It's scary to see how much influence a software multinational company has on most countries. Makes you wonder what those oil giants can do... Luckily, in my country they can't do much, because there is a state owned monopoly on refineries and fuel. Fuel has comparable prices to neighbors, even though we don't have any oil. That's what they don't teach in class when they say monopolies are bad.
Fellow uruguayan here... I've heard the same story (from people that attended the votation).
So, what shall we conclude? That ISO isn't a relevant entity. This votation has shown that it's corrupt in many countries, and incompetent in others. Why should the other standards that have been aproved in the past be any more "respectable"? Couldn't they also been approved out of corruption or incompetence?
And even if in the end it doesn't get approved, you can't ignore what has happened. I don't know about you, but I will not hold ISO in high regard anymore. Well, it all comes down to what your agenda is. ISO is relevant right now, and will continue to be so, even with all these issues. OOXML being rejected as an ISO standard would give a competitive edge to ODF. OOXML is having problems right now becoming a defacto standard, because users with older msoffice versions are pushing backwards. I think without the added momentum of ISO compliance it will never catch on. In large organizations it will come down to keeping the old formats, for compatibility sake, or ODF for ISO compliance. It would very easy to make the case against OOXML if they don't get ISO status. In that scenario, time could get rid of.doc, eventually, and finally data would be freely available, and time proof.
I was hoping people in our country would be wiser, but I underestimated the power of government people do do the stupid thing.
I'm with AC here. Are Groklaw, etc, really suggesting that several standards bodies in several nations are/all/ corrupt? And not one leak? Not one failed, incorruptible whistleblower? Or is it just that, whatever you may think of the standard, Microsoft, etc, that OOXML just has enough to get past? I know it's an ugly concept, but it seems more plausible. And only natural / human that when your championed standard/objections to something are overlooked/fail, that you look for a culprit, any culprit, that overlooks your own weaknesses and / or failings?
That's more what it seems like to me, despite my personal objections and issues with OOXML.
In my country, Uruguay, they were not corrupt. They were just ignorant. The vote of government organization was in the line of: we don't really know what this is all about, but MS software is important to us, so we think it's OK to standardize it. Vote YES.
I think that, because this is a key issue for MS, they exploited the system in every way they could, you don't even need corruption in most places, if the have the right vulnerabilities.
The reason why we are all saying that it can't be possible that they accept it is that some of us read the standard, of excerpts from it. The complaint is that, even to lay people, it is very easy to see it's not a standard at all, and tries to standardize an area that already has a real standard approved (ODF), without improving on it. It should be easier to spot for standards specialists. There are issues where you can have different opinions, but this seems too clear cut to even be discussed.
A standard should be something that allows you to test compliance. OOXML, in lots of points does not help you build a compliance test. Of course, those tags that say your should render content as Word9x come to mind. That is why it's so clear to me that I can't be approved, in its current form. Of course, it could be improved and become a standard, but it has not happened yet.
Actually christian missionaries in China use similar methods of communication. If you send an e-mail to someone inside of China (or vice-versa) and include the word "Jesus" it'll show up blank. So you have to use other non-religious words to get your point across. That was a few years ago that I experienced that first hand. At the time I was surprised by the level of filtering. Now I just take it for granted:-/ No way. The thing is that the Chinese reference the words to actual objects representing their meaning to do the filtering. Then they serialize them to string again, at the other side of the tunnel. In the case of any exception, they just catch it silently.
In your case, it's probably a NullPointerException when trying to follow the reference of the word. You should try using "FSM" instead of that word.
CMYK, Pantone in particular but mostly it's down to the horrible interface that GIMP comes with. Gimp is basically a programmers idea of how a creative tool should look. I understand that Gimp interface will always be wrong, because it's not the one from Adobe Photoshop, and lots of people are already trained for it, or have friends who are.
Other than that, what makes you think that photoshop is more "creative" friendly? Aside from the fact than working on Photoshop doesn't look to me as more of a creative activity than using a wordprocessor, it's interface was not so much designed, but more evolved (only it was created less than 6000 years ago). Its menus and palettes are not very human friendly, they are the way they are due to the limitations of older computer systems. If someone designed a new user interface for a similar program they could take advantage of new concepts, and technology, like for example being able to use each and every tool and filter directly on the spot, rather than on separate windows.
About CMYK, well, print is not dead, but most people who use Photoshop don't care about CMYK. It's probably not it's killer feature.
If you don't tell us the font, family, weight, etc, how are we supposed to judge which is more correctly rendered? Duh. And how are you going to judge that? Comparing the fonts to their Adobe rendering? Other than drawing with pencils, or using pre-Adobe printouts, it would be very difficult to find fonts to compare that are not rendered by Adobe. That wouldn't be fair.
Hmmmm... Peru has no gauchos. The Inca people live in Peru. Different origins, different looks, different culture, different jokes. Gauchos don't get to meet llamas, and where gauchos live, women are more beautiful than sheep. In Peru, it's a different deal.
If there is a monopoly condition, price approaches infinity according to needs. Talk to any company that did software contracts with MS during the 90's. I said "orthogonal", meaning that price has nothing to do with quality. I followed with a counterexample of the supposed direct relation between price and quality.
What do monopolies have to do with that? I know most monopolies push prices upwards and quality downwards, but not all of them. Some of them are designed to do the opposite, and they even work.
I understood that this was because of the way that PDFs store information based on positioning, curves, gradients, etc, so I am skeptical about what this feature of OOo actually does, given that some very expensive commercial software does not even do this. Price is orthogonal to quality. Eclipse is free, VS2008 is expensive. I can tell you first hand that the former is much easier to use, yet more powerful. Air is free, pure nitrogen is more expensive.
There are new table saws that only make a small cut in your finger if you try to cut it off, maybe future designs can make it as safe to use as a plastic butter knife.
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. But I'd bet good money that this saw's manual comes with *more* warnings than a normal saw. (WARNING: Never use your actual finger to test failsafe mechanism! CAUTION: Electrical interference may cause false triggering!, etc.)
I just pointed out that example because it was very illustrative. My point is that he was right saying that warnings are really design shortcomings. A perfect design would have no warning. Nobody said that a perfect design is achievable, but with software we are much closer, because detected shortcomings are relatively easy to fix, finding them is more difficult. In a free software project, where they tend to have honest public relations, "known issues" for a release tend to get fixed for the next release, implying that those "warnings" could be easily removed.
Any statements in the documentation that start out "Don't" or marked "Warning" or "Notice" are always present because of flaws -- the right approach is to fix the software (and remove the statement from the documentation).
Let's apply that to other products in the real world. How about a table saw: that's covered with warning stickers and the instruction manual is full of safety notices. These are all flaws, and we'll change the saw's design to remove them one by one. At the end of the process, we'll have a flawless and user friendly cutting tool: a plastic butter knife.
No thanks, I'll take my powerful but "dangerous" software over dumbed down pablum.
Ok. Software does not live in the real world. Some rules do not apply. "Undo" is rarely available in the real world, and backups are much more expensive there. There are reasons why warnings in software can be changed into fixes.
About your table saw, that proves the original poster point. There are new table saws that only make a small cut in your finger if you try to cut it off, maybe future designs can make it as safe to use as a plastic butter knife. I don't think losing fingers is inherent to cutting wood, current design can cope with that, and it can only improve.
I was responding to this sentence of the AC I replied:
because the idea that it's okay to murder someone for their political beliefs is the hallmark of such enemies. That seemed to confirm that marxists and communists like killing people per se. Maybe I didn't get the point, sorry, I am not a native English speaker. But I was not questioning the one he was replying to is a wacko, I thought it was too obvious to point out.
As for measures against actual Communists and they sympathizers, I have no problem with that. In the context of the Cold War, there was no reason to protect Communists at all. My preferred solution to Communists and Marxists involves a machine gun and a ditch because there is nothing to discuss between such enemies.
Then you better climb down into that ditch and start fellating that machine gun yourself, because the idea that it's okay to murder someone for their political beliefs is the hallmark of such enemies. Marxists don't like murdering people anymore than muslims like to make themselves explode, or Americans like blowing up citi... Well, you get the idea. Just because someone who shares some viewpoints with a wacko, it doesn't mean he is a wacko, too.
So... You were saying something? That you were right and I was wrong with respect to that.
about:
What _I_ would like, and won't have is people actually know the stuff they are talking about. Right now, "piracy" means "whatever someone else does that I don't like regarding copyrighted works", regardless if it's legal, illegal, moral, or immoral. It's not just that the term does not apply, it's that it's propaganda meaning is too wide to be useful, other than for creating confusion. I still think _that_ holds.
The fact that some people have succeeded in calling copyright infringement "piracy" does not make it any more legitimate. Yes it does. That's how language works. I mean, when a word has been used to mean something for nearly two centuries, you might as well give it up and accept that that's what the word means now. I mean -- it's in a law dictionary and apparently has been for over a century. It's now officially a term of the art. Well, that was what I was pointing out. It hasn't been in a law dictionary for over a century. The quote is about plagiarism. What I am complaining about is that people keep using words they don't understand to describe stuff they don't understand. Plagiarism is very different and has very different implications than copyright infringement. In fact, those blanket terms only help to add confusion. What _I_ would like, and won't have is people actually know the stuff they are talking about. Right now, "piracy" means "whatever someone else does that I don't like regarding copyrighted works", regardless if it's legal, illegal, moral, or immoral. It's not just that the term does not apply, it's that it's propaganda meaning is too wide to be useful, other than for creating confusion.
piracy, n. 3. The unauthorized and illegal reproduction or distribution of materials protected by copyright, patent, or trademark law. See INFRINGEMENT.
"[T]he test of piracy [is] not whether the identical language, the same words, are used, but whether the substance of the production is unlawfully appropriated." Eaton S. Drone, A Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions 97 (1879).
Black's Law Dictionary (2004)(citation abridged) And that text refers to plagiarism. Plagiarism is not copyright infringement, It's plagiarism. Even if some US lawyer had used the term for copyright infringement in the 19th century, it doesn't mean it's less a part of a propaganda campaign, just a long one.
People try to call bad names other people they don't like, and some times, they succeed, esp. when they manage the media themselves. The fact that some people have succeeded in calling copyright infringement "piracy" does not make it any more legitimate. They got away with that, and they are probably going to succeed in equating copyright infringement with robbery. After all, real piracy implies robbery. In the future they might say that copying mp3 is like killing people, because actual piracy often implies killing people.
it's open source! if it doesn't do it how you want, go in and change things do it does! But that might require _you_ to know how to touch a man from the outside. I think that kind of ability can get you a flesh and blood partner of the relevant gender much easier than buying a robot.
Yeah and why do they have to pass a checklist of requirements to release their code freely? You should be freely available to release your code freely, and the first "freely" I mean in the sense of completely free, not GPL-free. You are missing the point. They can release the code as completely free. Public domain if they want. There is no checklist. There is a checklist if you want to release your code under the GPL, but you don't seem to be talking about that, just "release their code freely".
And as a prize for ou efforts, I'll bite. When you mean "completely free", what do you mean? Do you think there is such a thing as absoulute freedom? I don't think so, myself, because I think that freedom involves more people than the developer and direct recipients of his software, and every actor that gets some freedom has the possibility of taking some freedom away from other actors, but I would like to see what _you_ mean by "completely free", and who you are taking into account (original developers, contributors, distributors, users) when you think about that "complete" freedom.
Not only "not nice." If people cannot make money from their creative work, then they will find another job. Everybody wants the latest song by $ARTIST but they don't realize that if $ARTIST has to choose between songwriting and eating, paying rent, etc. then he probably will do something else. Probably I wasn't clear enough. I think that it's fair for everybody to have the same rules applied to them. I only think he has the right to control his works, _because_ he lives in a society with copyright.
I am not against a society without copyright, I think it would be better than what we have today. Right now copyright only benefits a handfull of creators, and an industry that is several times larger, but does not produce creative works.
With the technology we have today, I think it's possible for creative workers to make a living without copyrights, and benefit from the advantages of a copyright free society, like evolutionary collaborative creations.
My math is this: probably less than 10% of the cash spent on copyrighted works goes to creators, if they are veeeery lucky.
What I think is that probably more than 10% of that money would still be happily spent by fans/customers, even if they could get it for free on the internet, because they like supporting their artists. Plus, smart creators can offer intangible benefits, like better access, stuff on demand, of course live performances too. I think it's easy to replace copyright, when you only need to charge 10% of the money you were charging before, because eliminating copyright almost instantly eliminates the need for a middle man.
Not only they used his work without his consent, but they also claimed it wasn't his, and that they in fact had the right to use instead of the original creator - via a fake document. So, I'd say in this case, they were stealing from him; had the judge sided with the other side he would be effectually unable to use his work anymore, and that might be equal to theft. But before all the "piracy is theft" crowd begin to cheer, I have never seen our mates at TPB claiming they own or produced any of the works their torrents lead to. That is fraud, not theft. Anyhow, people who say that "piracy is theft" are right. Of course piracy is theft. That is exactly the problem with using propaganda words instead of neutral ones. When you accept that "piracy" is the right word to describe "copyright infringement", you are accepting all the concepts associated with the word "piracy", like theft. Of course, it's kind of a circular reasoning. If I want to argue that anything you do is theft, I only have to call it by a name that implies theft, like "piracy". Once you accept my name, because it's widely used (a good propaganda job), or whatever, I am free to use all the other concepts associated to the word. It works pretty much like branding, but in a negative way.
Why should anybody pay him for it? Nobody is denying him of the use of the photos. Interesting question. I think copyright should work in his favor, only to balance out the fact that it works against him. He is not allowed to do whatever he pleases with other peoples work, so, in exchange, everybody else isn't allowed to use his stuff, and they have to pay him to do it. It's only fair. Otherwise, the community would be taking from him, and not giving him anything. That would not be nice.
The Slashdot community has this amusing mix of copyright haters and copyright lovers. See, we're supposed to be all geeks, so if someone takes (pardon me, "duplicates") our stuff, it's not longer "copyright is not theft!" but rather "get a goddamn rope!"
C// Copyright infringement is not theft. This is a civil issue. That's why they are supposed to pay, not to go to jail. In this particular case, copyright is working probably like it was meant to work. Seeing that this is the extreme minority of the copyright consequences, I still think copyright, as it is now, should not exist at all, because its benefits are eclipsed by its drawbacks.
These people should be forced to pay a reasonable amount of money to this guy.
some really awkward-sounding name That's the problem right there, and why I personally say Linux. I think most people have no problem with giving attribution to GNU but not at the expense of easy pronunciation. By now, I think it's too late to change the name. GNU should have come up with a better name several years ago. And I agree that it's not very hard to find out about GNU. The FSF should realize that they need open-source because open-source is what sells. The focus should be on attracting programmers and unifying applications, closing holes in functionality to better compete with other OSs, not arguing about who made what. Leave it to the individual distros to educate their users on the usefulness of Free Software. The argument started when someone said that Linus had written an OS, in the context of a media article. The whole issue of GNU/Linux is that RMS fears that the work of the GNU will be attributed to Linus, like what happened here. It is not important because of the ego of the programmers. It is important, because the GNU project is a political movement, and producing good quality software is not its only objective. It's not about making things work, and choosing the "right" technical alternative. It's about spreading the message that software should be free, in a particular way. GNU fights for atribution, because that's what they are looking for when they write their program, and any marketing decision that ignores their branding is not a good marketing decision for GNU and its objectives.
"An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
Linux is an operating system. It is not wise to quote Wikipedia as an authoritative source, beacause they are not one. Aside from that, we are supposed to be nerds, being in slashdot, and nerds know what OSs are. Encyclopedias don't apply in that context, because the knowledge they bring to the discussion is too shallow for people who know enough about the subject in particular.
There are different views on what an OS is, but the most common way of seeing it is that Windows XP, Ubuntu, and OSX are OSs, and Mac, kernel32 and Linux are kernels. That happens because what most people mean as Linux OS is Linux + userland. To illustrate that (not as an authoritative source) you can see this quote from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux/:
Free Software Foundation views Linux distributions which use GNU software as GNU variants and they ask that such operating systems be referred to as GNU/Linux or a Linux-based GNU system.[60] However, the media and population at large refers to this family of operating systems simply as Linux. While some distributors make a point of using the aggregate form, most notably Debian with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, the term's use outside of the enthusiast community is limited. The distinction between the Linux kernel and distributions based on it plus the GNU system is a source of confusion to many newcomers, and the naming remains controversial.
Slashdot Mirror
These laptops don't have 8800 nvidia cards. Shut up.
So, what shall we conclude? That ISO isn't a relevant entity. This votation has shown that it's corrupt in many countries, and incompetent in others. Why should the other standards that have been aproved in the past be any more "respectable"? Couldn't they also been approved out of corruption or incompetence?
And even if in the end it doesn't get approved, you can't ignore what has happened. I don't know about you, but I will not hold ISO in high regard anymore. Well, it all comes down to what your agenda is. ISO is relevant right now, and will continue to be so, even with all these issues. OOXML being rejected as an ISO standard would give a competitive edge to ODF. OOXML is having problems right now becoming a defacto standard, because users with older msoffice versions are pushing backwards. I think without the added momentum of ISO compliance it will never catch on. In large organizations it will come down to keeping the old formats, for compatibility sake, or ODF for ISO compliance. It would very easy to make the case against OOXML if they don't get ISO status. In that scenario, time could get rid of
I was hoping people in our country would be wiser, but I underestimated the power of government people do do the stupid thing.
In my country, Uruguay, they were not corrupt. They were just ignorant. The vote of government organization was in the line of: we don't really know what this is all about, but MS software is important to us, so we think it's OK to standardize it. Vote YES.That's more what it seems like to me, despite my personal objections and issues with OOXML.
I think that, because this is a key issue for MS, they exploited the system in every way they could, you don't even need corruption in most places, if the have the right vulnerabilities.
The reason why we are all saying that it can't be possible that they accept it is that some of us read the standard, of excerpts from it. The complaint is that, even to lay people, it is very easy to see it's not a standard at all, and tries to standardize an area that already has a real standard approved (ODF), without improving on it. It should be easier to spot for standards specialists. There are issues where you can have different opinions, but this seems too clear cut to even be discussed.
A standard should be something that allows you to test compliance. OOXML, in lots of points does not help you build a compliance test. Of course, those tags that say your should render content as Word9x come to mind. That is why it's so clear to me that I can't be approved, in its current form. Of course, it could be improved and become a standard, but it has not happened yet.
In your case, it's probably a NullPointerException when trying to follow the reference of the word. You should try using "FSM" instead of that word.
Other than that, what makes you think that photoshop is more "creative" friendly?
Aside from the fact than working on Photoshop doesn't look to me as more of a creative activity than using a wordprocessor, it's interface was not so much designed, but more evolved (only it was created less than 6000 years ago). Its menus and palettes are not very human friendly, they are the way they are due to the limitations of older computer systems. If someone designed a new user interface for a similar program they could take advantage of new concepts, and technology, like for example being able to use each and every tool and filter directly on the spot, rather than on separate windows.
About CMYK, well, print is not dead, but most people who use Photoshop don't care about CMYK. It's probably not it's killer feature.
Other than drawing with pencils, or using pre-Adobe printouts, it would be very difficult to find fonts to compare that are not rendered by Adobe. That wouldn't be fair.
Hmmmm...
Peru has no gauchos. The Inca people live in Peru. Different origins, different looks, different culture, different jokes.
Gauchos don't get to meet llamas, and where gauchos live, women are more beautiful than sheep. In Peru, it's a different deal.
If there is a monopoly condition, price approaches infinity according to needs. Talk to any company that did software contracts with MS during the 90's. I said "orthogonal", meaning that price has nothing to do with quality.
I followed with a counterexample of the supposed direct relation between price and quality.
What do monopolies have to do with that? I know most monopolies push prices upwards and quality downwards, but not all of them. Some of them are designed to do the opposite, and they even work.
Eclipse is free, VS2008 is expensive. I can tell you first hand that the former is much easier to use, yet more powerful.
Air is free, pure nitrogen is more expensive.
I just pointed out that example because it was very illustrative. My point is that he was right saying that warnings are really design shortcomings. A perfect design would have no warning. Nobody said that a perfect design is achievable, but with software we are much closer, because detected shortcomings are relatively easy to fix, finding them is more difficult. In a free software project, where they tend to have honest public relations, "known issues" for a release tend to get fixed for the next release, implying that those "warnings" could be easily removed.Oh yeah, I forgot about that. But I'd bet good money that this saw's manual comes with *more* warnings than a normal saw. (WARNING: Never use your actual finger to test failsafe mechanism! CAUTION: Electrical interference may cause false triggering!, etc.)
Let's apply that to other products in the real world. How about a table saw: that's covered with warning stickers and the instruction manual is full of safety notices. These are all flaws, and we'll change the saw's design to remove them one by one. At the end of the process, we'll have a flawless and user friendly cutting tool: a plastic butter knife.
Ok. Software does not live in the real world. Some rules do not apply. "Undo" is rarely available in the real world, and backups are much more expensive there. There are reasons why warnings in software can be changed into fixes.No thanks, I'll take my powerful but "dangerous" software over dumbed down pablum.
About your table saw, that proves the original poster point. There are new table saws that only make a small cut in your finger if you try to cut it off, maybe future designs can make it as safe to use as a plastic butter knife. I don't think losing fingers is inherent to cutting wood, current design can cope with that, and it can only improve.
I was responding to this sentence of the AC I replied: because the idea that it's okay to murder someone for their political beliefs is the hallmark of such enemies. That seemed to confirm that marxists and communists like killing people per se. Maybe I didn't get the point, sorry, I am not a native English speaker. But I was not questioning the one he was replying to is a wacko, I thought it was too obvious to point out.
Then you better climb down into that ditch and start fellating that machine gun yourself, because the idea that it's okay to murder someone for their political beliefs is the hallmark of such enemies. Marxists don't like murdering people anymore than muslims like to make themselves explode, or Americans like blowing up citi... Well, you get the idea.
Just because someone who shares some viewpoints with a wacko, it doesn't mean he is a wacko, too.
about
What I am complaining about is that people keep using words they don't understand to describe stuff they don't understand. Plagiarism is very different and has very different implications than copyright infringement. In fact, those blanket terms only help to add confusion.
What _I_ would like, and won't have is people actually know the stuff they are talking about. Right now, "piracy" means "whatever someone else does that I don't like regarding copyrighted works", regardless if it's legal, illegal, moral, or immoral. It's not just that the term does not apply, it's that it's propaganda meaning is too wide to be useful, other than for creating confusion.
3. The unauthorized and illegal reproduction or distribution of materials protected by copyright, patent, or trademark law. See INFRINGEMENT.
"[T]he test of piracy [is] not whether the identical language, the same words, are used, but whether the substance of the production is unlawfully appropriated." Eaton S. Drone, A Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions 97 (1879).
Black's Law Dictionary (2004)(citation abridged) And that text refers to plagiarism. Plagiarism is not copyright infringement, It's plagiarism.
Even if some US lawyer had used the term for copyright infringement in the 19th century, it doesn't mean it's less a part of a propaganda campaign, just a long one.
People try to call bad names other people they don't like, and some times, they succeed, esp. when they manage the media themselves. The fact that some people have succeeded in calling copyright infringement "piracy" does not make it any more legitimate. They got away with that, and they are probably going to succeed in equating copyright infringement with robbery. After all, real piracy implies robbery. In the future they might say that copying mp3 is like killing people, because actual piracy often implies killing people.
And as a prize for ou efforts, I'll bite. When you mean "completely free", what do you mean? Do you think there is such a thing as absoulute freedom? I don't think so, myself, because I think that freedom involves more people than the developer and direct recipients of his software, and every actor that gets some freedom has the possibility of taking some freedom away from other actors, but I would like to see what _you_ mean by "completely free", and who you are taking into account (original developers, contributors, distributors, users) when you think about that "complete" freedom.
I am not against a society without copyright, I think it would be better than what we have today. Right now copyright only benefits a handfull of creators, and an industry that is several times larger, but does not produce creative works.
With the technology we have today, I think it's possible for creative workers to make a living without copyrights, and benefit from the advantages of a copyright free society, like evolutionary collaborative creations.
My math is this: probably less than 10% of the cash spent on copyrighted works goes to creators, if they are veeeery lucky.
What I think is that probably more than 10% of that money would still be happily spent by fans/customers, even if they could get it for free on the internet, because they like supporting their artists. Plus, smart creators can offer intangible benefits, like better access, stuff on demand, of course live performances too. I think it's easy to replace copyright, when you only need to charge 10% of the money you were charging before, because eliminating copyright almost instantly eliminates the need for a middle man.
I think copyright should work in his favor, only to balance out the fact that it works against him. He is not allowed to do whatever he pleases with other peoples work, so, in exchange, everybody else isn't allowed to use his stuff, and they have to pay him to do it. It's only fair.
Otherwise, the community would be taking from him, and not giving him anything. That would not be nice.
C// Copyright infringement is not theft. This is a civil issue. That's why they are supposed to pay, not to go to jail.
In this particular case, copyright is working probably like it was meant to work. Seeing that this is the extreme minority of the copyright consequences, I still think copyright, as it is now, should not exist at all, because its benefits are eclipsed by its drawbacks.
These people should be forced to pay a reasonable amount of money to this guy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
Linux is an operating system. It is not wise to quote Wikipedia as an authoritative source, beacause they are not one. Aside from that, we are supposed to be nerds, being in slashdot, and nerds know what OSs are. Encyclopedias don't apply in that context, because the knowledge they bring to the discussion is too shallow for people who know enough about the subject in particular.
There are different views on what an OS is, but the most common way of seeing it is that Windows XP, Ubuntu, and OSX are OSs, and Mac, kernel32 and Linux are kernels. That happens because what most people mean as Linux OS is Linux + userland. To illustrate that (not as an authoritative source) you can see this quote from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux/