If I were fighting for my freedom, or the safety of my family I would fight and die if necessary. I would like to think that I would value freedom even if I was born in a country gripped by tyranny. I would hope that if I was an Iraqi I would have been part of a movement to free my country from Saddam Hussein.
However, it's hard to know how I would act if I hadn't been raised to value my freedom. Still, no matter how you slice it Iraqi troops are supporting a vicious dictator. If it wasn't for the support of his troops Saddam would have been removed by the Iraqi people themselves a long time ago. Upholding Saddam's brand of tyranny is just wrong, no matter what country you are from.
That's a very good point. I actually have a private school education (although it was a private school in Lima, Peru:). While I was there I learned first hand how effective anti-American propaganda could be. The government sponsored a rather large anti-U.S. campaign while I was there, primarily to cover up their own corruption (Google for Alan Garcia). I was surprised how well it worked. It really is amazing what people will believe Americans are capable of.
The most amazing "news story" was that an American was roaming the streets of Lima stealing the eyes of poor Peruvian children for sale back in the U.S. It was all crap, but it didn't stop a mob of folks from nearly turning over our automobile while we were downtown one day. The only thing that saved us was A) we all spoke fluent Spanish, and B) my father pointed out to the mob that his one and two year old children were with him in the car.
I hope that the U.S. counter-propaganda works. Thanks for the discussion.
I, for one, would fight and die for my country, my freedom, my right to worship as I see fit, and the right for chuckheads like yourself to say any sort of stupid thing that you want.
You don't have to like George Bush. You will have the opportunity to try and elect someone else in a relatively short time. You don't have to agree with the war either. However, if you can't see the difference between the freedoms available in a country like the United States and the Tyranny of a regime like Saddam Hussein's then you need medical help.
The faster the Iraqis surrender, the faster we can start giving them food. At the rate that this war is going I don't think the Iraqis are likely to even get hungry. Heck, they probably won't even have to skip a meal.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. If I was an Iraqi soldier I would be lining up to surrender. Who wants to give their life defending Saddam Hussein? Heck, If I was an Iraqi soldier I would like to think that I would have turned my gun on that regime a long time ago.
Even if Saddam is alive people that give a crap about what he has to say are almost certainly few and far between.
The reason that I go from "It is simply too easy for local leaders to blame those "Yankee Devils" and cast the blame for their problems on us." to "No matter what we do we get criticized" is simple. I have lived outside the United States enough to see that to be the case. This is especially true in areas of the world where there is a great deal of poverty. It doesn't matter that the U.S. spends billions trying to help the people. It is simply too easy for the leaders in these places to distract attention from their own bad behavior by blaming the peoples problems on the U.S. Never mind that the real reason the people are poor and downtrodden is the fact that their leaders are crooks, the propaganda that they hear is all about how they are poor because of America. I don't even blame the people for this belief. If you don't know anything about economics (because your leaders make sure that getting a quality education is nearly impossible) it is easy to believe that you are poor because Americans have all the money.
Europe doesn't have this problem (to the same extent) because they don't meddle as much, and because they aren't quite as prosperous. Unfortunately, the U.S. tried isolationism and it didn't work out well for us or for the rest of the world. Do you really want us to pull out of Europe?
As for Arafat. The Palestinian people chose him to be their leader and to negotiate for them in the peace accords. The fact that they chose a criminal and a terrorist to negotiate can hardly be blamed on the United States. The long and the short of it is that Arafat doesn't want peace, and negotiating with him is a clear waste of time. As for the Palestinians intentions to "drive the Israelis into the sea" that's a quote from Arafat. If that isn't the sentiment from the majority of Palestinians then they need to choose a different leader to represent them. All I know is that there seemed to be a lot of Palestinians dancing in the street after 9/11.
All I know was that if some group of yahoos used terrorist tactics against my friends and family it would be war. The people in question could either hand over the guilty parties, or they would all suffer the consequences. The Israelis have been very understanding. They could simply drive the Palestinians out of the country by force where they would almost certainly be slaughtered by their fellow Arabs. The Israelis would be happy to stop firing rockets into Palestinian homes if they thought that this would help. Unfortunately, trying to negotiate with the thugs that the Palestinians have chosen as leadership is impossible.
It is easy to simply blame the Israelis, but blaming the Jews for moving back to Israel doesn't solve the problem, and neither does trying to negotiate with Arafat. So what precisely does that leave as choices for Israel. They could sit around and wait until they are all blown up by terrorists, or they could try and track down the terrorist cells.
Now, so that I end on a constructive note, I think it does matter what you do. I think that if you treat people fairly, they will ultimately understand and reciprocate. I think that to be admired is a better way to achieve security than to be feared.
When I lived in Peru there were several occasions where I was literally attacked by Peruvians because I was American. This didn't have anything to do with anything the U.S. had actually done (I was a 16 year old kid), and had everything to do with false propaganda that Peruvian leaders spread via the state owned media. None of the propaganda was even true, it was simply a ploy to distract the people from the fact that these same leaders were stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in Peru's funds. Google for Alan Garcia to learn more details.
Now, how exactly does the U.S. defend itself from that sort of slander? The answer is that they can't. Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all over the world whenever you have a government that wants to distract its people from its own corruption.
Both articles stated that the link to Al Qaeda was tenuous. My point was simply that there are plenty of reasons to go to war, and there are plenty of links between Saddam and terrorists (perhaps not Al Qaeda terrorists). I would even agree that many U.S. conservatives have been looking for excuses to remove Saddam for years now. As if we need an excuse. The man is a menace, and only a fool believes that he isn't trying to amass weapons of mass destruction. It's far better to remove him now then wait until he has the power to do real damage.
Heck, I will even admit to trolling. It seems so amazing to me that people can't see Saddam as a danger to world peace that I get a little carried away. The Apollo moon landing bit was over the top, and bringing the Israelis into the discussion was uncalled for. I am just tired of hearing that the U.S. deserves the terrorist attacks because we support the Jews in Israel (not that you ever stated anything like that).
Geez, if this were really all about oil, then why not simply buy Iraqi oil? They were more than happy to sell it to us. You are rigth about the rhetoric bit though. The reason that America has a PR target is that we are such a big target for rhetoric. It is simply too easy for local leaders to blame those "Yankee Devils" and cast the blame for their problems on us.
It's also true that America has a reputation as a bully. The fact of the matter is that whenever there is a conflict somewhere in the world it is the U.S. that pays the butcher's bill. Europe doesn't mind so much when we are putting out the fires in their back yard (in Bosnia), but now that we are hurting France and Russia's bottom lines we get demonized.
In the end it makes you wonder why America bothers with PR at all. No matter what we do we are criticized.
Palestine is a good example. We worked very hard hammering out a deal between the Palestinians and the Israelis that had the Israelis giving up nearly half of their country. Arafat nixes the deal (because he is an idiot and a terrorist) and somehow it's the U.S.'s fault. What more does the Arab world want of us. We would be happy to leave them to their pitiful corner of the world, but we aren't going to let them kill millions of our allied Jews in the process. When the Palestinians stop talking about genocide then we can start talking about fair.
America wants a world where terrorists have a hard time getting their work done. We already tried leaving Saddam in place, it didn't help. It's easy for the Europeans to talk about peace, they aren't in the crosshairs of these terrorist groups.
Proof? And White House press releases don't count.
Oh please. I suppose you also have your doubts about the Apollo moon landing. There is plenty of evidence that Iraq has been aiding and abetting terrorists. Heck, in my opinion paying the living relatives of suicide bombers is enough in itself. Saying that Iraq isn't a rogue nation and a sponsor for terrorism is just ridiculous. They've been killing the Kurds for years. Of course, Kurds are somewhat like Jews. They don't really count as people.
That's exactly my point. The protestors are protesting a war against an enemy that is actively seeking to kill them. Pretending that we can simply be nice to the folks in the middle east and have the whole situation blow over is the worst sort of naivety.
The most ironic part of the whole thing is that the protestors know that they are targets (as witnessed by the remarks about large gatherings in small spaces).
It's easy for France and Russia to talk about diplomacy when they aren't the targets of the various terrorists groups that Saddam has supported for years. It's not French or Russian lives that are on the line, it's American lives, and apparently American lives don't count for much when weighted against French and Russian financial interests in Saddam's regime.
Twelve years was more than enough time to disarm, it was high time for the big stick. Heck, the U.S. shouldn't have listened to the U.N. in the first Gulf War. We should have just removed Saddam then.
Serves us right for listening to those crazy racist bastards. Leavind Saddam in charge certainly didn't protect us from Saudi terrorists, it just made it easier for said terrorists to get the funding they needed to carry out 9/11.
The reason that NK wants to pull the US into the discussions is that they have already learned that they can't blackmail more money out of China or Japan. Personally I am sick and tired of the "International Community" always looking to the US when it is time to pay the bill.
China is the country that should be putting more pressure on these guys. It's their mess.
Ok, I read your article, and in fact here is a quote from the last paragraph:
The Gulf War and its aftermath demonstrate the strengths and gaps of international humanitarian norms and law. Though the U.S.-led coalition in some cases at least encroached upon the rules of war, the allies in most cases did make a conscious effort to adhere to them. Saddam Hussein chose to ignore them nearly altogether.
In short, the worst that the U.S.-led coalition did was destroy some power plants that fed hospitals, and the random water treatment plant. There was also at least one major accident with a cruise missle.
I've got news for you friend. The most humane thing that you can do when going to war is to play to win. The sooner that the conflict is over the better for everyone involved. Sometimes that means destroying infrastructure, and sometimes accidents will happen. Equating what the coalition did with "war crimes" is just ridiculous.
Bringing Israel into the picture is a perfect example of what I am talking about. That's racism, pure and simple. The rest of Middle East hates Israel because they are Jews. Apparently being Jewish is a sin so hideous that it justifies blowing up their children.
Of course, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with Israel either, but it's the sort of propaganda that the leaders in these nations use to get their population to focus on the "Dirty Jews" and the "Yankee Devils" instead of on the problems created by their own government.
What in the heck are you talking about? Handling North Korea is every bit as important to U.S. interests as handling Saddam Hussein. Perhaps it is even more vital to the U.S.'s long term safety. The reason that the U.S. is not responding in the same way to North Korea as it is to Iraq has nothing to do with "U.S. interests" and has everything to do with China.
China could care less what we do in Iraq, but they are very interested in what we do in North Korea. In many ways the mess in North Korea is China's problem. They created the monster, and they are entirely responsible for its continued funding.
People don't hate the U.S. because of its foreign policy. People hate the U.S. because it is easy for leaders in these foreign countries to blame the "Yankee devils" for their problems. Americans make a handy target, that's all.
The overwhelming majority of open projects are not developed the way Linux and KDE are.
Yes, but the overwhelming majority of Free Software that actually gets used is developed in some sort of a community fashion. Sure, there are plenty of small projects that are basically one or two person shows, but these projects generally only have one or two users as well. Now take any piece of Free Software that sees a lot of use and you will undoubtedly see that there is truly a community built around it. Heck, read ESR's work on the fetchmail utility and you will see what I mean. Even small utilities can generate sizable communities.
Because nowadays customers want Linux not HP-UX. Now, HP could pretend that this wasn't the case, but that wouldn't improve sales of HP-UX, it would just guarantee that they missed out on a piece of the Linux pie. This is the same reason that Sun will also sell you Linux devices. Sun knows that it's better to sell you their Linux server than have you go buy from a competitor.
Applying political bandages to economic problems tends to make matters worse, not better. The government could certainly try to set up protections for the U.S. software market, but all that would do is guarantee that American companies paid more for their software. That might help American coders (in the short run), but it would hurt everyone else. What's more it would likely accelerate the creation of foreign software companies. So Sun, IBM, and Microsoft wouldn't be able to hire foreign coders, but Wipro, SAP, and the rest of the world would. In the end American software would be less competitive and we would lose these jobs anyhow. More importantly we would lose control over the entire industry, and the rest of the American economy would end up paying higher prices for software.
If anything we should simply make it easy for talented hackers from all over the world to move to the U.S with no strings attached. Indian nationals living in the U.S. have all of the same expenses that I do. Indians living in Calcuta have a much lower cost of living.
The reason that government hasn't been willing to "rein this one in" is that they have learned from experience that regulating trade always works out to the detriment of the economy. They still do it when the issue becomes a hot political issue, but they don't like it.
Code linked with GPLed code has to be distributed under a GPL license because it is a derivative work. It's not just the folks at the FSF that believe this either. Take a look at some of the licenses that come with commercial licenses if you don't believe me. Even the old-style BSD licenses acknowledge this fact, that is why they could require software that linked against BSD-licensed libraries to include their licensing blurb. The original BSD license was every bit as "viral" as the GPL, which is why so many programs currently have an a BSD licensing blurb.
In that sense, every time you use someone else's library you have to pay attention to licensing issues. Or, to put it more bluntly, all libraries are "viral." The difference is what the library requires of coders that distribute software that is a derivative work of the library. The GPL requires that all recipients of the derivative works receive the same rights that the distributor had. The new-style BSD licenses require very little (if anything). Proprietary licenses generally require some sort of licensing fee.
Both the proprietary license advocates and the BSD license advocates have linked the term "viral" to the GPL for marketing-driven reasons. This does not mean that the BSD and proprietary hackers are willing to give up the idea that linking against a library makes the software a derivative of the library. Everyone that writes software libraries would argue that this was the case.
If the new Indian management team is any good then the first thing that they will do is move a good portion of the company to India. After all, you get more bang from your buck using low cost Indian coders. So now nearly the entire company will be from India instead of merely a portion of the company.
You see, this isn't a social problem, it's an economic one. Talented Indian workers are willing to work for less than American workers.
Re:Most companies aren't asking the right question
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CIOs Looking At OSS
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I can tell you first hand what happens when you don't share changes to a Free Software project, and it ain't pretty.
Several years ago I needed software to create some specialized graphs for a manufacturing Intranet. Since I was working in Perl at the time I downloaded GIFgraph, and took a look at it. It did about 90% of what I needed, and was cleanly written, so I spent a couple of weeks and added the features that I needed. Several of these features were the type of thing that just about anyone making graphs would appreciate, and at least one of the features was something that had been mentioned repeatedly on their mailing list. I toyed briefly with asking permission to release the code, but the Intranet was a bit of a skunkworks and I was afraid that sharing had the potential to get me and my boss in trouble.
The good news is that the Intranet was a success. Not only did it work flawlessly, but the solution was so ridiculously inexpensive to maintain and deploy that it got rolled out to several factories. And that's where the problems started in. You see, because I hadn't shared my rather minor extensions to GIFgraph I had to maintain my own incompatible version. GIFgraph soon had most of the features that I had added, but they were all incompatible with the work that I had done. Even worse, the underlying GD library went through some major changes and my version of GIFgraph didn't work with them either. So now I had my own custom version of GIFgraph that depended on an older version of GD (that wasn't available via FTP anymore because of GIF licensing issues). It seems to me that Perl also came out with some changes that were tricky as well, which required me to stick with an older version of Perl than what shipped in most Linux distributions.
Maintaining this stuff was doable, but it was certainly extra work. What's more it could have all been avoided if I would have shared. In the end the application was rewritten in Python and integrated into Zope (which made me happy, as I like Python). However, I could have saved myself some work if I would have shared right from the start.
Actually my experience has been just the opposite. Free Software makes it affordable to create a customized solution that is built from a base of commodity Free Software parts. This is excellent news for in-house development staffs and small-time developers. All of a sudden we can produce custom solutions that cost less than the one-size-fits-all solutions available from the the huge software development houses.
Yes, this is bad news for Microsoft, Oracle, BEA, and the rest of the commercial software giants, but it's good news for the 80% of software developers that work outside of the software industry.
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If I were fighting for my freedom, or the safety of my family I would fight and die if necessary. I would like to think that I would value freedom even if I was born in a country gripped by tyranny. I would hope that if I was an Iraqi I would have been part of a movement to free my country from Saddam Hussein.
However, it's hard to know how I would act if I hadn't been raised to value my freedom. Still, no matter how you slice it Iraqi troops are supporting a vicious dictator. If it wasn't for the support of his troops Saddam would have been removed by the Iraqi people themselves a long time ago. Upholding Saddam's brand of tyranny is just wrong, no matter what country you are from.
That's a very good point. I actually have a private school education (although it was a private school in Lima, Peru :). While I was there I learned first hand how effective anti-American propaganda could be. The government sponsored a rather large anti-U.S. campaign while I was there, primarily to cover up their own corruption (Google for Alan Garcia). I was surprised how well it worked. It really is amazing what people will believe Americans are capable of.
The most amazing "news story" was that an American was roaming the streets of Lima stealing the eyes of poor Peruvian children for sale back in the U.S. It was all crap, but it didn't stop a mob of folks from nearly turning over our automobile while we were downtown one day. The only thing that saved us was A) we all spoke fluent Spanish, and B) my father pointed out to the mob that his one and two year old children were with him in the car.
I hope that the U.S. counter-propaganda works. Thanks for the discussion.
I, for one, would fight and die for my country, my freedom, my right to worship as I see fit, and the right for chuckheads like yourself to say any sort of stupid thing that you want.
You don't have to like George Bush. You will have the opportunity to try and elect someone else in a relatively short time. You don't have to agree with the war either. However, if you can't see the difference between the freedoms available in a country like the United States and the Tyranny of a regime like Saddam Hussein's then you need medical help.
The faster the Iraqis surrender, the faster we can start giving them food. At the rate that this war is going I don't think the Iraqis are likely to even get hungry. Heck, they probably won't even have to skip a meal.
That shouldn't surprise anyone. If I was an Iraqi soldier I would be lining up to surrender. Who wants to give their life defending Saddam Hussein? Heck, If I was an Iraqi soldier I would like to think that I would have turned my gun on that regime a long time ago.
Even if Saddam is alive people that give a crap about what he has to say are almost certainly few and far between.
Or for the same price you can get two 19 in CRTs and have a double headed display.
In short, no gracias.
The reason that I go from "It is simply too easy for local leaders to blame those "Yankee Devils" and cast the blame for their problems on us." to "No matter what we do we get criticized" is simple. I have lived outside the United States enough to see that to be the case. This is especially true in areas of the world where there is a great deal of poverty. It doesn't matter that the U.S. spends billions trying to help the people. It is simply too easy for the leaders in these places to distract attention from their own bad behavior by blaming the peoples problems on the U.S. Never mind that the real reason the people are poor and downtrodden is the fact that their leaders are crooks, the propaganda that they hear is all about how they are poor because of America. I don't even blame the people for this belief. If you don't know anything about economics (because your leaders make sure that getting a quality education is nearly impossible) it is easy to believe that you are poor because Americans have all the money.
Europe doesn't have this problem (to the same extent) because they don't meddle as much, and because they aren't quite as prosperous. Unfortunately, the U.S. tried isolationism and it didn't work out well for us or for the rest of the world. Do you really want us to pull out of Europe?
As for Arafat. The Palestinian people chose him to be their leader and to negotiate for them in the peace accords. The fact that they chose a criminal and a terrorist to negotiate can hardly be blamed on the United States. The long and the short of it is that Arafat doesn't want peace, and negotiating with him is a clear waste of time. As for the Palestinians intentions to "drive the Israelis into the sea" that's a quote from Arafat. If that isn't the sentiment from the majority of Palestinians then they need to choose a different leader to represent them. All I know is that there seemed to be a lot of Palestinians dancing in the street after 9/11.
All I know was that if some group of yahoos used terrorist tactics against my friends and family it would be war. The people in question could either hand over the guilty parties, or they would all suffer the consequences. The Israelis have been very understanding. They could simply drive the Palestinians out of the country by force where they would almost certainly be slaughtered by their fellow Arabs. The Israelis would be happy to stop firing rockets into Palestinian homes if they thought that this would help. Unfortunately, trying to negotiate with the thugs that the Palestinians have chosen as leadership is impossible.
It is easy to simply blame the Israelis, but blaming the Jews for moving back to Israel doesn't solve the problem, and neither does trying to negotiate with Arafat. So what precisely does that leave as choices for Israel. They could sit around and wait until they are all blown up by terrorists, or they could try and track down the terrorist cells.
When I lived in Peru there were several occasions where I was literally attacked by Peruvians because I was American. This didn't have anything to do with anything the U.S. had actually done (I was a 16 year old kid), and had everything to do with false propaganda that Peruvian leaders spread via the state owned media. None of the propaganda was even true, it was simply a ploy to distract the people from the fact that these same leaders were stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in Peru's funds. Google for Alan Garcia to learn more details.
Now, how exactly does the U.S. defend itself from that sort of slander? The answer is that they can't. Unfortunately, this sort of thing happens all over the world whenever you have a government that wants to distract its people from its own corruption.
Both articles stated that the link to Al Qaeda was tenuous. My point was simply that there are plenty of reasons to go to war, and there are plenty of links between Saddam and terrorists (perhaps not Al Qaeda terrorists). I would even agree that many U.S. conservatives have been looking for excuses to remove Saddam for years now. As if we need an excuse. The man is a menace, and only a fool believes that he isn't trying to amass weapons of mass destruction. It's far better to remove him now then wait until he has the power to do real damage.
Heck, I will even admit to trolling. It seems so amazing to me that people can't see Saddam as a danger to world peace that I get a little carried away. The Apollo moon landing bit was over the top, and bringing the Israelis into the discussion was uncalled for. I am just tired of hearing that the U.S. deserves the terrorist attacks because we support the Jews in Israel (not that you ever stated anything like that).
Yes, I think that we can let this thread die :).
Geez, if this were really all about oil, then why not simply buy Iraqi oil? They were more than happy to sell it to us. You are rigth about the rhetoric bit though. The reason that America has a PR target is that we are such a big target for rhetoric. It is simply too easy for local leaders to blame those "Yankee Devils" and cast the blame for their problems on us.
It's also true that America has a reputation as a bully. The fact of the matter is that whenever there is a conflict somewhere in the world it is the U.S. that pays the butcher's bill. Europe doesn't mind so much when we are putting out the fires in their back yard (in Bosnia), but now that we are hurting France and Russia's bottom lines we get demonized.
In the end it makes you wonder why America bothers with PR at all. No matter what we do we are criticized.
Palestine is a good example. We worked very hard hammering out a deal between the Palestinians and the Israelis that had the Israelis giving up nearly half of their country. Arafat nixes the deal (because he is an idiot and a terrorist) and somehow it's the U.S.'s fault. What more does the Arab world want of us. We would be happy to leave them to their pitiful corner of the world, but we aren't going to let them kill millions of our allied Jews in the process. When the Palestinians stop talking about genocide then we can start talking about fair.
America wants a world where terrorists have a hard time getting their work done. We already tried leaving Saddam in place, it didn't help. It's easy for the Europeans to talk about peace, they aren't in the crosshairs of these terrorist groups.
Oh please. I suppose you also have your doubts about the Apollo moon landing. There is plenty of evidence that Iraq has been aiding and abetting terrorists. Heck, in my opinion paying the living relatives of suicide bombers is enough in itself. Saying that Iraq isn't a rogue nation and a sponsor for terrorism is just ridiculous. They've been killing the Kurds for years. Of course, Kurds are somewhat like Jews. They don't really count as people.
That's exactly my point. The protestors are protesting a war against an enemy that is actively seeking to kill them. Pretending that we can simply be nice to the folks in the middle east and have the whole situation blow over is the worst sort of naivety.
The most ironic part of the whole thing is that the protestors know that they are targets (as witnessed by the remarks about large gatherings in small spaces).
It's easy for France and Russia to talk about diplomacy when they aren't the targets of the various terrorists groups that Saddam has supported for years. It's not French or Russian lives that are on the line, it's American lives, and apparently American lives don't count for much when weighted against French and Russian financial interests in Saddam's regime.
Twelve years was more than enough time to disarm, it was high time for the big stick. Heck, the U.S. shouldn't have listened to the U.N. in the first Gulf War. We should have just removed Saddam then.
Serves us right for listening to those crazy racist bastards. Leavind Saddam in charge certainly didn't protect us from Saudi terrorists, it just made it easier for said terrorists to get the funding they needed to carry out 9/11.
Appeasement never works, and it never will.
The reason that NK wants to pull the US into the discussions is that they have already learned that they can't blackmail more money out of China or Japan. Personally I am sick and tired of the "International Community" always looking to the US when it is time to pay the bill.
China is the country that should be putting more pressure on these guys. It's their mess.
Ok, I read your article, and in fact here is a quote from the last paragraph:
In short, the worst that the U.S.-led coalition did was destroy some power plants that fed hospitals, and the random water treatment plant. There was also at least one major accident with a cruise missle.
I've got news for you friend. The most humane thing that you can do when going to war is to play to win. The sooner that the conflict is over the better for everyone involved. Sometimes that means destroying infrastructure, and sometimes accidents will happen. Equating what the coalition did with "war crimes" is just ridiculous.
Consider for a moment the irony of terrorists attacking a protest of the war in Iraq.
Bringing Israel into the picture is a perfect example of what I am talking about. That's racism, pure and simple. The rest of Middle East hates Israel because they are Jews. Apparently being Jewish is a sin so hideous that it justifies blowing up their children.
Of course, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with Israel either, but it's the sort of propaganda that the leaders in these nations use to get their population to focus on the "Dirty Jews" and the "Yankee Devils" instead of on the problems created by their own government.
What in the heck are you talking about? Handling North Korea is every bit as important to U.S. interests as handling Saddam Hussein. Perhaps it is even more vital to the U.S.'s long term safety. The reason that the U.S. is not responding in the same way to North Korea as it is to Iraq has nothing to do with "U.S. interests" and has everything to do with China.
China could care less what we do in Iraq, but they are very interested in what we do in North Korea. In many ways the mess in North Korea is China's problem. They created the monster, and they are entirely responsible for its continued funding.
People don't hate the U.S. because of its foreign policy. People hate the U.S. because it is easy for leaders in these foreign countries to blame the "Yankee devils" for their problems. Americans make a handy target, that's all.
Yes, but the overwhelming majority of Free Software that actually gets used is developed in some sort of a community fashion. Sure, there are plenty of small projects that are basically one or two person shows, but these projects generally only have one or two users as well. Now take any piece of Free Software that sees a lot of use and you will undoubtedly see that there is truly a community built around it. Heck, read ESR's work on the fetchmail utility and you will see what I mean. Even small utilities can generate sizable communities.
Because nowadays customers want Linux not HP-UX. Now, HP could pretend that this wasn't the case, but that wouldn't improve sales of HP-UX, it would just guarantee that they missed out on a piece of the Linux pie. This is the same reason that Sun will also sell you Linux devices. Sun knows that it's better to sell you their Linux server than have you go buy from a competitor.
Applying political bandages to economic problems tends to make matters worse, not better. The government could certainly try to set up protections for the U.S. software market, but all that would do is guarantee that American companies paid more for their software. That might help American coders (in the short run), but it would hurt everyone else. What's more it would likely accelerate the creation of foreign software companies. So Sun, IBM, and Microsoft wouldn't be able to hire foreign coders, but Wipro, SAP, and the rest of the world would. In the end American software would be less competitive and we would lose these jobs anyhow. More importantly we would lose control over the entire industry, and the rest of the American economy would end up paying higher prices for software.
If anything we should simply make it easy for talented hackers from all over the world to move to the U.S with no strings attached. Indian nationals living in the U.S. have all of the same expenses that I do. Indians living in Calcuta have a much lower cost of living.
The reason that government hasn't been willing to "rein this one in" is that they have learned from experience that regulating trade always works out to the detriment of the economy. They still do it when the issue becomes a hot political issue, but they don't like it.
Code linked with GPLed code has to be distributed under a GPL license because it is a derivative work. It's not just the folks at the FSF that believe this either. Take a look at some of the licenses that come with commercial licenses if you don't believe me. Even the old-style BSD licenses acknowledge this fact, that is why they could require software that linked against BSD-licensed libraries to include their licensing blurb. The original BSD license was every bit as "viral" as the GPL, which is why so many programs currently have an a BSD licensing blurb.
In that sense, every time you use someone else's library you have to pay attention to licensing issues. Or, to put it more bluntly, all libraries are "viral." The difference is what the library requires of coders that distribute software that is a derivative work of the library. The GPL requires that all recipients of the derivative works receive the same rights that the distributor had. The new-style BSD licenses require very little (if anything). Proprietary licenses generally require some sort of licensing fee.
Both the proprietary license advocates and the BSD license advocates have linked the term "viral" to the GPL for marketing-driven reasons. This does not mean that the BSD and proprietary hackers are willing to give up the idea that linking against a library makes the software a derivative of the library. Everyone that writes software libraries would argue that this was the case.
If the new Indian management team is any good then the first thing that they will do is move a good portion of the company to India. After all, you get more bang from your buck using low cost Indian coders. So now nearly the entire company will be from India instead of merely a portion of the company.
You see, this isn't a social problem, it's an economic one. Talented Indian workers are willing to work for less than American workers.
I can tell you first hand what happens when you don't share changes to a Free Software project, and it ain't pretty.
Several years ago I needed software to create some specialized graphs for a manufacturing Intranet. Since I was working in Perl at the time I downloaded GIFgraph, and took a look at it. It did about 90% of what I needed, and was cleanly written, so I spent a couple of weeks and added the features that I needed. Several of these features were the type of thing that just about anyone making graphs would appreciate, and at least one of the features was something that had been mentioned repeatedly on their mailing list. I toyed briefly with asking permission to release the code, but the Intranet was a bit of a skunkworks and I was afraid that sharing had the potential to get me and my boss in trouble.
The good news is that the Intranet was a success. Not only did it work flawlessly, but the solution was so ridiculously inexpensive to maintain and deploy that it got rolled out to several factories. And that's where the problems started in. You see, because I hadn't shared my rather minor extensions to GIFgraph I had to maintain my own incompatible version. GIFgraph soon had most of the features that I had added, but they were all incompatible with the work that I had done. Even worse, the underlying GD library went through some major changes and my version of GIFgraph didn't work with them either. So now I had my own custom version of GIFgraph that depended on an older version of GD (that wasn't available via FTP anymore because of GIF licensing issues). It seems to me that Perl also came out with some changes that were tricky as well, which required me to stick with an older version of Perl than what shipped in most Linux distributions.
Maintaining this stuff was doable, but it was certainly extra work. What's more it could have all been avoided if I would have shared. In the end the application was rewritten in Python and integrated into Zope (which made me happy, as I like Python). However, I could have saved myself some work if I would have shared right from the start.
Actually my experience has been just the opposite. Free Software makes it affordable to create a customized solution that is built from a base of commodity Free Software parts. This is excellent news for in-house development staffs and small-time developers. All of a sudden we can produce custom solutions that cost less than the one-size-fits-all solutions available from the the huge software development houses.
Yes, this is bad news for Microsoft, Oracle, BEA, and the rest of the commercial software giants, but it's good news for the 80% of software developers that work outside of the software industry.