The biophysical application of the same technology, however, is still called "NMR spectroscopy". The different naming conventions are actually useful in separating the techniques, which have entirely different purposes.
One of the winners, Erik Demaine, is 22 and is already a CS professor at MIT with a gigantic publication list. I find this both inspiring and profoundly demoralizing. He'd better not be getting laid more than me too.
You're extrapolating too far to say that the Patriot Act proves that there is no difference between the parties. The Patriot Act simply demonstrates that both parties are largely composed of spineless, opportunistic career politicians, but when you find an issue that doesn't have the potential to fuck up careers you'll see plenty of difference in how they vote.
The distinctions are blurred quite a bit because either side continually co-opts its opponents' issues (with some modification) for political gain, e.g. Clinton with welfare reform, or Bush and homeland security.
A cynical view of the matter (but, unfortunately, a fairly accurate one) is that the Patriot Act wasn't really designed to combat terrorism, but used September 11 as an excuse to expand the powers of the FBI. Some people in the DOJ had been wanting this kind of thing for a long time, and once they had an opening they ran with it. The attempts to broaden the scope of these powers and to extend them to the drug war is evidence enough that fighting terrorism was just a convenient cover.
(Not that it matters, but I support the "War on Terror" 100% and still consider myself a patriotic American; I just don't think the Bush administration is competent or trustworthy enough to lead it.)
Welcome to the hell of American politics - you can vote either Democrat or Republican which makes no noticeable difference.
Bullshit. I'm sick of hearing this lie propagated. The real problem was that the Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) were too spineless to put up a fight in the wake of September 11, and when the Ashcroft submitted the FBI's wish list they just approved it without even reading the fucking thing. Most of them probably thought that if they didn't vote yes, the RNC would be running ads against them next election cycle telling their constituents how they wanted to let the terrorists win. Do a Google search for "Max Cleland Homeland Security" if you don't believe me. Russ Feingold, an ultra-liberal, has risked his political career before and was the target of a concerted GOP takedown attempt back in 1998, but most of his colleagues would prefer to take a stand on other issues that aren't quite so politically volatile. And today's congressional GOP is not known as being a place where dissent is easily tolerated - you don't fuck with Tom DeLay.
Despite what Fox News would have you believe, there is a fair amount of bipartisan opposition to the Patriot Act, and the excresence labelled Patriot Act II was shot down due to protests from the entire political spectrum from the ACLU to hardline religious conservatives. It looks like the sunset provisions (most of them, at least) will not be changed, since there's wide realization that giving the DOJ a blank check may not be a wise course in the long run.
In terms of the Dems vs. GOP choice, these parties are still in power because they continue to reflect the views of most Americans. People generally don't want a heartless, minimalist government like the Libertarians promise us, and very few people are convinced by the Greens' socialist blather.
As an additional historical note, bear in mind that an increasing number of voters have been enfranchised over the past two hundred years, and direct democracy has become quite powerful at the state level, at least judging from my experiences in WA and CA. The sort of things that make it to ballot over here make quite a lot of reasonable people decide that we actually need less democracy, not more.
Hah. "Troops" still remains the standard by which all Star Wars ripoffs must be judged. It's hard to tell how good the effects actually are, given the low quality of most of downloadable version, but it feels right. And the fact that it's entirely tongue-in-cheek makes up for the utter geekiness of it being a Star Wars fan film.
I've heard that in some states (CT, maybe? I used to live there) you have to pay taxes on any car you buy out-of-state. So, if you buy your car in a state that doesn't have sales tax, when you get to your home state which does, you need to pay the local sales tax on your car. I'm not sure about the details, but it has the ring of truth.
There's a short story that occurs after both Deepness and Fire but was written first. Actually, it was the very first Zones of Thought story. It's called Blabber, and you can find it published in various Vinge compilations. "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge" has it, along with some comments by Vinge on the background.
Specifically, there are incompatabilities between the short story and Fire, which he says now constrain his efforts to turn the story into a sequel. (Although I think he'd be foolish to try to stick too closely to the literal text of the story.) The universe is clearly the same, and one of the characters, but some references are recognizible but just don't make sense in context.
I'd actually read the short story before the other two, then over the course of time, read the two novels and re-read the short.
I disagree - it's more interesting to read the books, then go back and see what he originally was thinking. In particular, his explanations for the "Zones of Thought".
Or the researchers for pharmacuticals... where if you find that drug X doesn't help cure Y, then you shouldn't expect any grant money next year. Yeah, not fired, but certainly the same net result.
That's not exactly fair. The pharmaceuticals would prefer to find out about these things from their own people, as quickly as possible. The entire FDA approval process is essentially designed to eliminate drugs from the pipeline before they reach the market. I've seen many pharmaceutical scientists speak about drug development, and they've all emphasized their efforts to rule out as many drugs as possible even before Phase I trials. It costs a shitload if they make it to Phase III before discovering that their drug is crap.
Now, once a drug has actually been released, it's much worse for the company to find that it's ineffective. However, it's still much better for them if one of their own people finds out, because if they don't, someone else will sooner or later. They'll lose money in the short term, but they'll probably save far more in the long run, and they'll definitely look better. Hopefully they can even avoid the class action lawsuit entirely.
As far as I'm aware, the problem (well, one of them) with drug companies is generally not that they push drugs they know to be ineffective, but rather that they push drugs that genuinely are effective on people that don't need them. A huge number of mood-altering pharmaceuticals fall into this category; I refer you to the South Park episode about Ritalin for details.
Just a clarification - pharma researchers do not get grants; they have contracts. A corporation would not keep an expensive PhD biochemist on staff while discontinuing his research. Some academics do get pharmaceutical grants, but not many, and they almost always have other sources of funding which are completely unconnected.
they are producing somewhere around 1/3 as much power as they're putting in
My recollection is that the latest and greatest fusion reactors can now come pretty close to breaking even, due to years of tinkering and refining. This is promising but doesn't really put us that much closer to a clean energy source.
I'm sure when fusion power becomes a reality we'll still have to deal with anti-nuclear folks who never bothered to learn basic science, though.
Exactly. Nuclear fusion reactors have been around for years, it's just that nobody has ever been able to make one that produces more energy than you need to put in to keep the reaction going (in addition to the fuel being expended). The reactor this kid built is clearly "useless" as an energy source - which the article is very clear about - and not even remotely novel, but it's a pretty bitchin' project for a high-schooler.
The problem with mandates like this is that it, in a way, sanctions monopoly.
How? It's not like IBM or RedHat is the only company in the field. An open-source mandate of the sort being discussed only makes certain requirements of software being purchased by the government. Classified installations have their own requirements for software - is it creating a monopoly environment for the DoD to dictate that software engineering must be done in Ada, or that OSes pass security certification for specific uses? Microsoft would be free to compete in the same arena if it open-sourced Windows.
I don't much care whether governments require open-source. Like many other people here, however, I do very strongly care about them requiring open formats so that I can use whatever software I want - but by your standards, that too would be creating monopoly conditions.
Nice troll. Free markets do not imply the complete lack of government regulation; the government does not favor or promote any particular party, but certainly may set ground rules. I suspect even the most diehard economic conservatives would admit that we need institutions like the SEC to prevent fraud. Much of the modern concept of capitalism and free markets was developed in opposition to the mercantilist system, where the government dictated the terms by which the marketplace operated. A "liberal" economic system, on the other hand, does not have artificial barriers to entry. (Yes, you too may produce a copyrighted work of software, and there's no price to do so.)
In the absence of copyrights, companies such as Microsoft would have found vastly more restrictive ways to keep their products proprietary. We would, no doubt, be using non-open PCs that required a vendor license, and would require a special personalized dongle for every single application. You'd see product activation schemes that would make Windows XP look pathetically simple. Massive organizations such as Microsoft would be able to finance such a regime, but small vendors trying to get started would not, and without copyright they would be at the mercy of bigger fish.
In the context of government adoption, I don't see any incompatibility between free markets and official adoption of open source. The government, as a paying customer, may select whichever criteria it wants for purchasing software. A non-free market approach would be to mandate that all software imported to that country must be open-source, or that all software bought by the government must be made in that country. So Microsoft's complaints are pretty pathetic, particularly since they don't address the very serious problem of designed incompatability and non-standard formats.
Your comparison to slavery is particularly offensive, by the way. No one is forcing you to listend to pop music or use Microsoft products, so stop whining about how The System is trying to keep you down.
Principles like "free as in freedom" don't come into play when you're talking about the bottom line.
They do when the proprietary alternative forces you into a licensing plan and is structured around planned obsolescence. Additionally, a Microsoft installation almost by definition forces adoption of Microsoft products by peripherals, e.g. the poor suckers like me who have to read the Word documents that they receive. Given that Microsoft forces homogeneity, "freedom" may be very valuable indeed.
Perhaps these companies are thinking about three years down the line when they're facing cutbacks and that licensing agreement and the server migration to the latest Windows doesn't look so hot anymore.
I've read plenty about the FMA. The tools over at National Review seem very worked up about it. Andrew Sullivan has been fulminating against it on his blog. I followed the debate over Lawrence v. Texas quite closely, and this is just a follow-up to it. NY Times magazine had a good article by Jeffrey Rosen about the sudden resurgence of theoconservative activists since the ruling; this is probably still online. The chances of it actually passing are pretty minimal; it's just a bone thrown to the reactionaries. Only a handful of senators bothered to show up at hearings last week.
You need to be a little more specific by what you mean by The Media. I've seen the polling data on gay marriage plenty of places; it's not too surprising. (Much more shocking, to my mind, is that a large segment of the population believes that the government should outlaw gay sex.) The Media is too busy reporting on the runaway success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to concern itself with the behavior of wing nuts like Weyrich.
Yeah, and most of the stuff floating around the Kazaa network has similar legalese appended to it. But most of the people here don't seem to give a shit.
Iran is a potential threat much in the way that France is or the soviet union was--they present alternatives to our system of running things. The soviet union had to be destroyed because it was a competing system, not because it was evil.
Horseshit. France is a representative democracy, just like the USA. The Soviet Union certainly was evil, because it was a totalitarian system led by theives and psycopaths, and butchered millions of its own people. Despite what your local campus Marxists would have you believe, the USSR was actually a far worse imperialist nation than the US has ever been. The right side won the Cold War- deal with it.
As for Iran: does your moral equivalency go as far as condoning the idea of instituting Biblical law in the US, and stoning homosexuals to death? Theocracy isn't an "alternative", it's evil. Iran's citizens deserve better.
Yes, speaking as a Yale alumnus: US News can blow me. The top three are basically a perpetual toss-up between Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with a different college (or pair) holding the top spot each year, depending on how they've decided to tweak their ranking formula. Occasionally there's an upset - Caltech got #1 a few years ago. (Which is a good indication of how fucked up US News' system is: Caltech is a fantastic school, but it's an engineering school, not at all like HYP.)
A couple of years ago, when Yale Law came in first in one of those rankings, the dean said that people should ignore the numbers anyway, because he didn't feel they were reflective of anything. The truth is, colleges probably prefer students who chose a school based on some particular attraction, not those who picked the school out of the rankings.
My favorite part was how he referred to "Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux AS" and "SuSE GNU/Linux Enterprise Server 8". At that point, I decided that the article was a giant troll. Saying that RedHat should name their product "GNU/Linux" is fair enough, but deliberately misnaming their product is pathetic.
this is a perfect example on why you should use the GNU/GPL license instead of BSD or other open source models.
It means that big companies will find it more difficult to steal and bury.
Three points:
1) Only misguided ideologues pick one license and refuse to use any other, no matter what the project is.
2) If you want everyone to actually use your software (because you like seeing your name everywhere, or you feel your code is superior, or because you've come up with some nifty new protocol), the best way to have this happen is to BSD it, because then commercial vendors will more readily incorporate it into their products. (This does not apply to most applications, obviously, but as I pointed out above it most certainly applies to projects such as PNG.)
3) How is it any harder for companies to steal and bury GPL code than BSD code? It's just as wrong legally or ethically, but there aren't any greater technical obstacles.
windows inet tools use BSD source, many use other open source libs [libpng, zlib, etc...] doesn't phase them. The fact that they rely on them for success...
The BSD TCP source is used by just about everyone, because when it was written it was the best. The 4.4 version is pretty much the reference product. And the Berkeley people had the wisdom to release it under the BSD license, which means that everyone else quickly adopted it and thus followed some sort of standard.
There is no hypocrisy involved. Microsoft's campaigns against open-source are misguided and misleading, but they have made it clear that they think a package like the BSD TCP stack should be released under a very liberal license. It would be a disaster if it had been released under the GPL- companies would have used their own inferior implementations, which would probably end up being somewhat incompatible or would break the standard. Although it's arguable whether Microsoft has played fast and loose with the protocol, I think we can agree that it's far better that they start out with the same implementation as everyone else rather than code their own...
As for libpng, same deal. The PNG team simply wanted to replace GIF with something that wouldn't get people sued, so they release libpng under a BSD-like license. If they hadn't, Microsoft simply wouldn't have supported PNG at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The biophysical application of the same technology, however, is still called "NMR spectroscopy". The different naming conventions are actually useful in separating the techniques, which have entirely different purposes.
One of the winners, Erik Demaine, is 22 and is already a CS professor at MIT with a gigantic publication list. I find this both inspiring and profoundly demoralizing. He'd better not be getting laid more than me too.
You're extrapolating too far to say that the Patriot Act proves that there is no difference between the parties. The Patriot Act simply demonstrates that both parties are largely composed of spineless, opportunistic career politicians, but when you find an issue that doesn't have the potential to fuck up careers you'll see plenty of difference in how they vote.
The distinctions are blurred quite a bit because either side continually co-opts its opponents' issues (with some modification) for political gain, e.g. Clinton with welfare reform, or Bush and homeland security.
A cynical view of the matter (but, unfortunately, a fairly accurate one) is that the Patriot Act wasn't really designed to combat terrorism, but used September 11 as an excuse to expand the powers of the FBI. Some people in the DOJ had been wanting this kind of thing for a long time, and once they had an opening they ran with it. The attempts to broaden the scope of these powers and to extend them to the drug war is evidence enough that fighting terrorism was just a convenient cover.
(Not that it matters, but I support the "War on Terror" 100% and still consider myself a patriotic American; I just don't think the Bush administration is competent or trustworthy enough to lead it.)
Welcome to the hell of American politics - you can vote either Democrat or Republican which makes no noticeable difference.
Bullshit. I'm sick of hearing this lie propagated. The real problem was that the Democrats (and more than a few Republicans) were too spineless to put up a fight in the wake of September 11, and when the Ashcroft submitted the FBI's wish list they just approved it without even reading the fucking thing. Most of them probably thought that if they didn't vote yes, the RNC would be running ads against them next election cycle telling their constituents how they wanted to let the terrorists win. Do a Google search for "Max Cleland Homeland Security" if you don't believe me. Russ Feingold, an ultra-liberal, has risked his political career before and was the target of a concerted GOP takedown attempt back in 1998, but most of his colleagues would prefer to take a stand on other issues that aren't quite so politically volatile. And today's congressional GOP is not known as being a place where dissent is easily tolerated - you don't fuck with Tom DeLay.
Despite what Fox News would have you believe, there is a fair amount of bipartisan opposition to the Patriot Act, and the excresence labelled Patriot Act II was shot down due to protests from the entire political spectrum from the ACLU to hardline religious conservatives. It looks like the sunset provisions (most of them, at least) will not be changed, since there's wide realization that giving the DOJ a blank check may not be a wise course in the long run.
In terms of the Dems vs. GOP choice, these parties are still in power because they continue to reflect the views of most Americans. People generally don't want a heartless, minimalist government like the Libertarians promise us, and very few people are convinced by the Greens' socialist blather.
As an additional historical note, bear in mind that an increasing number of voters have been enfranchised over the past two hundred years, and direct democracy has become quite powerful at the state level, at least judging from my experiences in WA and CA. The sort of things that make it to ballot over here make quite a lot of reasonable people decide that we actually need less democracy, not more.
Hah. "Troops" still remains the standard by which all Star Wars ripoffs must be judged. It's hard to tell how good the effects actually are, given the low quality of most of downloadable version, but it feels right. And the fact that it's entirely tongue-in-cheek makes up for the utter geekiness of it being a Star Wars fan film.
I'm curious - how do you fold a computer?
I've heard that in some states (CT, maybe? I used to live there) you have to pay taxes on any car you buy out-of-state. So, if you buy your car in a state that doesn't have sales tax, when you get to your home state which does, you need to pay the local sales tax on your car. I'm not sure about the details, but it has the ring of truth.
There's a short story that occurs after both Deepness and Fire but was written first. Actually, it was the very first Zones of Thought story. It's called Blabber, and you can find it published in various Vinge compilations. "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge" has it, along with some comments by Vinge on the background.
Specifically, there are incompatabilities between the short story and Fire, which he says now constrain his efforts to turn the story into a sequel. (Although I think he'd be foolish to try to stick too closely to the literal text of the story.) The universe is clearly the same, and one of the characters, but some references are recognizible but just don't make sense in context.
I'd actually read the short story before the other two, then over the course of time, read the two novels and re-read the short.
I disagree - it's more interesting to read the books, then go back and see what he originally was thinking. In particular, his explanations for the "Zones of Thought".
Or the researchers for pharmacuticals... where if you find that drug X doesn't help cure Y, then you shouldn't expect any grant money next year. Yeah, not fired, but certainly the same net result.
That's not exactly fair. The pharmaceuticals would prefer to find out about these things from their own people, as quickly as possible. The entire FDA approval process is essentially designed to eliminate drugs from the pipeline before they reach the market. I've seen many pharmaceutical scientists speak about drug development, and they've all emphasized their efforts to rule out as many drugs as possible even before Phase I trials. It costs a shitload if they make it to Phase III before discovering that their drug is crap.
Now, once a drug has actually been released, it's much worse for the company to find that it's ineffective. However, it's still much better for them if one of their own people finds out, because if they don't, someone else will sooner or later. They'll lose money in the short term, but they'll probably save far more in the long run, and they'll definitely look better. Hopefully they can even avoid the class action lawsuit entirely.
As far as I'm aware, the problem (well, one of them) with drug companies is generally not that they push drugs they know to be ineffective, but rather that they push drugs that genuinely are effective on people that don't need them. A huge number of mood-altering pharmaceuticals fall into this category; I refer you to the South Park episode about Ritalin for details.
Just a clarification - pharma researchers do not get grants; they have contracts. A corporation would not keep an expensive PhD biochemist on staff while discontinuing his research. Some academics do get pharmaceutical grants, but not many, and they almost always have other sources of funding which are completely unconnected.
Pure evil vs. pure evil. I'm not sure who to root for. Maybe we'll all get lucky and they'll bankrupt each other with skyrocketing legal fees.
they are producing somewhere around 1/3 as much power as they're putting in
My recollection is that the latest and greatest fusion reactors can now come pretty close to breaking even, due to years of tinkering and refining. This is promising but doesn't really put us that much closer to a clean energy source.
I'm sure when fusion power becomes a reality we'll still have to deal with anti-nuclear folks who never bothered to learn basic science, though.
Exactly. Nuclear fusion reactors have been around for years, it's just that nobody has ever been able to make one that produces more energy than you need to put in to keep the reaction going (in addition to the fuel being expended). The reactor this kid built is clearly "useless" as an energy source - which the article is very clear about - and not even remotely novel, but it's a pretty bitchin' project for a high-schooler.
Dude, YHBT. It's called "parody".
The problem with mandates like this is that it, in a way, sanctions monopoly.
How? It's not like IBM or RedHat is the only company in the field. An open-source mandate of the sort being discussed only makes certain requirements of software being purchased by the government. Classified installations have their own requirements for software - is it creating a monopoly environment for the DoD to dictate that software engineering must be done in Ada, or that OSes pass security certification for specific uses? Microsoft would be free to compete in the same arena if it open-sourced Windows.
I don't much care whether governments require open-source. Like many other people here, however, I do very strongly care about them requiring open formats so that I can use whatever software I want - but by your standards, that too would be creating monopoly conditions.
Nice troll. Free markets do not imply the complete lack of government regulation; the government does not favor or promote any particular party, but certainly may set ground rules. I suspect even the most diehard economic conservatives would admit that we need institutions like the SEC to prevent fraud. Much of the modern concept of capitalism and free markets was developed in opposition to the mercantilist system, where the government dictated the terms by which the marketplace operated. A "liberal" economic system, on the other hand, does not have artificial barriers to entry. (Yes, you too may produce a copyrighted work of software, and there's no price to do so.)
In the absence of copyrights, companies such as Microsoft would have found vastly more restrictive ways to keep their products proprietary. We would, no doubt, be using non-open PCs that required a vendor license, and would require a special personalized dongle for every single application. You'd see product activation schemes that would make Windows XP look pathetically simple. Massive organizations such as Microsoft would be able to finance such a regime, but small vendors trying to get started would not, and without copyright they would be at the mercy of bigger fish.
In the context of government adoption, I don't see any incompatibility between free markets and official adoption of open source. The government, as a paying customer, may select whichever criteria it wants for purchasing software. A non-free market approach would be to mandate that all software imported to that country must be open-source, or that all software bought by the government must be made in that country. So Microsoft's complaints are pretty pathetic, particularly since they don't address the very serious problem of designed incompatability and non-standard formats.
Your comparison to slavery is particularly offensive, by the way. No one is forcing you to listend to pop music or use Microsoft products, so stop whining about how The System is trying to keep you down.
Principles like "free as in freedom" don't come into play when you're talking about the bottom line.
They do when the proprietary alternative forces you into a licensing plan and is structured around planned obsolescence. Additionally, a Microsoft installation almost by definition forces adoption of Microsoft products by peripherals, e.g. the poor suckers like me who have to read the Word documents that they receive. Given that Microsoft forces homogeneity, "freedom" may be very valuable indeed.
Perhaps these companies are thinking about three years down the line when they're facing cutbacks and that licensing agreement and the server migration to the latest Windows doesn't look so hot anymore.
I've read plenty about the FMA. The tools over at National Review seem very worked up about it. Andrew Sullivan has been fulminating against it on his blog. I followed the debate over Lawrence v. Texas quite closely, and this is just a follow-up to it. NY Times magazine had a good article by Jeffrey Rosen about the sudden resurgence of theoconservative activists since the ruling; this is probably still online. The chances of it actually passing are pretty minimal; it's just a bone thrown to the reactionaries. Only a handful of senators bothered to show up at hearings last week.
You need to be a little more specific by what you mean by The Media. I've seen the polling data on gay marriage plenty of places; it's not too surprising. (Much more shocking, to my mind, is that a large segment of the population believes that the government should outlaw gay sex.) The Media is too busy reporting on the runaway success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to concern itself with the behavior of wing nuts like Weyrich.
Kazaa's license states: [ blah blah blah ]
Yeah, and most of the stuff floating around the Kazaa network has similar legalese appended to it. But most of the people here don't seem to give a shit.
Iran is a potential threat much in the way that France is or the soviet union was--they present alternatives to our system of running things. The soviet union had to be destroyed because it was a competing system, not because it was evil.
Horseshit. France is a representative democracy, just like the USA. The Soviet Union certainly was evil, because it was a totalitarian system led by theives and psycopaths, and butchered millions of its own people. Despite what your local campus Marxists would have you believe, the USSR was actually a far worse imperialist nation than the US has ever been. The right side won the Cold War- deal with it.
As for Iran: does your moral equivalency go as far as condoning the idea of instituting Biblical law in the US, and stoning homosexuals to death? Theocracy isn't an "alternative", it's evil. Iran's citizens deserve better.
Yes, speaking as a Yale alumnus: US News can blow me. The top three are basically a perpetual toss-up between Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, with a different college (or pair) holding the top spot each year, depending on how they've decided to tweak their ranking formula. Occasionally there's an upset - Caltech got #1 a few years ago. (Which is a good indication of how fucked up US News' system is: Caltech is a fantastic school, but it's an engineering school, not at all like HYP.)
A couple of years ago, when Yale Law came in first in one of those rankings, the dean said that people should ignore the numbers anyway, because he didn't feel they were reflective of anything. The truth is, colleges probably prefer students who chose a school based on some particular attraction, not those who picked the school out of the rankings.
My favorite part was how he referred to "Red Hat Enterprise GNU/Linux AS" and "SuSE GNU/Linux Enterprise Server 8". At that point, I decided that the article was a giant troll. Saying that RedHat should name their product "GNU/Linux" is fair enough, but deliberately misnaming their product is pathetic.
If they were honest in this, they would have released their own protocol implementations under a similar liberal licence.
The difference is that the BSD project was funded by government money.
this is a perfect example on why you should use the GNU/GPL license instead of BSD or other open source models.
It means that big companies will find it more difficult to steal and bury.
Three points:
1) Only misguided ideologues pick one license and refuse to use any other, no matter what the project is.
2) If you want everyone to actually use your software (because you like seeing your name everywhere, or you feel your code is superior, or because you've come up with some nifty new protocol), the best way to have this happen is to BSD it, because then commercial vendors will more readily incorporate it into their products. (This does not apply to most applications, obviously, but as I pointed out above it most certainly applies to projects such as PNG.)
3) How is it any harder for companies to steal and bury GPL code than BSD code? It's just as wrong legally or ethically, but there aren't any greater technical obstacles.
windows inet tools use BSD source, many use other open source libs [libpng, zlib, etc...] doesn't phase them. The fact that they rely on them for success...
The BSD TCP source is used by just about everyone, because when it was written it was the best. The 4.4 version is pretty much the reference product. And the Berkeley people had the wisdom to release it under the BSD license, which means that everyone else quickly adopted it and thus followed some sort of standard.
There is no hypocrisy involved. Microsoft's campaigns against open-source are misguided and misleading, but they have made it clear that they think a package like the BSD TCP stack should be released under a very liberal license. It would be a disaster if it had been released under the GPL- companies would have used their own inferior implementations, which would probably end up being somewhat incompatible or would break the standard. Although it's arguable whether Microsoft has played fast and loose with the protocol, I think we can agree that it's far better that they start out with the same implementation as everyone else rather than code their own...
As for libpng, same deal. The PNG team simply wanted to replace GIF with something that wouldn't get people sued, so they release libpng under a BSD-like license. If they hadn't, Microsoft simply wouldn't have supported PNG at all.