulations there are, and how many of them work reasonably well--not to mention how many things are unregulated without problem. The thing is that when regulation works well, it's almost unnoticeable, but when it fails, the results are often spectacularly obvious (as with your examples). This is the "man bites dog" effect: dogs frequently bite men, so that's not news, but the other way around is definitely news, so if you go just by the news, you'd conclude that men are more likely to bite dogs than the other way around.
For that matter, while I would tend to agree with you about other western nations, there are some notable exceptions. An obvious example is US vs. UK laws about libel and slander; in the US, truth is considered a defense, a proposition I find it hard to imagine that anyone could reject. Likewise, while copyright law is a general mess on both sides of the pond, I think "fair use" is a good example of something that the US got more right than most.
It's too large for a phone, but too small for a tablet.
Right, because the fact that there have been Internet Tablets with a similar size and form for as long as the iPhone has been on the market doesn't matter? If it doesn't have the Apple logo on it, it doesn't exist? Only Apple is allowed to define "Tablet"? I have no idea what you're basing your opinion on, but it doesn't seem to match the facts.
On the other hand, I totally agree that this doesn't seem to stand out from the other Android and Maemo systems available, and I'm not sure why anyone would bother.
You mean the clause mentioned here? The one that hasn't been a part of the BSD license since 1999? That advertising clause?
Except for the name of the organization, the WebM license is word-for-word identical to the license currently used by the primary copyright owners of the product known as "BSD". If that's not "an exact BSD license", then I don't know what is.
Might I further suggest that flavored coffee which appeals to children needs to be immediatedly banned.
I'm not a big fan of your other suggestion, but I'm with you 100% on this one! If I never accidentally get a flavored coffee again, it'll still be too soon!:)
You're not drinking enough. I used to start with a cup or two at home, then drink coffee all day long at work. I was probably drinking somewhere between six to ten cups a day. I decided to go cold turkey, and by the end of the next day, I was capital M Miserable! Now (years later) I'm back up to about two cups a day, but I can and do frequently go without on weekends without any noticeable effects.
It's one possible solution to the problem of classifying Ring Species. For the simplest case, where populations (A+B) could be classified as a species, and populations (B+C) could as well, but (A+C) could not, how many species do you have? I could make strong arguments for one, two, two-point-five, and three.
It gets even trickier with longer rings/chains. If (A+B), (B+C), and (C+D) all meet a definition of "species", but (A+D) doesn't (requirement of "ring species"), that still leaves open questions about (A+C) and (B+D). One possible solution is to use larger or smaller fractions depending on the answers to those pairings.
Of course, there's also the issue of defining "species"--what Wikipedia calls the "Species Problem". Note that I was careful to say above, "could be classified as a species", or "meet a definition of species". The common definition, "able to produce fertile offspring" is almost meaningless to microbiologists (where sex--genetic sharing--is separate from reproduction) and unanswerable by paleontologists, since extinct species rarely reproduce.
As Dawkins argues, the whole concepts of species and families and kingdoms seems to stem from an attempt to inflict Platonic idealism on a messy and ambiguous reality. Life is chaotic. Should we be surprised if it turns out to have a fractal nature and fractional dimension?:)
But scientists *do* say these things for a number of reasons
And the corrolary here is that not everything scientists say is science. I heard one sneeze the other day, and I was--amazingly--able to not interpret it as a statement of science.
Unlike priests, scientists (the individuals) make no claims of infallibility. This, I think, is what gives people who don't understand science the most difficulty.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy. Not the only one, of course, but further study quickly reveals that we are social animals. Studies of the human brain reveal powerful empathic circuitry that may well form the basis for the Golden Rule. It's not as strong as the sex drive (and even that can be suppressed), but there does seem to be a biological basis for some foundational ethics. In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Of course, science is unlikely to tell us which fork to use at a formal dinner, or why, but it can definitely reveal a lot about basic ethics. I might go so far as to say that if it can't be explained by science, it's not ethics, but manners.
Likewise, science isn't the be-all-end-all in determining what kind of government you should set up
Not at this point. There's a definite paucity of data, as you point out. We've only tried a handful of kinds, and this is something where the negative consequences of random experimentation are too great to risk on live populations. Nevertheless, models and simulations can reveal a great deal, although our current tools limit the scope, and therefore the effectiveness of such modeling. I agree that science is not yet the "be-all-end-all" here, but to suggest that it can't ever be is naive and foolish. Heck, it may well turn out that there is no "best" kind of government--that you always have tradeoffs. Nevertheless, that can only be proven with...wait for it...science. And if science can help us understand those tradeoffs (which, at least in theory, it certainly can), then it can help us make a more informed decision.
Science does have limits, no question, but your view of those limits seems hopelessly naive.
I do hope that people will ask themselves how they would respond to this parallel case:
I fail to see the parallels. The case you describe doesn't offer any obvious evidence that the person was joking, nor do you suggest that the person regularly passes tests for non-bigotry (to the best of my knowledge, no such tests exist with even a fraction of the accuracy of drug tests). So, in the completely different case you describe, I would, indeed, respond differently.
I think your case is so far from being parallel that it's nearly perpendicular.:)
Actually, I believe the FSF owns some small amount of the code in the kernel as well, but I suspect they're overextended trying to enforce the license for code they more-or-less own outright, e.g. GNU utils and gcc. The kernel has dozens of copyright holders with much deeper pockets, who are in a much better position to pursue a case like this. Examples, include IBM, Sun, Oracle, Intel, Red Hat, HP--heck, even SCO has (perfectly legitimate) code in the kernel, though they're doing their best to forget it. (Ironically, SCO could be happily suing company after company to our loud applause if they'd decided to go after people who were actually violating their copyrights, instead of suing over non-violations of copyrights they didn't own.):)
Asking the authors of the legal documents for assistance as expert witnesses is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
Ok, it's more like asking the authors of the lease form than the printers. Nevertheless, it's silly to expect them to intervene. Asking them for assistance? Well, they have FAQs. Asking them to appear as expert witnesses? There's tens of thousands of people (at least) using the license they published, so don't sound so shocked when they say no. Anyway, as I pointed out, his grounds to sue are pretty dubious in the first place.
If he'd mentioned taking any other action than "approaching the FSF", I probably wouldn't have said a word. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll bet good money that he was expecting them to solve his little problem, and not just to appear as experts.
Indeed, it's worth another reminder that the FSF is not in the job of policing GPL abuse. They publish the license for others to use, but they're only going to (only can) try to enforce it for code they actually own. Asking the FSF to intervene in a random GPL case is sort of like asking the printers to intervene in a dispute between you and your car lease company, simply because they printed the lease forms.
Furthermore, while the GPL is intended to grant freedoms to you and other third parties, it is, by the fact that it leverages existing laws, difficult for a third party to enforce. It's easy to imagine the following dialog:
You: They won't give me all the code as required by the license. Them: The license itself says its not mandatory and we don't have to accept it. You: It also says that if you don't accept it, then normal copyright law applies, and they don't have permission to use the code. Them: That's as may be, but you have no standing to sue us over the copyrights. Judge: Agreed, case dismissed.
Of course, this means that they will have more-or-less admitted to copyright violation in open court, which is a pretty risky strategy, but suddenly, you're out a bunch of money and facing a dead end. Better, as QuantumG suggested, to get ahold of the copyright holders up front.
The infamous "second system effect" can be countered by following the old principle, "write one to throw away" as long as you make sure that it's the second system that you throw away! Of course, this is often what actually happens in practice, but it is rarely what's planned.:)
Only if it was unconditional. If (as with most free software licenses) it was conditioned on actions that would ordinarily violate copyright, the court might simply ignore the clause as irrelevant (and probably whimsical*), and rule that you're guilty of copyright violation. In fact, as with the GPL, it's unlikely that the license would ever be mentioned in court, since the plaintiff has a straightforward copyright violation case, and the defendant can't claim to be dead and thus protected from prosecution by the license.
* "You may ignore my copyrights on this code as long as you're dead" is pretty easy to interpret as "you may not ignore my copyrights". Similar grants of license to High Elves, Cephalopods, or natives of the planet Ferenginar would likely have the same result. Claiming that the "as long as you're dead/elven/octopoid/Ferengi" clause can simply be severed, and the license interpreted as "you may ignore my copyrights" is quite a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah but lets not forget that even in countries where soccer is the usual term, football would be an unambiguous synonym for it. Almost anywhere outside the US, no one is going to get confused...
Well, except for in Canada, Australia, and Ireland, each of which, like the US, has its own native game called "football". So that's like, four of the five biggest primarily-English-speaking countries in the world. (The fifth, the UK, doesn't call it "soccer".)
But, if you ignore the overwhelming majority, I suppose you're right. If your definition of "anywhere outside the US" is "Jamaica and only Jamaica", then you're indisputably correct! :)
Heh, I'd mod you informative if you weren't replying to my post! (Can't mod and post in the same discussion).
I think I like the name "Hanny's Voorwerp" even better now that I know there's an element of irony in it. :)
Music doesn't become popular because it's free to use or anything like that. It becomes popular because it's "catchy".
Catchy music is a dime a dozen. Music doesn't become popular because it's catchy (although not being catchy can hinder its popularity). Music becomes popular because it's promoted, normally by large companies with plenty of money to throw around, who promote it in return for a (generally obscenely large) share of the profit.
Releasing (some of) your music for free is a form of promotion! It may be a lot less effective than a massive media blitz and payola, but if you can't persuade (or don't want) the big companies to buy your soul in return for some more traditional promotion, it may be one of the most effective forms of self-promotion available to you. So yes, copyleft could become a competitive advantage. Not only does it increase your exposure by providing a broader potential audience, it also increases good will, making it more likely that people will think you're the kind of artist they want to support.
Here's an exercise for you: two bands, both play fairly similar music, so they're competing for the same audience. Both have a modest audience that likes them about equally. Then one begins releasing some of its music for free. Which one is likely to start growing its audience?
Here's another exercise. Two musicians who refuse to leave their parent's basement. One posts his music on the Internet, the other one is only ever heard by his parents and his cat. Which one is likely to find some fans?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go serenade the cat. :)
In Dutch, I'm sure that's true, but if this word were to enter English as a term meaning "illuminated intergalactic dust cloud", then it might well follow English rules of pluralization, as so many borrowed words do (e.g. "ninjas" or "octopuses"[*]).
The real problem is that the stupid summary treats "voorwerp" as if it really were already adopted into English with the given meaning. The statement "Voorwerps are so rare" is simply false, because voorwerp means object, and objects are not rare.
[*] And no, "octopi", while also an acceptable pluralization in English is not a counterexample, because it uses pluralization rules of a different language (Greek v. Latin), which is a distinctly English sort of thing to do.
Technically, "voorwerp" is simply a dutch word meaning "object", so, while you could say that "looks like a voorwerp," technically, so does this car, or this shell.
Of course, it is possible that "voorwerp" will now enter the English language as a word meaning "illuminated intergalactic dust cloud", but let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? :)
I checked, and...no, slashdot does not have an "insane" moderation option, so I'm not quite sure how to respond. :)
Football is a game where you move the ball with your feet, not with your hands.
Actually, some games called "football" forbid moving the ball with your feet. The etymology is not clear, but there's a strong case that the term refers to the fact that the players are on foot (as opposed to, say, being on horseback).
most of the English speaking world call it soccer
According to wikipedia, you are wrong.
Really? You're using India, Chad and the Sudan as counterexamples? Let's take a look at countries where English is the primary language, and...whoops, there goes just about every blue spot on your map! Anyway, what they really call it in India is "not cricket so who cares?" :)
(To be fair, I've seen sources that suggest that Australia and Ireland should be in the "disputed category" rather than the "soccer" category.)
I also note that the article linked to that map you referenced says of those countries that call it "football", "In many of these countries, the term "soccer" is also widely used." This leads to the possible conclusion that both the statements "most of the English-speaking world calls it 'soccer'" and "most of the English-speaking world calls it 'football'" are both true. Without further hard evidence, I have to conclude that both you and the person you're responding to are talking out your asses. :)
Umm, "atom" != "molecule". And even if you think that's a quibble, original poster's point that "hydrophilic" means "water-loving" is important. Oil, a hydrocarbon, contains an awful lot of hydrogen (atoms) as well. (Of course, the "hydro-" in "hydrocarbon" does refer to hydrogen, just to confuse matters.)
So far as I can tell, it just means that now the BIOS is going to consist of a complicated, semi-unintelligible set of menus
Well, I didn't RTFA (Slashdot is too prone to link to content-free blogs or PR pieces), but I did google some of the key terms, and and from what I can tell, EFI sounds like it could be Big Win. Little things like CPU-independent drivers, extensibility (hence the 'E' in the name), and a built-in shell(!) and boot manager all sound like bonuses to me. Personally, I wish they'd just gone ahead and used OpenBoot, but NIH is a powerful force, and this sounds similar enough that I'm definitely willing to take a wait-and-see attitude. (I once wrote a version of Life for OpenBoot--but enough about my obsessive geekiness.)
I'm not quite sure why you think replacing one set of arcane menu options with another set of arcane menu options is such a disimprovement, no matter which one uses simple text, but I assure you that anyone who has used OpenBoot/OpenFirmware will be more than happy to see the bios go the way of the dodo, even if the replacement is still a bit less than ideal.
Still, from what I gather by reading other comments, it does sound like the article linked by Slashdot is more of a puff-piece aimed at computerphobic idiots than an informative article aimed at techies, and I don't actually know enough about EFI to be absolutely sure that it's a good thing, so I understand your trepidation. But still, this is slashdot--you should know better than to trust the summary or the linked article! :)
For some reason, America just doesn't understand how to do proper regulation. Every attempt at regulation ends up causing more problems than it manages to fix, or the lack of regulation ends up allowing horrid behavior to occur.
"Every attempt"? Nice rhetorical device, but I think you seriously underestimate how many regulations there are, and how many of them work reasonably well--not to mention how many things are unregulated without problem. The thing is that when regulation works well, it's almost unnoticeable, but when it fails, the results are often spectacularly obvious (as with your examples). This is the "man bites dog" effect: dogs frequently bite men, so that's not news, but the other way around is definitely news, so if you go just by the news, you'd conclude that men are more likely to bite dogs than the other way around.
For that matter, while I would tend to agree with you about other western nations, there are some notable exceptions. An obvious example is US vs. UK laws about libel and slander; in the US, truth is considered a defense, a proposition I find it hard to imagine that anyone could reject. Likewise, while copyright law is a general mess on both sides of the pond, I think "fair use" is a good example of something that the US got more right than most.
It's too large for a phone, but too small for a tablet.
Right, because the fact that there have been Internet Tablets with a similar size and form for as long as the iPhone has been on the market doesn't matter? If it doesn't have the Apple logo on it, it doesn't exist? Only Apple is allowed to define "Tablet"? I have no idea what you're basing your opinion on, but it doesn't seem to match the facts.
On the other hand, I totally agree that this doesn't seem to stand out from the other Android and Maemo systems available, and I'm not sure why anyone would bother.
You mean the clause mentioned here? The one that hasn't been a part of the BSD license since 1999? That advertising clause?
Except for the name of the organization, the WebM license is word-for-word identical to the license currently used by the primary copyright owners of the product known as "BSD". If that's not "an exact BSD license", then I don't know what is.
at what point did Rush Limbaugh die? I totally missed that one!
Does brain-death count? If so, I'm guessing some time before 1988. :)
Might I further suggest that flavored coffee which appeals to children needs to be immediatedly banned.
I'm not a big fan of your other suggestion, but I'm with you 100% on this one! If I never accidentally get a flavored coffee again, it'll still be too soon! :)
You're not drinking enough. I used to start with a cup or two at home, then drink coffee all day long at work. I was probably drinking somewhere between six to ten cups a day. I decided to go cold turkey, and by the end of the next day, I was capital M Miserable! Now (years later) I'm back up to about two cups a day, but I can and do frequently go without on weekends without any noticeable effects.
It's one possible solution to the problem of classifying Ring Species. For the simplest case, where populations (A+B) could be classified as a species, and populations (B+C) could as well, but (A+C) could not, how many species do you have? I could make strong arguments for one, two, two-point-five, and three.
It gets even trickier with longer rings/chains. If (A+B), (B+C), and (C+D) all meet a definition of "species", but (A+D) doesn't (requirement of "ring species"), that still leaves open questions about (A+C) and (B+D). One possible solution is to use larger or smaller fractions depending on the answers to those pairings.
Of course, there's also the issue of defining "species"--what Wikipedia calls the "Species Problem". Note that I was careful to say above, "could be classified as a species", or "meet a definition of species". The common definition, "able to produce fertile offspring" is almost meaningless to microbiologists (where sex--genetic sharing--is separate from reproduction) and unanswerable by paleontologists, since extinct species rarely reproduce.
As Dawkins argues, the whole concepts of species and families and kingdoms seems to stem from an attempt to inflict Platonic idealism on a messy and ambiguous reality. Life is chaotic. Should we be surprised if it turns out to have a fractal nature and fractional dimension? :)
But scientists *do* say these things for a number of reasons
And the corrolary here is that not everything scientists say is science. I heard one sneeze the other day, and I was--amazingly--able to not interpret it as a statement of science.
Unlike priests, scientists (the individuals) make no claims of infallibility. This, I think, is what gives people who don't understand science the most difficulty.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy. Not the only one, of course, but further study quickly reveals that we are social animals. Studies of the human brain reveal powerful empathic circuitry that may well form the basis for the Golden Rule. It's not as strong as the sex drive (and even that can be suppressed), but there does seem to be a biological basis for some foundational ethics. In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Of course, science is unlikely to tell us which fork to use at a formal dinner, or why, but it can definitely reveal a lot about basic ethics. I might go so far as to say that if it can't be explained by science, it's not ethics, but manners.
Likewise, science isn't the be-all-end-all in determining what kind of government you should set up
Not at this point. There's a definite paucity of data, as you point out. We've only tried a handful of kinds, and this is something where the negative consequences of random experimentation are too great to risk on live populations. Nevertheless, models and simulations can reveal a great deal, although our current tools limit the scope, and therefore the effectiveness of such modeling. I agree that science is not yet the "be-all-end-all" here, but to suggest that it can't ever be is naive and foolish. Heck, it may well turn out that there is no "best" kind of government--that you always have tradeoffs. Nevertheless, that can only be proven with...wait for it...science. And if science can help us understand those tradeoffs (which, at least in theory, it certainly can), then it can help us make a more informed decision.
Science does have limits, no question, but your view of those limits seems hopelessly naive.
I do hope that people will ask themselves how they would respond to this parallel case:
I fail to see the parallels. The case you describe doesn't offer any obvious evidence that the person was joking, nor do you suggest that the person regularly passes tests for non-bigotry (to the best of my knowledge, no such tests exist with even a fraction of the accuracy of drug tests). So, in the completely different case you describe, I would, indeed, respond differently.
I think your case is so far from being parallel that it's nearly perpendicular. :)
Actually, I believe the FSF owns some small amount of the code in the kernel as well, but I suspect they're overextended trying to enforce the license for code they more-or-less own outright, e.g. GNU utils and gcc. The kernel has dozens of copyright holders with much deeper pockets, who are in a much better position to pursue a case like this. Examples, include IBM, Sun, Oracle, Intel, Red Hat, HP--heck, even SCO has (perfectly legitimate) code in the kernel, though they're doing their best to forget it. (Ironically, SCO could be happily suing company after company to our loud applause if they'd decided to go after people who were actually violating their copyrights, instead of suing over non-violations of copyrights they didn't own.) :)
Asking the authors of the legal documents for assistance as expert witnesses is a perfectly acceptable thing to do.
Ok, it's more like asking the authors of the lease form than the printers. Nevertheless, it's silly to expect them to intervene. Asking them for assistance? Well, they have FAQs. Asking them to appear as expert witnesses? There's tens of thousands of people (at least) using the license they published, so don't sound so shocked when they say no. Anyway, as I pointed out, his grounds to sue are pretty dubious in the first place.
If he'd mentioned taking any other action than "approaching the FSF", I probably wouldn't have said a word. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll bet good money that he was expecting them to solve his little problem, and not just to appear as experts.
Direct them to the Software Freedom Law Center.
Indeed, it's worth another reminder that the FSF is not in the job of policing GPL abuse. They publish the license for others to use, but they're only going to (only can) try to enforce it for code they actually own. Asking the FSF to intervene in a random GPL case is sort of like asking the printers to intervene in a dispute between you and your car lease company, simply because they printed the lease forms.
Furthermore, while the GPL is intended to grant freedoms to you and other third parties, it is, by the fact that it leverages existing laws, difficult for a third party to enforce. It's easy to imagine the following dialog:
You: They won't give me all the code as required by the license.
Them: The license itself says its not mandatory and we don't have to accept it.
You: It also says that if you don't accept it, then normal copyright law applies, and they don't have permission to use the code.
Them: That's as may be, but you have no standing to sue us over the copyrights.
Judge: Agreed, case dismissed.
Of course, this means that they will have more-or-less admitted to copyright violation in open court, which is a pretty risky strategy, but suddenly, you're out a bunch of money and facing a dead end. Better, as QuantumG suggested, to get ahold of the copyright holders up front.
The word "blogger" tripped their acceptance regex. (:
The infamous "second system effect" can be countered by following the old principle, "write one to throw away" as long as you make sure that it's the second system that you throw away! Of course, this is often what actually happens in practice, but it is rarely what's planned. :)
Only if it was unconditional. If (as with most free software licenses) it was conditioned on actions that would ordinarily violate copyright, the court might simply ignore the clause as irrelevant (and probably whimsical*), and rule that you're guilty of copyright violation. In fact, as with the GPL, it's unlikely that the license would ever be mentioned in court, since the plaintiff has a straightforward copyright violation case, and the defendant can't claim to be dead and thus protected from prosecution by the license.
* "You may ignore my copyrights on this code as long as you're dead" is pretty easy to interpret as "you may not ignore my copyrights". Similar grants of license to High Elves, Cephalopods, or natives of the planet Ferenginar would likely have the same result. Claiming that the "as long as you're dead/elven/octopoid/Ferengi" clause can simply be severed, and the license interpreted as "you may ignore my copyrights" is quite a stretch.