OT editorial question: is this Slashlaw, News for Geeky Lawyers?
Standard disclaimers and discussion: While I'm no lawyer, I don't see how you can sign one document compelling the signing of another, currently undeveloped document in the future. In any case, I'd be charging a signatory administration fee, for any continued effort on my part in reviewing and writing my name on documents. I might even throw in charges for consulting with my own legal team about the new documents. If continuation of previously awarded benefits or compensation are conditional upon cooperation in this matter, then it's mostly a price issue-- is the compensation sufficient for being involved in what is deemed an unworthy application. If he's already signed documents transferring the rights to his work to the company, I don't understand why they are trying to include him at all, doesn't that potentially weaken their ability to claim sole ownership of the idea?
Um. Not to defend Metallica, especially since they seem to be completely brain-dead on how to deal with digitized music and the internet, but they are NOT the same as the record companies. They have, in the past, filed suits against the record companies, Amazon.com and even Victoria's Secret. I tried to find more details, but all searches resulted in Napster news. I hate to nitpick, but let's keep our bad guys distinct. On the one hand we have a bunch of lawyer-loving suits at the RIAA who may never have played a note of music trying to preserve their ability to make a buck off starving artists. On the other hand we have some starving artists who made it (way too?) big and have encountered too many legal issues on the way to be able to have a clue remaining as to how to deal with new legal issues.
Re:Who really needs a lesson
on
Lawsuits Suck
·
· Score: 1
Heck, if you can figure out Slashdot, you can probably figure out how to get full text of the bills and transcripts of the discussions at the web site that congress set up to help share this information.
I don't think it's Perl's fault that it is any of the above. In fact, I disagree with Mr. Wall that it is hard to learn. I'd have to defer on "use well" since that is subjective. Difficult to maintain? I'd agree, but not because the language is bad, but because I can't think of a single IDE for Perl other than ActiveState's PDK, which is for Windows. I mean, is there anything out there that goes beyond auto-indent macros and color coding? Most of the Perl code I've seen is either kept really really short, heavily.pm-ized (which then obscures the methods and you end up searching man/docs/how-to's just to work with a module-- better than nothing, but efficient, no), or written in very non-modular fashion (such that code snippet reuse from project to project would be painful, if even possible).
Yes. Taint is great, if not a complete pain to work under *grin*. But how many run-of-the-mill "Learn Perl-CGI by Putting This Book Under Your Pillow" books cover security and detainting form input with reg exps before going any farther than "Hello World"? For that matter, how many Linux for Dimwits books take the time to explain right away that you may want to turn off a bunch of services and set up some firewall rules if you don't intend to offer your test apache install to the world at large? This particular exploit isn't listed at CERT yet and the article doesn't say anything about specific examples. However, Red Hat has this and updated RPMs and source for glibc.
That is why I listed four licenses from the very free (public domain) to the very un-free (proprietary). If they don't care if they comply with the GPL that's a completely separate issue-- and they should write whatever license they want and ignore RMS completely. But if they're going to try for GPL-compatibility, it seems to be easiest to just use the GPL, rather than trying to come up with something else.
There is no incentive for a private corporation to share customer data with federal, state, or local governments, especially when that data will frequently include their own directors', managers', and employees' information. The accounting department is more likely to be spending time finding ways to state the accounts so as to lower taxes, while the people who are most likely to be using the above SQL code are the ones in marketing departments, you know, for sales and profitability purposes.
The best uses for disposable credit card numbers are to discourage tracking via account number by vendors(harder to join multiple purchases when the common factor isn't a single number field) and to reduce the risk that a cracker will access a vendor db and get active account numbers.
Disability or not, I firmly agree that RMS' choice about how to use his time right now is not a useful discussion. First, ad hominem attacks are widely considered to be a logical fallacy, and as such do not validate or invalidate any points in debates about GPL and GPL-compatibility. Second, RMS' efforts on my behalf are much appreciated. I use programs he has written every day, which I obtained free of charge and in a form which gives me a maximum amount of personal freedom to use them or change them or give them away, without endangering those programs with the possibility of becoming obsolete when a software firm forks development and makes a closed source proprietary upgrade. Since I haven't personally offered RMS or the FSF any compensation for the service of writing those programs yet, I don't think I'm in a position to demand that he write even more. Third, it certainly seems that the GNU software is a big part of what made Linux possible, since it meant that instead of suddenly having to write all the system utilities, they just needed to be ported. It also influenced a large community of developers to continue to improve upon and add to both these pieces in such a way as to continue to add to their usability while maintaining end user freedom. Fourth, the GPL had and is still having an effect on large commercial software firms exactly as it was intended (freeing their software from artificial constraints), especially as Linux gains ground. Fifth, because there is a [L]GPL and a BSD license and an Artistic license and Public Domain and proprietary "all rights reserved" licensing, I don't see a real need for a lot of differently worded licenses that attempt to be free, but create problems with one of the above. Sixth, by being vigilant about these licenses RMS is actually doing us a favor, since he's the one who bothers to read these things and make sure there are no legal complications down the line. Someday companies like Red Hat and VA Linux may be as big as Microsoft or Apple or IBM, and there are certainly going to be issues that pop up, hopefully minor license issues won't be frequent due to RMS crowing about it loudly right now.
So perhaps some sort of discussion system attached to deliberations over legislation-- complete with threading and moderation by elected moderators (I'm only half joking). Voting should not necessarily be a yes-no basis, but a point scale, with +5 being a resounding yes for a bill, with -5 being a resounding no for a bill. Laws are open for voting for [number of months]. Laws need to have a certain vote score average, like a +2.5, and a certain threshold of votes (like 1% of the population must have cast a vote on the bill) after the discussion period to be sent to the president for signing. We will still need congresspersons with law writing ability to introduce/amend bills and administer the system. I would also work in some sort of automatic review of the law where new laws have the opportunity to be voted as repealed without a special bill for such a repeal.
What a load. Pennies and nickels are legal tender according to popular myth debunking site, snopes.com. I worked at a cafe that carted our electric bill in pennies in wheelbarrows to the 'lectric company HQ and dumped it on the floor to protest a nuclear power issue locally.
I never said the ruling class and the Church cooperated. I said they benefitted from the work of the peasants. Yes, it's a vast over-simplification... in response to an over-simplification (and further proof that I need to never respond to sips' babbling again). And no, I didn't really want to characterize the Church as this inhumane monstrous organization, except to say that people didn't necessarily go to Church for "comfort", unless you consider it comforting to be told that you will burn for eternity unless you drink this wine and eat this bread, but hey, here is some of that wine and that bread, so everything's okay. Not my idea of comfort, but if that's yours, fine.
As for the people involved-- and this is what gets me riled up with posts like sips' where corporations are made out to be these huge mechanical operations-- is that they are people, whether it is the Church or a corporation. Which means that 95% of the people involved, whether priests, marketroids, or PHB's are just that, people. As such they are basically good and just trying to do the right thing, whatever they might think that is. I am not anti-corporate at all-- I work for a large one myself. And yes, technically corporations offer goods and services for money, but they often try to convince you to buy those goods or services using a technique that involves you having faith in their word that buying them will make your life better. And in fact, much advertising does attempt to change your world view so that you will be inclined to agree that their good or service is needed to live better. "Things go better with Coke!" "The Real Thing" "Calgon take me away" Why else do you think kids get in fights over Starter jackets (well, maybe that's passed now) or why fans riot when the home team wins?
The key here is that the systems have been compromised using a completely un-IRC-related flaw in rpc.statd (check securityfocus.com for more info). This has nothing to do with IRCing as root and allowing remote installs. The agent installed on the compromised machine then uses IRC to accept commands, either privately or from the public channel. An ingenious way to broadcast commands to clients, imho. This could be extended to download files/scripts on the fly via dcc transfers and/or to recognize commands as separate from idle chatter on the channel. On a LAN with IRCd on a secure server, this could be fun. As a tool for DDoS it's still crafty since it alleviates the need for the cracker to be logged into all the compromised machines or even to remember which machines are cracked-- they come to him/her.
Actually, it is a bizarre statement to assert that medieval churches existed to give citizens "comfort". I'm not sure how church was a recreation, especially in Continental Europe. For most of the time of the prominence of the Roman Catholic Church, the average peasant couldn't understand more than three words of the average Mass, nor read a Bible. The idea that people should Fear God was popular. Priests existed as go-betweens for the humans and their God. This same "comforting" Church was known for a particularly brutal attitude towards non-Christians, or even Christians suspected of things like heresy or witchcraft. They condemned most harshly any teachings that might cause the average individual to suspect that the Church was not the sole repository of Truth-- furthermore, they've probably destroyed more "heretical" texts than you could ever read, or locked them in vaults in the Vatican. If people somehow got any comfort at all from this, then good. Because the same ruling class and church hierarchies that promoted religion were the ones who benefitted chiefly from the toil of the peasants.
Now. Let's go back to the corporation=religion deal. What better proof that corporations offer comfort based on faith is there than television advertising and billboards?
I agree with what you're saying . It's just that proving copyright infringment on reusing HTML and JS is going to be nigh impossible, unless you've written some pretty fancy JS. I mean, if I produce a hello_world.pl, how am I ever going to be able to prosecute infringments, since this is usually the first example in any tutorial. HTML is open source by default. The files are plain text. This does not make them GPL, but it does make it impossible to prevent people from reading the source and learning from it or borrowing snippets of it. This particular instance of "borrowing" (from Linux.com) is poor etiquette, if nothing else. And the re-use of graphics probably does violate a copyright, since I couldn't find where Linux.com released those under the GPL.
I also agree that any CGI, whether it's Perl, Java on the server, C, two line shell scripts or even (ick) VB, should not be reused without explicit permission. But a properly configured server shouldn't even allow access to the actual CGI application. So unless a developer wants to share that code, it's not even available.
No. Left-side navigation isn't something you want to copyright, for that you'd want a patent *smirk*.
As for getting someone else to buy bandwidth for your site by direct linking to their content/images within your HTML, there are ways to prevent this at the server that are not that tough to implement, so do that. Or replace the linked images with naughty stuff.
But look and feel, even JavaScript/HTML tricks? It's not like C or Perl code which is usually long and involved, most everything that can be done with JS/HTML is documented in some book or online help, so I can't really see being possessive about someone dissecting your code and using it, or even going so far as cutting and pasting parts of it (that is, assuming the content is replaced).
Of course, Slashdotting the offending site was a good move.:)
Sounds like a niche market to me, and I'm guessing that Compaq/Digital and IBM have already gotten a strong hold on it (with MS gaining, due to crazy large money to throw at the problem). I'd think that this would be a distracting side project to most Linux distribution companies right now. Red Hat, Caldera, and Corel (couldn't get SUSE investor info in English this morning) are not "making lots of moolah". They all use red ink to print their bottom lines. I'm guessing no retail distro comes out of the box compliant with and DoD standard. So, this is probably more than just paying a fee and giving some military testers a boxed set and waiting for the certificate to come in the mail. But then again, maybe building a relationship with the military is a good investment, it sure hasn't hurt Compaq or IBM has it?
No. I'm with the first poster on this. I understand their limit and that they think this will reduce their risk, but this method of verifying identity seems invasive. Getting a "chump" bank account may expose you to early closure fees or inactivity fees as well. Most banks don't appreciate being used in this way. And if PayPal goofs and sends a debit to your "chump" account, once you've let the balance slide you may incur overdraft fees, which may or may not affect your financial records whether PayPal makes you whole on the deal or not.
And your point about the historical significance of the documents is the most Orwellian piece of this tricky license. "Oh those facts were ALL UNTRUE, we've replaced them in version 666.124a. Please update your files to reflect our new reality. Licenses on prior versions of reality will be expired in fifteen days."
You might want to keep reading until you get to point 21. Where it clearly states that 21 - The client agrees that its registration of the SLD name shall be
subject to suspension, cancellation, or transfer pursuant to any
ICANN-adopted policy, or pursuant to any registrar or registry procedure
not inconsistent with an ICANN-adopted policy, (1) to correct mistakes
by Registrar or the Registry in registering the name or (2) for the
resolution of disputes concerning the SLD name.
It is not freedom when you have to keep something a secret.
<sarcasm>all of the worst code on my machine seems to have names attached to it. you know, boring useless shit like the linux kernel, GNU utilities, Perl... are these fuckers crazy putting their names on this stuff or what? i can't believe they even called this code "developed"!</sarcasm>
I stopped watching TV news a long time before I got on the internet. In fact, I don't know that I ever watched TV news. We had these things called newspapers. Very functional. Still, I got most of my news from the Opinion section, for the mere fact that it was more fun to read those articles/letters than the rest of the paper-- and the bias was openly declared.
However, I have to disagree with reading the paper on the bus. So far, the easiest thing to read on the bus that I've found is a Palm Pilot with Avant Go. I got a lot more news (more variety plus the Onion) on that each day with a lot more convenience than my current option of the NY Times paper version-- which is mostly useful for the crossword puzzle. A paper is simply unwieldy on a crowded bus--especially compared with a little calculator.
This doesn't really change the source of my news. It's still the same old media people, just using a new distribution method that is fundamentally similar to the old method. I don't have a problem with this, except when those traditional sources start to believe hoaxes distributed on Slashdot about potato-powered servers and beer as a supercoolant.
Out of the whole article you linked this is a seriously minor portion, and RMS seems to be fairly defensive the whole time. His previous several statements and statement immediately following your quote sum up clearly the idea that if the software is proprietary it is not worth using at any price (even at no price) because it requires the user to forego his/her freedom. RMS says right away that the same effect as illegal sharing of software can be achieved by not using the software at all. I don't see him advocating breaking the law. I see him advocating free software. I'd say there's a big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
OT editorial question: is this Slashlaw, News for Geeky Lawyers?
Standard disclaimers and discussion: While I'm no lawyer, I don't see how you can sign one document compelling the signing of another, currently undeveloped document in the future. In any case, I'd be charging a signatory administration fee, for any continued effort on my part in reviewing and writing my name on documents. I might even throw in charges for consulting with my own legal team about the new documents. If continuation of previously awarded benefits or compensation are conditional upon cooperation in this matter, then it's mostly a price issue-- is the compensation sufficient for being involved in what is deemed an unworthy application. If he's already signed documents transferring the rights to his work to the company, I don't understand why they are trying to include him at all, doesn't that potentially weaken their ability to claim sole ownership of the idea?
Um. Not to defend Metallica, especially since they seem to be completely brain-dead on how to deal with digitized music and the internet, but they are NOT the same as the record companies. They have, in the past, filed suits against the record companies, Amazon.com and even Victoria's Secret. I tried to find more details, but all searches resulted in Napster news. I hate to nitpick, but let's keep our bad guys distinct. On the one hand we have a bunch of lawyer-loving suits at the RIAA who may never have played a note of music trying to preserve their ability to make a buck off starving artists. On the other hand we have some starving artists who made it (way too?) big and have encountered too many legal issues on the way to be able to have a clue remaining as to how to deal with new legal issues.
Heck, if you can figure out Slashdot, you can probably figure out how to get full text of the bills and transcripts of the discussions at the web site that congress set up to help share this information.
I don't think it's Perl's fault that it is any of the above. In fact, I disagree with Mr. Wall that it is hard to learn. I'd have to defer on "use well" since that is subjective. Difficult to maintain? I'd agree, but not because the language is bad, but because I can't think of a single IDE for Perl other than ActiveState's PDK, which is for Windows. I mean, is there anything out there that goes beyond auto-indent macros and color coding? Most of the Perl code I've seen is either kept really really short, heavily .pm-ized (which then obscures the methods and you end up searching man/docs/how-to's just to work with a module-- better than nothing, but efficient, no), or written in very non-modular fashion (such that code snippet reuse from project to project would be painful, if even possible).
Yes. Taint is great, if not a complete pain to work under *grin*. But how many run-of-the-mill "Learn Perl-CGI by Putting This Book Under Your Pillow" books cover security and detainting form input with reg exps before going any farther than "Hello World"? For that matter, how many Linux for Dimwits books take the time to explain right away that you may want to turn off a bunch of services and set up some firewall rules if you don't intend to offer your test apache install to the world at large? This particular exploit isn't listed at CERT yet and the article doesn't say anything about specific examples. However, Red Hat has this and updated RPMs and source for glibc.
That is why I listed four licenses from the very free (public domain) to the very un-free (proprietary). If they don't care if they comply with the GPL that's a completely separate issue-- and they should write whatever license they want and ignore RMS completely. But if they're going to try for GPL-compatibility, it seems to be easiest to just use the GPL, rather than trying to come up with something else.
There is no incentive for a private corporation to share customer data with federal, state, or local governments, especially when that data will frequently include their own directors', managers', and employees' information. The accounting department is more likely to be spending time finding ways to state the accounts so as to lower taxes, while the people who are most likely to be using the above SQL code are the ones in marketing departments, you know, for sales and profitability purposes.
The best uses for disposable credit card numbers are to discourage tracking via account number by vendors(harder to join multiple purchases when the common factor isn't a single number field) and to reduce the risk that a cracker will access a vendor db and get active account numbers.
Disability or not, I firmly agree that RMS' choice about how to use his time right now is not a useful discussion. First, ad hominem attacks are widely considered to be a logical fallacy, and as such do not validate or invalidate any points in debates about GPL and GPL-compatibility. Second, RMS' efforts on my behalf are much appreciated. I use programs he has written every day, which I obtained free of charge and in a form which gives me a maximum amount of personal freedom to use them or change them or give them away, without endangering those programs with the possibility of becoming obsolete when a software firm forks development and makes a closed source proprietary upgrade. Since I haven't personally offered RMS or the FSF any compensation for the service of writing those programs yet, I don't think I'm in a position to demand that he write even more. Third, it certainly seems that the GNU software is a big part of what made Linux possible, since it meant that instead of suddenly having to write all the system utilities, they just needed to be ported. It also influenced a large community of developers to continue to improve upon and add to both these pieces in such a way as to continue to add to their usability while maintaining end user freedom. Fourth, the GPL had and is still having an effect on large commercial software firms exactly as it was intended (freeing their software from artificial constraints), especially as Linux gains ground. Fifth, because there is a [L]GPL and a BSD license and an Artistic license and Public Domain and proprietary "all rights reserved" licensing, I don't see a real need for a lot of differently worded licenses that attempt to be free, but create problems with one of the above. Sixth, by being vigilant about these licenses RMS is actually doing us a favor, since he's the one who bothers to read these things and make sure there are no legal complications down the line. Someday companies like Red Hat and VA Linux may be as big as Microsoft or Apple or IBM, and there are certainly going to be issues that pop up, hopefully minor license issues won't be frequent due to RMS crowing about it loudly right now.
So perhaps some sort of discussion system attached to deliberations over legislation-- complete with threading and moderation by elected moderators (I'm only half joking). Voting should not necessarily be a yes-no basis, but a point scale, with +5 being a resounding yes for a bill, with -5 being a resounding no for a bill. Laws are open for voting for [number of months]. Laws need to have a certain vote score average, like a +2.5, and a certain threshold of votes (like 1% of the population must have cast a vote on the bill) after the discussion period to be sent to the president for signing. We will still need congresspersons with law writing ability to introduce/amend bills and administer the system. I would also work in some sort of automatic review of the law where new laws have the opportunity to be voted as repealed without a special bill for such a repeal.
What a load. Pennies and nickels are legal tender according to popular myth debunking site, snopes.com. I worked at a cafe that carted our electric bill in pennies in wheelbarrows to the 'lectric company HQ and dumped it on the floor to protest a nuclear power issue locally.
I never said the ruling class and the Church cooperated. I said they benefitted from the work of the peasants. Yes, it's a vast over-simplification... in response to an over-simplification (and further proof that I need to never respond to sips' babbling again). And no, I didn't really want to characterize the Church as this inhumane monstrous organization, except to say that people didn't necessarily go to Church for "comfort", unless you consider it comforting to be told that you will burn for eternity unless you drink this wine and eat this bread, but hey, here is some of that wine and that bread, so everything's okay. Not my idea of comfort, but if that's yours, fine.
As for the people involved-- and this is what gets me riled up with posts like sips' where corporations are made out to be these huge mechanical operations-- is that they are people, whether it is the Church or a corporation. Which means that 95% of the people involved, whether priests, marketroids, or PHB's are just that, people. As such they are basically good and just trying to do the right thing, whatever they might think that is. I am not anti-corporate at all-- I work for a large one myself. And yes, technically corporations offer goods and services for money, but they often try to convince you to buy those goods or services using a technique that involves you having faith in their word that buying them will make your life better. And in fact, much advertising does attempt to change your world view so that you will be inclined to agree that their good or service is needed to live better. "Things go better with Coke!" "The Real Thing" "Calgon take me away" Why else do you think kids get in fights over Starter jackets (well, maybe that's passed now) or why fans riot when the home team wins?
The key here is that the systems have been compromised using a completely un-IRC-related flaw in rpc.statd (check securityfocus.com for more info). This has nothing to do with IRCing as root and allowing remote installs. The agent installed on the compromised machine then uses IRC to accept commands, either privately or from the public channel. An ingenious way to broadcast commands to clients, imho. This could be extended to download files/scripts on the fly via dcc transfers and/or to recognize commands as separate from idle chatter on the channel. On a LAN with IRCd on a secure server, this could be fun. As a tool for DDoS it's still crafty since it alleviates the need for the cracker to be logged into all the compromised machines or even to remember which machines are cracked-- they come to him/her.
Actually, it is a bizarre statement to assert that medieval churches existed to give citizens "comfort". I'm not sure how church was a recreation, especially in Continental Europe. For most of the time of the prominence of the Roman Catholic Church, the average peasant couldn't understand more than three words of the average Mass, nor read a Bible. The idea that people should Fear God was popular. Priests existed as go-betweens for the humans and their God. This same "comforting" Church was known for a particularly brutal attitude towards non-Christians, or even Christians suspected of things like heresy or witchcraft. They condemned most harshly any teachings that might cause the average individual to suspect that the Church was not the sole repository of Truth-- furthermore, they've probably destroyed more "heretical" texts than you could ever read, or locked them in vaults in the Vatican. If people somehow got any comfort at all from this, then good. Because the same ruling class and church hierarchies that promoted religion were the ones who benefitted chiefly from the toil of the peasants.
Now. Let's go back to the corporation=religion deal. What better proof that corporations offer comfort based on faith is there than television advertising and billboards?
I agree with what you're saying . It's just that proving copyright infringment on reusing HTML and JS is going to be nigh impossible, unless you've written some pretty fancy JS. I mean, if I produce a hello_world.pl, how am I ever going to be able to prosecute infringments, since this is usually the first example in any tutorial. HTML is open source by default. The files are plain text. This does not make them GPL, but it does make it impossible to prevent people from reading the source and learning from it or borrowing snippets of it. This particular instance of "borrowing" (from Linux.com) is poor etiquette, if nothing else. And the re-use of graphics probably does violate a copyright, since I couldn't find where Linux.com released those under the GPL.
I also agree that any CGI, whether it's Perl, Java on the server, C, two line shell scripts or even (ick) VB, should not be reused without explicit permission. But a properly configured server shouldn't even allow access to the actual CGI application. So unless a developer wants to share that code, it's not even available.
No. Left-side navigation isn't something you want to copyright, for that you'd want a patent *smirk*.
:)
As for getting someone else to buy bandwidth for your site by direct linking to their content/images within your HTML, there are ways to prevent this at the server that are not that tough to implement, so do that. Or replace the linked images with naughty stuff.
But look and feel, even JavaScript/HTML tricks? It's not like C or Perl code which is usually long and involved, most everything that can be done with JS/HTML is documented in some book or online help, so I can't really see being possessive about someone dissecting your code and using it, or even going so far as cutting and pasting parts of it (that is, assuming the content is replaced).
Of course, Slashdotting the offending site was a good move.
Sounds like a niche market to me, and I'm guessing that Compaq/Digital and IBM have already gotten a strong hold on it (with MS gaining, due to crazy large money to throw at the problem). I'd think that this would be a distracting side project to most Linux distribution companies right now. Red Hat, Caldera, and Corel (couldn't get SUSE investor info in English this morning) are not "making lots of moolah". They all use red ink to print their bottom lines. I'm guessing no retail distro comes out of the box compliant with and DoD standard. So, this is probably more than just paying a fee and giving some military testers a boxed set and waiting for the certificate to come in the mail. But then again, maybe building a relationship with the military is a good investment, it sure hasn't hurt Compaq or IBM has it?
No. I'm with the first poster on this. I understand their limit and that they think this will reduce their risk, but this method of verifying identity seems invasive. Getting a "chump" bank account may expose you to early closure fees or inactivity fees as well. Most banks don't appreciate being used in this way. And if PayPal goofs and sends a debit to your "chump" account, once you've let the balance slide you may incur overdraft fees, which may or may not affect your financial records whether PayPal makes you whole on the deal or not.
I'm with this suggestion all the way.
<rant mode="RMS">If it requires a person to buy some proprietary client to play it, what right-minded person would want this game anyway? ></rant>
Not to mention that this is a repeat of the "From the XYZ department" line from the article posting itself.
"Would you like fries with that?"
And your point about the historical significance of the documents is the most Orwellian piece of this tricky license. "Oh those facts were ALL UNTRUE, we've replaced them in version 666.124a. Please update your files to reflect our new reality. Licenses on prior versions of reality will be expired in fifteen days."
You might want to keep reading until you get to point 21. Where it clearly states that 21 - The client agrees that its registration of the SLD name shall be subject to suspension, cancellation, or transfer pursuant to any ICANN-adopted policy, or pursuant to any registrar or registry procedure not inconsistent with an ICANN-adopted policy, (1) to correct mistakes by Registrar or the Registry in registering the name or (2) for the resolution of disputes concerning the SLD name.
It is not freedom when you have to keep something a secret.
<sarcasm>all of the worst code on my machine seems to have names attached to it. you know, boring useless shit like the linux kernel, GNU utilities, Perl... are these fuckers crazy putting their names on this stuff or what? i can't believe they even called this code "developed"!</sarcasm>
I stopped watching TV news a long time before I got on the internet. In fact, I don't know that I ever watched TV news. We had these things called newspapers. Very functional. Still, I got most of my news from the Opinion section, for the mere fact that it was more fun to read those articles/letters than the rest of the paper-- and the bias was openly declared.
However, I have to disagree with reading the paper on the bus. So far, the easiest thing to read on the bus that I've found is a Palm Pilot with Avant Go. I got a lot more news (more variety plus the Onion) on that each day with a lot more convenience than my current option of the NY Times paper version-- which is mostly useful for the crossword puzzle. A paper is simply unwieldy on a crowded bus--especially compared with a little calculator.
This doesn't really change the source of my news. It's still the same old media people, just using a new distribution method that is fundamentally similar to the old method. I don't have a problem with this, except when those traditional sources start to believe hoaxes distributed on Slashdot about potato-powered servers and beer as a supercoolant.
Out of the whole article you linked this is a seriously minor portion, and RMS seems to be fairly defensive the whole time. His previous several statements and statement immediately following your quote sum up clearly the idea that if the software is proprietary it is not worth using at any price (even at no price) because it requires the user to forego his/her freedom. RMS says right away that the same effect as illegal sharing of software can be achieved by not using the software at all. I don't see him advocating breaking the law. I see him advocating free software. I'd say there's a big difference.