There's a Hawaiian restaurant here in the SF bay area that offers SPAM maki: a slice of SPAM on rice wrapped with seaweed. I just had to try it, and you know what? It was surprisingly good. The flavor of the seaweed really complemented the flavor of the SPAM. (Wasabi and ginger didn't hurt either.) I'm starting to think the Hawaiians may be on to something here!:)
I'll ignore your confusion over "Santa Clara" vs. "Santa Cruz", since several others have corrected you already. But the Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarantella, recently purchased by Sun) is a completely different company! This "SCO" is "The SCO Group". The "SCO" in their name doesn't stand for anything; their name is simply "The SCO Group".
This "SCO" was formerly known as Caldera, and they were originally formed to create a desktop environment (the "Caldera Network Desktop" or CND) for Linux. And they helped fund the creation of Red Hat, in order to have a stable base for the CND. Later, they decided to go their own way, and forked the Red Hat distro to make their own Linux distro ("Caldera OpenLinux"). Then they bought some assets (vague and unspecified, but definitely including the "SCO" trademark) from the Santa Cruz Operation, changed their name, started pretending they'd never heard of Linux before, and sued IBM.
Kornbluth's thesis was formed in massive ignorance of what human intelligence is, and how it works. (Not too surprising - at the time Kornbluth wrote, the structure of DNA had barely been discerned.) Intelligence is NOT a simple genetic trait. It is a combination of MANY genetic traits, combined with a huge number of non-genetic factors. The brain is not unlike a muscle; it develops by being exercised. Kornbluth also massively underestimated how widespread and diverse the human gene pool is. So: intelligence comes from many genetic traits, these traits are widespread throughout the gene pool (even among those of lesser intelligence), AND actually have less to do with the resulting intelligence of an individual than early training and exposure to ideas.
Check Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" for some insight into why Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" theory is not a realistic fear. (I know, some of Gould's speculations about the pre-Cambrian have been generally discredited by Dawkins and others, but in general, he's still pretty solid.)
And, once again, I never said human freedom was analogous to software freedom! My analogy (as I said before) was about different meanings of the word "free"! Yes, I introduced a third meaning of the word "free". That's very true and it's completely irrelevant to the point I was making!
Price is a silly thing to bring up when we're talking about other meanings of the word "free". That's true no matter which of the many other meanings of the word "free" we're talking about. Here's another example: "after the accident, my mechanic said he'd have to bang out the fender to free the wheel. That wheel was a gift, it's completely free! I didn't pay a penny for it. The mechanic doesn't consider it free, but you know what? He doesn't own the word 'free'".
Is my point clear yet? Or are you going to waste our time complaining that wheels aren't the same as software (or humans) either?
A slightly more scientific survey (slightly) run by IDC (as reported in Techworld) also indicated that price was not the main factor driving businesses to open source. This survey focused on Western Europe, and had a few interesting points, such as: only 25% of the companies surveyed used Linux, but 33% use OSS database products.
One thing I found curious: "industries that treated software as a commodity were less likely to have open-source deployments." Again, a bit backwards from what one might expect. There were also, reportedly, a surprising number of respondents who said that the ability to customize the software was important. This may be related.
Yeah, it's just like those darn abolitionists saying that slaves should be free! My slave is free! I didn't pay a penny for him! John Brown doesn't consider him free, but you know what? He doesn't own the word "free".
This so-called "nit" was stupid 150 years ago, and it's stupid today. You know what RMS is talking about when he says software should be free, it has nothing to do with "owning" the word free, it's a perfectly valid meaning of the word free, and the fact that there are other meanings of the word free has nothing to do with the topic under discussion, and more than my "free slave" is a valid rebuttal to the abolitionists.
If you don't support free software (or free slaves), that's fine, just say so. Stop pretending that you're too stupid to understand what's actually being discussed, though. It makes you look like a fool. There are plenty of reasons why one might not buy into the free software philosophy, but the ambiguity of the English language is not one of them. Stop wasting everyone's time with this junk.
64-bit Linux has been around for about a decade, since the initial DEC Alpha port. There are at least four 64-bit architectures with Linux support at this point, and it's well tested and debugged.
As for the Windows side, the lessons of the 16->32 conversion were not wasted, abstract types created for that conversion are still in use, and will certainly make the new transition much easier. There will be some bugs that will need to be shaken out, but it's unlikely to be the sort of major effort it was last time.
While I was initially annoyed by the misuse of Hormel's trademark there too, it actually kind of does have something to do with both SPAM(tm) and spam, since Monty Python's skit mentioning the luncheon meat (over and over and over) is the inspiration for the junk email nickname.
The SCO bosses are definitely LDSers, there's no question about that. Not necessarily very good LDSers, since at least some of them seem to have been siphoning off money that was earmarked to go the the church when Novell founder (and prominent LDSer) Ray Noorda dies. But Darl McB and Ralph Yarro (among others) are quite open about their church membership.
And why it's relevent is, well, duh, MOG brought up PJ's supposed membership in a mildly fringe religion to try to discredit her! Go look up the definition of "ironic" if you're still not clear on the concept.
(I should note, BTW, that PJ has been quite firm in slapping down anyone who tries to criticize the LDS church on her site. And Groklaw has several LDSers among its regulars, who no more approve of Darl and Ralph than anyone else does. Religion has not been an issue in all this until MOG brought it up.)
GPL doesn't apply to something you don't have the right to contribute
Yes, of course, but the company doesn't have any other options. They can agree to allow it to be GPL'd, or they can discard it. It's tainted by being a derivative work, so there is no third option. (Well, they could use it internally, but that's not a very exciting choice, unless they actually use the original, unmodified software, in which case, they're probably motivated to release their enhancements under the GPL).
(Note: I am of course, assuming that we're talking about the very common case of a contribution to an existing project. If you create a whole huge public project on your own when your employment contract forbids it, then you're just insanely stupid.)
Anyway, I was mainly trying to point out that you're unlikely to hurt the project by such actions. I agree with you that I may have underemphasised just how badly you can hurt yourself through such actions.
First of all, in many cases, it doesn't matter. The license is more important than the name on the copyright. If your work is based on, say, GPL'd code, then even if the company does own your work, it doesn't matter, because their only choices are to release it under the GPL, or simply supress it. Of course, if you want to avoid that last option (and want to avoid personal and legal hassles), you should make sure that the company knows what you're doing and approves. But if that's a problem, you're working for the wrong company.
Second, it's easy to write in exceptions to those contracts. The last one I signed even had a place for you to list previously existing projects that were yours, not the company's. I wrote in "Debian GNU/Linux", thereby ensuring that any work I did for Debian would be exempted (at least if it didn't violate other terms of the contract, like non-disclosure and non-compete, which is only fair). I made a point of pointing it out, and explained that I was making a huge, broad exemption here, and was told that that was just fine. (Of course, this was a company that was already bragging about how they employed some Apache developers, so I wasn't too worried.)
No. First of all, discovery goes to your opponent, not to the court. The opponent picks through it and decides what they want to bring to the court. And second of all, the court can and does seal documents in order to keep people's private information private. The fact that (for example) your drivers license and credit cards might be presented as evidence in a case where your wallet was stolen does NOT mean that your license number and CC numbers will automatically be published for the world to see. Sheesh!:)
Actually, the pre-1991 RELEASE code is still on file, and IBM delivered that last year. All the source code is available. What's missing is the revision control information from before 1991. I'm not sure I'd keep 15-year-old commit logs either.
As for making it free/public - IBM doesn't own all that code. They had to notify several third parties before turning over this batch over to SCO. (I think they got permission last year, when they turned over the source to every released version of AIX and Dynix.)
Actually, anyone with a UID below 4 or 5000 or so probably dates back to the early days before/. had accounts, and you really can't tell all that much about who came first or anything with numbers that low. I mean, I signed up the day they announced that that they were offering accounts, and I ended up with this crappy four-digit number!:)
Nethack takes a very long time to complete, but you can save the game at any time, and has enough replayability that I'm still playing it nearly two decades after I first found it. And I know I'm not alone!
It may be somewhat the exception to the rule, though.:)
Overall, I think they have a moderately valid point, but I think it's more of a guideline than a rule, and probably varies somewhat from person to person. I find a fair amount of replayability in Civ-style games and TBSers (at least the ones that don't have a completely lame AI).
I also have to say that while I have played a fair amount of solitaire and tetris over the years, I really don't enjoy 'em quite as much as a good TBS. They're more something to do when I'm tired and distracted and don't want to have to think much. The same reason I sometimes find myself watching cartoons.
"The only people who consider mormons Christians are mormons."
Definitely not true. I'm neither a Mormon nor a Christian, and I definitely consider Mormons to be Christians. I also consider Rastafarians to be Christians. I also consider Satanists to be Christians. (And yes, that means that most Heavy Metal is actually Christian Rock.):)
As for your History of Christianity Prof., first of all, we don't know what all Christians throughout history thought. In particular, our records of the early Christians are extremely spotty. This is arguably some of the most important information in defining what a "true Christian" is, and our hard data is notably lacking. Most of what we know about Christianity dates from the post-Constantine era. And there is strong evidence that earlier Christianity was quite different.
Second of all, your Prof's argument is an example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. If you predefine Christianity to only include Catholicism, for example, you'll find that no Protestants meet the definition of Christianity. Interestingly enough, it bothers many Protestants when someone challenges their attempt to redefine the term Christian. Protestants. Go figure.
The point is, different flavors of Christianity have different beliefs. They have many beliefs in common, but each of them has their own unique features too. The Mormons may have more unique features than most variants of Christianity, but they still share a basic core. So who, precisely, defines exactly where the cut-off between Christian and non-Christian is? You're trying to put forth the claim that there is some sort of absolute line of demarcation, when, in fact, the distinction is completely subjective. The Mormons may not meet your definition of Christians, but they do meet mine, and neither one of us has a claim to be "more right" than the other.
Well, actually, I think Philip K. Dick was the only true Christian left in the twentieth century, since he was the only one still living in the first century AD. (Note how I neatly bring the topic back to SF.):)
(Boy, if only Phil Dick had written an episode of Star Trek. That might have saved the whole series, at least for me!):)
What makes you think the US Senators are even aware that Canada is a separate country? I mean, it's not like they speak a "furrin" language or anything (not like those guys down in New Mexico). I mean, c'mon, Canada is part of (North) America, even those smarty-pants college boys know that; where do you get this nonsense about it being a different country?:)
I encourage the devs at MS to make IE as good as they can to compete.
Oh, you want them to compete!? Then I think the first thing they're going to have to do is take IE out of the core OS, publish the API that a browser needs to provide in order to be the core OS's browser, and allow vendors to distribute the OS with any browser that matches the API. I.e., e.g., no more requirement for IE for their Update services.
Until they do that (at a minimum), what they're doing is not properly described as "competing". It's properly described as leveraging their monopoly.
That said, I do agree that improving IE is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on whether they're doing it to make the browser more attractive and useful on its own terms, or whether they're doing it in order to lock more people into their proprietary "variants" of actual standards. And this case (considered on its own) does indeed seem like it might be a rare instance of the former, which is a good thing. But IE considered as a whole still constitutes an attempt to lock in customers, lock out competition, and embrace, extend and extinguish open standards.
STOP SAYING THAT! It's as annoying as those people who insist on made-up gender-neutral pronouns liks "hesh". Stealing is NOT defined as depriving someone of their property. You can (for example) steal ideas, and it's not even illegal (as long as the ideas aren't patented, and you don't engage in illegal behavior to obtain the ideas).
If you really want to get through to these people, stop trying to redefine the language to fit your own agenda. There's nothing people find more annoying, nor more likely to get you ignored as a troll or fanatic than to tell people that words don't "really" mean what they know they mean!
Instead, point out that stealing is not necessarily wrong or illegal. Point out that copyright infringement is a form of stealing that in many ways more closely resembles the stealing of ideas (perfectly legal, and even socially acceptable if you give proper credit) than it does the stealing of physical property. And most of all, stop trying to pretend that this is a simple, cut-and-dried matter. That's what the other side would like us to believe. It is not a simple, cut-and-dried matter, and I think we're best served by pointing that out.
That said, I do like your point about the two groups of people likely to come out of this. That's an excellent argument, and you should definitely keep it in your arsenal. In fact, I may steal it myself!:)
> Sure people with low IQs have to work very hard to learn information and people with High IQ learn information very quickly.
Actually, people with low IQs have to work very hard to pass tests, and people with high IQs can pass tests very quickly. There is probably some correlation between the ability to learn and the ability to pass tests, but it is certainly not 100% - although how much less is a controversial topic.
Of course, this only serves to emphasize your main point even more strongly.
The game Tuxracer did this quite a while ago. In that case, it was the original author who switched to a proprietary model and began selling binary-only versions of the program, but the principle is exactly the same, and, as parent comments, the original source is still available for anyone to use and extend.
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There's a Hawaiian restaurant here in the SF bay area that offers SPAM maki: a slice of SPAM on rice wrapped with seaweed. I just had to try it, and you know what? It was surprisingly good. The flavor of the seaweed really complemented the flavor of the SPAM. (Wasabi and ginger didn't hurt either.) I'm starting to think the Hawaiians may be on to something here! :)
I'll ignore your confusion over "Santa Clara" vs. "Santa Cruz", since several others have corrected you already. But the Santa Cruz Operation (now Tarantella, recently purchased by Sun) is a completely different company! This "SCO" is "The SCO Group". The "SCO" in their name doesn't stand for anything; their name is simply "The SCO Group".
This "SCO" was formerly known as Caldera, and they were originally formed to create a desktop environment (the "Caldera Network Desktop" or CND) for Linux. And they helped fund the creation of Red Hat, in order to have a stable base for the CND. Later, they decided to go their own way, and forked the Red Hat distro to make their own Linux distro ("Caldera OpenLinux"). Then they bought some assets (vague and unspecified, but definitely including the "SCO" trademark) from the Santa Cruz Operation, changed their name, started pretending they'd never heard of Linux before, and sued IBM.
Kornbluth's thesis was formed in massive ignorance of what human intelligence is, and how it works. (Not too surprising - at the time Kornbluth wrote, the structure of DNA had barely been discerned.) Intelligence is NOT a simple genetic trait. It is a combination of MANY genetic traits, combined with a huge number of non-genetic factors. The brain is not unlike a muscle; it develops by being exercised. Kornbluth also massively underestimated how widespread and diverse the human gene pool is. So: intelligence comes from many genetic traits, these traits are widespread throughout the gene pool (even among those of lesser intelligence), AND actually have less to do with the resulting intelligence of an individual than early training and exposure to ideas.
Check Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" for some insight into why Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" theory is not a realistic fear. (I know, some of Gould's speculations about the pre-Cambrian have been generally discredited by Dawkins and others, but in general, he's still pretty solid.)
And, once again, I never said human freedom was analogous to software freedom! My analogy (as I said before) was about different meanings of the word "free"! Yes, I introduced a third meaning of the word "free". That's very true and it's completely irrelevant to the point I was making!
Price is a silly thing to bring up when we're talking about other meanings of the word "free". That's true no matter which of the many other meanings of the word "free" we're talking about. Here's another example: "after the accident, my mechanic said he'd have to bang out the fender to free the wheel. That wheel was a gift, it's completely free! I didn't pay a penny for it. The mechanic doesn't consider it free, but you know what? He doesn't own the word 'free'".
Is my point clear yet? Or are you going to waste our time complaining that wheels aren't the same as software (or humans) either?
The analogy is about valid uses of the word "free", not about software vs. human beings, so stuff your fake indignancy.
A slightly more scientific survey (slightly) run by IDC (as reported in Techworld) also indicated that price was not the main factor driving businesses to open source. This survey focused on Western Europe, and had a few interesting points, such as: only 25% of the companies surveyed used Linux, but 33% use OSS database products.
One thing I found curious: "industries that treated software as a commodity were less likely to have open-source deployments." Again, a bit backwards from what one might expect. There were also, reportedly, a surprising number of respondents who said that the ability to customize the software was important. This may be related.
Yeah, it's just like those darn abolitionists saying that slaves should be free! My slave is free! I didn't pay a penny for him! John Brown doesn't consider him free, but you know what? He doesn't own the word "free".
This so-called "nit" was stupid 150 years ago, and it's stupid today. You know what RMS is talking about when he says software should be free, it has nothing to do with "owning" the word free, it's a perfectly valid meaning of the word free, and the fact that there are other meanings of the word free has nothing to do with the topic under discussion, and more than my "free slave" is a valid rebuttal to the abolitionists.
If you don't support free software (or free slaves), that's fine, just say so. Stop pretending that you're too stupid to understand what's actually being discussed, though. It makes you look like a fool. There are plenty of reasons why one might not buy into the free software philosophy, but the ambiguity of the English language is not one of them. Stop wasting everyone's time with this junk.
64-bit Linux has been around for about a decade, since the initial DEC Alpha port. There are at least four 64-bit architectures with Linux support at this point, and it's well tested and debugged.
As for the Windows side, the lessons of the 16->32 conversion were not wasted, abstract types created for that conversion are still in use, and will certainly make the new transition much easier. There will be some bugs that will need to be shaken out, but it's unlikely to be the sort of major effort it was last time.
While I was initially annoyed by the misuse of Hormel's trademark there too, it actually kind of does have something to do with both SPAM(tm) and spam, since Monty Python's skit mentioning the luncheon meat (over and over and over) is the inspiration for the junk email nickname.
The SCO bosses are definitely LDSers, there's no question about that. Not necessarily very good LDSers, since at least some of them seem to have been siphoning off money that was earmarked to go the the church when Novell founder (and prominent LDSer) Ray Noorda dies. But Darl McB and Ralph Yarro (among others) are quite open about their church membership.
And why it's relevent is, well, duh, MOG brought up PJ's supposed membership in a mildly fringe religion to try to discredit her! Go look up the definition of "ironic" if you're still not clear on the concept.
(I should note, BTW, that PJ has been quite firm in slapping down anyone who tries to criticize the LDS church on her site. And Groklaw has several LDSers among its regulars, who no more approve of Darl and Ralph than anyone else does. Religion has not been an issue in all this until MOG brought it up.)
GPL doesn't apply to something you don't have the right to contribute
Yes, of course, but the company doesn't have any other options. They can agree to allow it to be GPL'd, or they can discard it. It's tainted by being a derivative work, so there is no third option. (Well, they could use it internally, but that's not a very exciting choice, unless they actually use the original, unmodified software, in which case, they're probably motivated to release their enhancements under the GPL).
(Note: I am of course, assuming that we're talking about the very common case of a contribution to an existing project. If you create a whole huge public project on your own when your employment contract forbids it, then you're just insanely stupid.)
Anyway, I was mainly trying to point out that you're unlikely to hurt the project by such actions. I agree with you that I may have underemphasised just how badly you can hurt yourself through such actions.
First of all, in many cases, it doesn't matter. The license is more important than the name on the copyright. If your work is based on, say, GPL'd code, then even if the company does own your work, it doesn't matter, because their only choices are to release it under the GPL, or simply supress it. Of course, if you want to avoid that last option (and want to avoid personal and legal hassles), you should make sure that the company knows what you're doing and approves. But if that's a problem, you're working for the wrong company.
Second, it's easy to write in exceptions to those contracts. The last one I signed even had a place for you to list previously existing projects that were yours, not the company's. I wrote in "Debian GNU/Linux", thereby ensuring that any work I did for Debian would be exempted (at least if it didn't violate other terms of the contract, like non-disclosure and non-compete, which is only fair). I made a point of pointing it out, and explained that I was making a huge, broad exemption here, and was told that that was just fine. (Of course, this was a company that was already bragging about how they employed some Apache developers, so I wasn't too worried.)
No. First of all, discovery goes to your opponent, not to the court. The opponent picks through it and decides what they want to bring to the court. And second of all, the court can and does seal documents in order to keep people's private information private. The fact that (for example) your drivers license and credit cards might be presented as evidence in a case where your wallet was stolen does NOT mean that your license number and CC numbers will automatically be published for the world to see. Sheesh! :)
Actually, the pre-1991 RELEASE code is still on file, and IBM delivered that last year. All the source code is available. What's missing is the revision control information from before 1991. I'm not sure I'd keep 15-year-old commit logs either.
As for making it free/public - IBM doesn't own all that code. They had to notify several third parties before turning over this batch over to SCO. (I think they got permission last year, when they turned over the source to every released version of AIX and Dynix.)
Actually, anyone with a UID below 4 or 5000 or so probably dates back to the early days before /. had accounts, and you really can't tell all that much about who came first or anything with numbers that low. I mean, I signed up the day they announced that that they were offering accounts, and I ended up with this crappy four-digit number! :)
Nethack takes a very long time to complete, but you can save the game at any time, and has enough replayability that I'm still playing it nearly two decades after I first found it. And I know I'm not alone!
:)
It may be somewhat the exception to the rule, though.
Overall, I think they have a moderately valid point, but I think it's more of a guideline than a rule, and probably varies somewhat from person to person. I find a fair amount of replayability in Civ-style games and TBSers (at least the ones that don't have a completely lame AI).
I also have to say that while I have played a fair amount of solitaire and tetris over the years, I really don't enjoy 'em quite as much as a good TBS. They're more something to do when I'm tired and distracted and don't want to have to think much. The same reason I sometimes find myself watching cartoons.
Your understanding is incorrect, the format is documented by Adobe right here.
"The only people who consider mormons Christians are mormons."
:)
:)
:)
Definitely not true. I'm neither a Mormon nor a Christian, and I definitely consider Mormons to be Christians. I also consider Rastafarians to be Christians. I also consider Satanists to be Christians. (And yes, that means that most Heavy Metal is actually Christian Rock.)
As for your History of Christianity Prof., first of all, we don't know what all Christians throughout history thought. In particular, our records of the early Christians are extremely spotty. This is arguably some of the most important information in defining what a "true Christian" is, and our hard data is notably lacking. Most of what we know about Christianity dates from the post-Constantine era. And there is strong evidence that earlier Christianity was quite different.
Second of all, your Prof's argument is an example of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. If you predefine Christianity to only include Catholicism, for example, you'll find that no Protestants meet the definition of Christianity. Interestingly enough, it bothers many Protestants when someone challenges their attempt to redefine the term Christian. Protestants. Go figure.
The point is, different flavors of Christianity have different beliefs. They have many beliefs in common, but each of them has their own unique features too. The Mormons may have more unique features than most variants of Christianity, but they still share a basic core. So who, precisely, defines exactly where the cut-off between Christian and non-Christian is? You're trying to put forth the claim that there is some sort of absolute line of demarcation, when, in fact, the distinction is completely subjective. The Mormons may not meet your definition of Christians, but they do meet mine, and neither one of us has a claim to be "more right" than the other.
Well, actually, I think Philip K. Dick was the only true Christian left in the twentieth century, since he was the only one still living in the first century AD. (Note how I neatly bring the topic back to SF.)
(Boy, if only Phil Dick had written an episode of Star Trek. That might have saved the whole series, at least for me!)
> It's the dross in the articles that worries me; I don't read the comments on Groklaw. Or indeed on Slashdot 90% of the time.
:p ;)
You read Slashdot at ALL and are complaining about the articles...on Groklaw!?! Irony, thy name is MythMoth!
What makes you think the US Senators are even aware that Canada is a separate country? I mean, it's not like they speak a "furrin" language or anything (not like those guys down in New Mexico). I mean, c'mon, Canada is part of (North) America, even those smarty-pants college boys know that; where do you get this nonsense about it being a different country? :)
I encourage the devs at MS to make IE as good as they can to compete.
Oh, you want them to compete!? Then I think the first thing they're going to have to do is take IE out of the core OS, publish the API that a browser needs to provide in order to be the core OS's browser, and allow vendors to distribute the OS with any browser that matches the API. I.e., e.g., no more requirement for IE for their Update services.
Until they do that (at a minimum), what they're doing is not properly described as "competing". It's properly described as leveraging their monopoly.
That said, I do agree that improving IE is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on whether they're doing it to make the browser more attractive and useful on its own terms, or whether they're doing it in order to lock more people into their proprietary "variants" of actual standards. And this case (considered on its own) does indeed seem like it might be a rare instance of the former, which is a good thing. But IE considered as a whole still constitutes an attempt to lock in customers, lock out competition, and embrace, extend and extinguish open standards.
Firstly, it's not stealing
:)
STOP SAYING THAT! It's as annoying as those people who insist on made-up gender-neutral pronouns liks "hesh". Stealing is NOT defined as depriving someone of their property. You can (for example) steal ideas, and it's not even illegal (as long as the ideas aren't patented, and you don't engage in illegal behavior to obtain the ideas).
If you really want to get through to these people, stop trying to redefine the language to fit your own agenda. There's nothing people find more annoying, nor more likely to get you ignored as a troll or fanatic than to tell people that words don't "really" mean what they know they mean!
Instead, point out that stealing is not necessarily wrong or illegal. Point out that copyright infringement is a form of stealing that in many ways more closely resembles the stealing of ideas (perfectly legal, and even socially acceptable if you give proper credit) than it does the stealing of physical property. And most of all, stop trying to pretend that this is a simple, cut-and-dried matter. That's what the other side would like us to believe. It is not a simple, cut-and-dried matter, and I think we're best served by pointing that out.
That said, I do like your point about the two groups of people likely to come out of this. That's an excellent argument, and you should definitely keep it in your arsenal. In fact, I may steal it myself!
cheers
> Sure people with low IQs have to work very hard to learn information and people with High IQ learn information very quickly.
Actually, people with low IQs have to work very hard to pass tests, and people with high IQs can pass tests very quickly. There is probably some correlation between the ability to learn and the ability to pass tests, but it is certainly not 100% - although how much less is a controversial topic.
Of course, this only serves to emphasize your main point even more strongly.
The game Tuxracer did this quite a while ago. In that case, it was the original author who switched to a proprietary model and began selling binary-only versions of the program, but the principle is exactly the same, and, as parent comments, the original source is still available for anyone to use and extend.
"Translation: blah-blah"
Translation: I'm going to overgeneralize about possible flaws in the original.
(Sorry, I thought parent was funny and possibly even insightful, but I couldn't resist.)