Ahem: "They used MFC? Then they deserve any abuse they get."
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist. Now, on to the thingy.
First, I'm going to work under the assumption that "on their own time" actually means "during down time when the reps were sitting in front of their computers but not actually taking calls." If that is the case, it will be hard for them to claim copyright on the application, because it was done on the employer's time and using the employer's resources. That just strikes me as the most likely interpretation.
Now, it's not fair for their bosses to be expecting them to do software developer work at phone jockey prices. When they set a deadline, this thing stopped being "a fun way to spend down time" and became part of their job duties, additional duties which require skills that most of their peers don't have, and for which they aren't being compensated. That isn't acceptable, and hopefully they'll be willing to stand up for themselves.
My suggestion: They should go back to these bosses, explain that their work up to this point has gone far above and beyond their actual job duties, and that if the bosses expect that work to continue then the coders should be rewarded above and beyond their actual paychecks. It's up to them whether they want this compensation in the form of money, a transfer to full time development work, prestige, scooby snacks, or glib promises that the bosses don't intend to keep.
If they can strike a deal, great. Tell them to get it all in writing, then build the software according to the highest standards of which they are capable.
But if negotiations fall apart, and the bosses come back with a "do it or you're fired" ultimatum, they're still in control. If they want, they can build InHouseApp 1.0, Teh Suck Edition. Random crashes, database corruption, an awkward, unintuitive interface... whatever it takes to embarrass the bosses who made such wild promises. Just remember that it has to be so sucky that the old way is far preferable, so they don't have to eat their own dog food.
Or they can build it nicely anyhow, and hope that their work will gain them some recognition. I wouldn't suggest this option, though. There is no reason for them to make it easy for the bosses to take advantage of them. For the same reason, they shouldn't even consider trying to take ownership of the application. Don't give them an excuse to file a lawsuit. That means letting management have the current codebase, rather than stripping out all the comments and adding a few judicious memory leaks.
Finally, in case of termination or threats thereof, make sure they know how to reach their bosses' bosses. They should have someone they can go to to explain their side of the situation.
My experience was different. Today I woke up, had breakfast (two bowls of "honey nut cheerios", except they're the off brand because the bagged cereal is waaaay cheaper), then went over to my girlfriend's place. Of course she was still asleep, so I read the editorial page until she was ready to drag herself out of bed. Paul Krugman has been speculating that Bush isn't going to follow through on a lot of his promises for relief to New Orleans.
Anyways, she woke up, we chatted while she had breakfast, and then we walked the dog.
The point? Who gives a crap about video games? I have a girlfriend!
The greater point: the post you're responding to was a joke, and it went a good ways over your head.
The greatest of all possible points: I have a girlfriend!
Seriously, though. Linux isn't a good gaming platform, because game publishers don't support it. When I chose Linux, I pretty much left gaming behind. The funny thing is, I don't miss it.
I'm a bit of a Python noob, but a few things have really impressed me. The syntax is about as clean and straightforward as things can get, and the "batteries included" philosophy means that you've got a lot of functionality at your fingertips. Regular expressions, XML parsers, etc. Very useful stuff.
Also, the interpretedness is useful. In EMACS python mode, all I have to do to run the program is C-c C-c. Syntactic whitespace makes for cleaner code.
There are pitfalls. No const's, weak typing, the ability to add functions and data to individual objects during execution... you can trip yourself up if you're too careless.
Still, it's a worthwhile language to learn, and yes, it's the most fun I've ever had programming.
To put it another another way: it's one fiftieth of a second. You show me someone who claims to be able to hear a 1/50th of a second synchronization gap, and I'll show you someone who is making stuff up to impress people with his 1337 4ud10phy13 5k177z.
The rule of thumb in game programming is, "to the user, 1/10th of a second is the same as instantaneous," and I've never heard a distinction made between sound events and user interface events.
Besides, on my local network, the time necessary to ping my gateway router is 2 milliseconds, not 20. That includes two hops in each direction, processing on two separate routers, etc. So unless the grandparent has way more talent in his left ear than I do in my entire body, I'm more than a lot skeptical when he claims he can actually hear it.
I guess this is as good a place to put this as anywhere:
Has anybody heard of Google Blogsearch? I'd never heard of it before, and I sort of stumbled onto it this morning. I guess with everybody having a blog these days, I should be glad somebody is trying to sort through the mess. I'd just never heard of this product before.
No, the real danger is that it's written by somebody with a convincing level of knowledge of the facts, but who has a highly controversial interpretation of the subject.
If an article is written by a totally clueless moron, it's usually pretty obvious. It becomes especially obvious when the researcher compares the information with other sources. There may be lots of people who are willing to populate an encyclopedia with crap. But the number of people who will take the time to find an obscure subject (to stay under the radar), then become knowledgeable enough about the subject to figure out what can be snuck in without setting off warning signals is much smaller. At that point, you've got a rather large and solid body of knowledge that just gets a bit squishy around the edges.
I think Wikipedia is doing very nicely, thankyouverymuch. I challenge you to go looking through it, and count the number of pages you go through before you find some demonstrably wrong claim that has been there for more than 24 hours. Bet you it's more than fifty.
You're not quite getting it. The simple fact that she performed legal services for Microsoft wouldn't be an issue. It's what her arguments in the case say about her that give me the jeebies. Either she seriously believes that "injury" is defined in an absurdly narrow way,* or she seriously believes that a lawyer has no ethical obligation to present the court with intellectually honest arguments.**
Microsoft told everyone to buy DOS 6 because it would help them save disk space. That feature was faulty, but rather than fix the problem, Microsoft decided to sell people the fix as an "upgrade", even though said upgrade only brought the software up to the level of functionality they originally promised.
Again, this is either insight into her cock-eyed legal theories or evidence of her willingness to lie in defense of the rich and powerful.
* In which case I don't want to see her on the Supreme Court. ** See *.
How can it not matter whether a lawyer spends her time protecting the innocent or the guilty, the powerless or the powerful? Shouldn't we care whether a lawyer is arguing out of honest conviction or unvarnished self-interest?
In the Microsoft case, the software company sold millions of people a defective feature which they promoted as the primary reason to upgrade. Then, when the defects came to light, Microsoft saw it as a golden opportunity to rake in even more cash. If her arguments speak at all to her beliefs about what constitutes "injury" in a product liability suit, then she shouldn't be allowed to serve on the Supreme Court.
If, on the other hand, she knew she was making a dishonest argument solely to win her case, then she isn't the sort of person we should want on the Supreme Court.
I would like to see a list of the clients Miers argued cases for. Given Bush's business-worship, I would be completely unsurprised if she has spent her career thus far defending big corporations from the rightful consequences of their actions, and ensuring that those they harmed never saw a dime in compensation.
It doesn't matter if we ignore him. There is a large segment of the population which loves the idea that we're on the train to the land of Moral Decline, and the only thing that can save our nation is to ban "smut", reintroduce corporal punishment, and make the damned kids start calling people "sir" and "ma'am" again. These people vote, write letters to their representatives, and basically wield the sort of political influence that can only be generated by large crowds of idiots.
If we ignore the idiots, they will not go away. They won't stop until they've invaded every home, blocked most of your cable channels, put a filter on your Internet, and passed laws allowing them to tell you to spit out our gum and stand up straight.
I don't think it's that common for legislators to write legislation themselves. It's very common to let "experts" write legislation, or crib a piece of legislation from another state. Sometimes special interest groups, lobbyists, etc., have items of legislation that they take from representative to representative, trying to find someone to sponsor it.
I think you're doing legislators a great disservice to describe their jobs as, "get[ting] paid money to sit in a chair and say yea or nay." You forget, they also grandstand, accept campaign contributions, and raise taxes.
I'm willing to accept your claim that your time is wort $100/hr. But the same is not true for most of your customers and business partners. Your mantra makes sense for you, but by insisting on.doc, you're insisting that others accept the same time/money/value tradeoff. The ideal of an open format is that people can interact with data in whatever way they choose, rather than having to use a single program from a single vendor.
Though there are efficiencies that occur when everyone uses the exact same software, most of them can happen just by using a program that properly implements an open format. In other ways, an open format is even better, because different programs can be used to interact with the data in different ways, ways that a single vendor like Microsoft would never think of doing. So long as "de facto standards" are as acceptable as real standards to businesses like yours, you're going to have to accept the ongoing costs of vendor lock-in. It sounds like you have, and I can respect that. But it would be in your best interests if there were multiple vendors of your data exchange solution (It always astounds me that people use Office in that way) who were able to compete on price, quality, and features.
I think that, for a long while to come, non-Microsoft office suites will have to stick to providing their own converters. For the most part, I've never had trouble with OpenOffice's conversions. But if Massachusetts sticks to its guns, Microsoft doesn't have much choice but to create its own converter (which they'll probably try to limit to Massachusetts alone), and they should prepare for a brutal mocking if their converter isn't significantly better than OpenOffice's.
I'm not clear on the point you were trying to make about HTML. HTML wasn't intended to be a "presentation format", which is one of its strengths. Well-done HTML can be viewed in one way by a standard browser, another way on a mobile phone or other portable device, yet another way on a text browser, and still another on a "browser for the blind". HTML is for data, CSS is for presentation.
I guess the fear is that, once they open it up to individuals, most of their product will go to individuals.
I say, with a $400 donation to their program, they should throw in a laptop.
You know, the way NPR throws in a free tote bag, as a way of saying "thank you" to their supporters.
Make it too expensive to "individuals" for their own sake, but cheap enough that people who want to treat it as a charity have a mechanism for donating to the cause.
I don't think you're trolling, but you may not see the entire potential this program has.
Combine these thingies with a solid wi-fi project, and you could get millions of people onto the Internet, exchanging information. Not much help without basic literacy programs, but if the people can read, then these laptops would dramatically increase the utility of having that skill.
I think that the flow of information is a "core need" in any society, and these laptops could help greatly accelerate that flow. For example, a laptop owner might have the ability to learn about public health issues, farming techniques, potential markets for their crops, government programs, etc.
Plus, $100 laptop! Fifteen million potential Linux users! Either would be Slashdot-worthy, even without the global poverty angle.
What "rights of the individual?" The right not to have their work used in a way they don't like?
If any "individual" copyright holder feels that their rights are being harmed, they can go to Google and opt out. That is a courtesy, not a legal requirement, if they can defend this practice.
Opt-in would kill this enormously valuable project dead in its tracks.
See, a company is allowed to do the sorts of things that fall under the rubric of "fair use".
Fair use, by its very definition, is something which doesn't require the consent of the creator whose work is being used.
Given all the work it would take to recreate the entire book from a series of Google searches, and the ubiquity of OCR software, I don't see that this could cause a huge leap in piracy.
Finally, your "What about e-books" is a complete non-sequitur. Reading an e-book is annoying. But reading two sentences, devising a query that will get you the next three sentences, waiting for the page to load... who would do that?
The problems with your analogy are so obvious, I find it remarkable that you even attempted to make it.
First, people in jail are people. Not "potential people given a nine month incubation." They have memories, experiences, and personalities which should not be taken from them except under the most extraordinary circumstances, if at all.
Next, medical research is both dangerous to a person's life and potentially extremely painful. A frozen embryo has no life to take away, and has no capacity to experience pain.
Using stem cells from otherwise discarded frozen embryos is still a no-brainer.
On that one, RedHat did seem to go beyond their rights as a trademark holder. It seems that, if they derive their distro from RedHat's, then there should be some perfectly legal way of explaining that fact in their advertising, on their website, etc. Anyone who understands Linux should be aware that "derived from" doesn't imply any business agreement beyond the GPL.
Still, I wonder if they talked to RedHat about it. I don't know how reasonable their legal department is. Maybe they tried.
I don't understand why people keep trying to make that comparison.
If you want to argue that RedHat has turned its back on the community, or jumped in bed with big business, or whatever, go right ahead. But it simply isn't possible for any Linux distributor to "become Microsoft", because unlike Microsoft, anybody who can obtain a copy of Distro X can legally rebrand, recompile, and sell it as Distro Y. Somebody running Distro Z can go through Distro X, figure out any new features, and bring those features to Distro Z.
RedHat can't do a thing to stop RH-based distros like CentOS and White Box. The GPL ensures that, while one distro might dominate the Linux landscape, nobody will ever have a lock on Linux itself. Linux World Domination would mean that nobody can dominate.
So please, elaborate your reasoning. What is RedHat doing that scares you?
You asked a loaded question which contained two rather stupid premises:
1) The research from this project "doesn't matter".
2) Taxation is basically theft, and therefore immoral.
Now, either justify your claim that this research "doesn't matter"--that is, it cannot have any long term educational or economic payoff (a difficult feat)--or withdraw your question in favor of one which recognizes that there are potential benefits to the research. Then we can discuss whether those benefits to society are worth inflicting the heinous thievery of taxation upon those poor, mistreated rich folks. As currently stated, your question is illegitimate, and not worth pursuing.
"Why is it that naive, idealistic comments get modded up, but harsh realistic comments get modded down?"
Maybe because the "realistic" comments you have in mind boil down to, "Want! Gimme! Won't share! Me, me, me!"
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem: "They used MFC? Then they deserve any abuse they get."
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist. Now, on to the thingy.
First, I'm going to work under the assumption that "on their own time" actually means "during down time when the reps were sitting in front of their computers but not actually taking calls." If that is the case, it will be hard for them to claim copyright on the application, because it was done on the employer's time and using the employer's resources. That just strikes me as the most likely interpretation.
Now, it's not fair for their bosses to be expecting them to do software developer work at phone jockey prices. When they set a deadline, this thing stopped being "a fun way to spend down time" and became part of their job duties, additional duties which require skills that most of their peers don't have, and for which they aren't being compensated. That isn't acceptable, and hopefully they'll be willing to stand up for themselves.
My suggestion: They should go back to these bosses, explain that their work up to this point has gone far above and beyond their actual job duties, and that if the bosses expect that work to continue then the coders should be rewarded above and beyond their actual paychecks. It's up to them whether they want this compensation in the form of money, a transfer to full time development work, prestige, scooby snacks, or glib promises that the bosses don't intend to keep.
If they can strike a deal, great. Tell them to get it all in writing, then build the software according to the highest standards of which they are capable.
But if negotiations fall apart, and the bosses come back with a "do it or you're fired" ultimatum, they're still in control. If they want, they can build InHouseApp 1.0, Teh Suck Edition. Random crashes, database corruption, an awkward, unintuitive interface... whatever it takes to embarrass the bosses who made such wild promises. Just remember that it has to be so sucky that the old way is far preferable, so they don't have to eat their own dog food.
Or they can build it nicely anyhow, and hope that their work will gain them some recognition. I wouldn't suggest this option, though. There is no reason for them to make it easy for the bosses to take advantage of them. For the same reason, they shouldn't even consider trying to take ownership of the application. Don't give them an excuse to file a lawsuit. That means letting management have the current codebase, rather than stripping out all the comments and adding a few judicious memory leaks.
Finally, in case of termination or threats thereof, make sure they know how to reach their bosses' bosses. They should have someone they can go to to explain their side of the situation.
My experience was different. Today I woke up, had breakfast (two bowls of "honey nut cheerios", except they're the off brand because the bagged cereal is waaaay cheaper), then went over to my girlfriend's place. Of course she was still asleep, so I read the editorial page until she was ready to drag herself out of bed. Paul Krugman has been speculating that Bush isn't going to follow through on a lot of his promises for relief to New Orleans.
Anyways, she woke up, we chatted while she had breakfast, and then we walked the dog.
The point? Who gives a crap about video games? I have a girlfriend!
The greater point: the post you're responding to was a joke, and it went a good ways over your head.
The greatest of all possible points: I have a girlfriend!
Seriously, though. Linux isn't a good gaming platform, because game publishers don't support it. When I chose Linux, I pretty much left gaming behind. The funny thing is, I don't miss it.
We don't need genetic privacy. If your genes aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide, right?
I'm a bit of a Python noob, but a few things have really impressed me. The syntax is about as clean and straightforward as things can get, and the "batteries included" philosophy means that you've got a lot of functionality at your fingertips. Regular expressions, XML parsers, etc. Very useful stuff.
Also, the interpretedness is useful. In EMACS python mode, all I have to do to run the program is C-c C-c. Syntactic whitespace makes for cleaner code.
There are pitfalls. No const's, weak typing, the ability to add functions and data to individual objects during execution... you can trip yourself up if you're too careless.
Still, it's a worthwhile language to learn, and yes, it's the most fun I've ever had programming.
To put it another another way: it's one fiftieth of a second. You show me someone who claims to be able to hear a 1/50th of a second synchronization gap, and I'll show you someone who is making stuff up to impress people with his 1337 4ud10phy13 5k177z.
The rule of thumb in game programming is, "to the user, 1/10th of a second is the same as instantaneous," and I've never heard a distinction made between sound events and user interface events.
Besides, on my local network, the time necessary to ping my gateway router is 2 milliseconds, not 20. That includes two hops in each direction, processing on two separate routers, etc. So unless the grandparent has way more talent in his left ear than I do in my entire body, I'm more than a lot skeptical when he claims he can actually hear it.
I guess this is as good a place to put this as anywhere:
Has anybody heard of Google Blogsearch? I'd never heard of it before, and I sort of stumbled onto it this morning. I guess with everybody having a blog these days, I should be glad somebody is trying to sort through the mess. I'd just never heard of this product before.
No, the real danger is that it's written by somebody with a convincing level of knowledge of the facts, but who has a highly controversial interpretation of the subject.
If an article is written by a totally clueless moron, it's usually pretty obvious. It becomes especially obvious when the researcher compares the information with other sources. There may be lots of people who are willing to populate an encyclopedia with crap. But the number of people who will take the time to find an obscure subject (to stay under the radar), then become knowledgeable enough about the subject to figure out what can be snuck in without setting off warning signals is much smaller. At that point, you've got a rather large and solid body of knowledge that just gets a bit squishy around the edges.
I think Wikipedia is doing very nicely, thankyouverymuch. I challenge you to go looking through it, and count the number of pages you go through before you find some demonstrably wrong claim that has been there for more than 24 hours. Bet you it's more than fifty.
Even better, just link to the instance of the page that you were viewing. If you're linked to a single version, it won't go goatse on you.
You're not quite getting it. The simple fact that she performed legal services for Microsoft wouldn't be an issue. It's what her arguments in the case say about her that give me the jeebies. Either she seriously believes that "injury" is defined in an absurdly narrow way,* or she seriously believes that a lawyer has no ethical obligation to present the court with intellectually honest arguments.**
Microsoft told everyone to buy DOS 6 because it would help them save disk space. That feature was faulty, but rather than fix the problem, Microsoft decided to sell people the fix as an "upgrade", even though said upgrade only brought the software up to the level of functionality they originally promised.
Again, this is either insight into her cock-eyed legal theories or evidence of her willingness to lie in defense of the rich and powerful.
* In which case I don't want to see her on the Supreme Court.
** See *.
Given the two choices you're presenting, we need two critical pieces of information before choosing between them:
1) Who was holding the gun to her head, forcing her to work on the case?
2) Did she know for certain that it was loaded?
So each person who bought DOS 6.0 should have been forced to sue individually to recover their $9.95?
Class action lawsuits do have a purpose.
Whatever.
How can it not matter whether a lawyer spends her time protecting the innocent or the guilty, the powerless or the powerful? Shouldn't we care whether a lawyer is arguing out of honest conviction or unvarnished self-interest?
In the Microsoft case, the software company sold millions of people a defective feature which they promoted as the primary reason to upgrade. Then, when the defects came to light, Microsoft saw it as a golden opportunity to rake in even more cash. If her arguments speak at all to her beliefs about what constitutes "injury" in a product liability suit, then she shouldn't be allowed to serve on the Supreme Court.
If, on the other hand, she knew she was making a dishonest argument solely to win her case, then she isn't the sort of person we should want on the Supreme Court.
I would like to see a list of the clients Miers argued cases for. Given Bush's business-worship, I would be completely unsurprised if she has spent her career thus far defending big corporations from the rightful consequences of their actions, and ensuring that those they harmed never saw a dime in compensation.
No, no. You have it backwards.
It doesn't matter if we ignore him. There is a large segment of the population which loves the idea that we're on the train to the land of Moral Decline, and the only thing that can save our nation is to ban "smut", reintroduce corporal punishment, and make the damned kids start calling people "sir" and "ma'am" again. These people vote, write letters to their representatives, and basically wield the sort of political influence that can only be generated by large crowds of idiots.
If we ignore the idiots, they will not go away. They won't stop until they've invaded every home, blocked most of your cable channels, put a filter on your Internet, and passed laws allowing them to tell you to spit out our gum and stand up straight.
I don't think it's that common for legislators to write legislation themselves. It's very common to let "experts" write legislation, or crib a piece of legislation from another state. Sometimes special interest groups, lobbyists, etc., have items of legislation that they take from representative to representative, trying to find someone to sponsor it.
I think you're doing legislators a great disservice to describe their jobs as, "get[ting] paid money to sit in a chair and say yea or nay." You forget, they also grandstand, accept campaign contributions, and raise taxes.
I'm willing to accept your claim that your time is wort $100/hr. But the same is not true for most of your customers and business partners. Your mantra makes sense for you, but by insisting on .doc, you're insisting that others accept the same time/money/value tradeoff. The ideal of an open format is that people can interact with data in whatever way they choose, rather than having to use a single program from a single vendor.
Though there are efficiencies that occur when everyone uses the exact same software, most of them can happen just by using a program that properly implements an open format. In other ways, an open format is even better, because different programs can be used to interact with the data in different ways, ways that a single vendor like Microsoft would never think of doing. So long as "de facto standards" are as acceptable as real standards to businesses like yours, you're going to have to accept the ongoing costs of vendor lock-in. It sounds like you have, and I can respect that. But it would be in your best interests if there were multiple vendors of your data exchange solution (It always astounds me that people use Office in that way) who were able to compete on price, quality, and features.
I think that, for a long while to come, non-Microsoft office suites will have to stick to providing their own converters. For the most part, I've never had trouble with OpenOffice's conversions. But if Massachusetts sticks to its guns, Microsoft doesn't have much choice but to create its own converter (which they'll probably try to limit to Massachusetts alone), and they should prepare for a brutal mocking if their converter isn't significantly better than OpenOffice's.
I'm not clear on the point you were trying to make about HTML. HTML wasn't intended to be a "presentation format", which is one of its strengths. Well-done HTML can be viewed in one way by a standard browser, another way on a mobile phone or other portable device, yet another way on a text browser, and still another on a "browser for the blind". HTML is for data, CSS is for presentation.
I guess the fear is that, once they open it up to individuals, most of their product will go to individuals.
I say, with a $400 donation to their program, they should throw in a laptop.
You know, the way NPR throws in a free tote bag, as a way of saying "thank you" to their supporters.
Make it too expensive to "individuals" for their own sake, but cheap enough that people who want to treat it as a charity have a mechanism for donating to the cause.
I don't think you're trolling, but you may not see the entire potential this program has.
Combine these thingies with a solid wi-fi project, and you could get millions of people onto the Internet, exchanging information. Not much help without basic literacy programs, but if the people can read, then these laptops would dramatically increase the utility of having that skill.
I think that the flow of information is a "core need" in any society, and these laptops could help greatly accelerate that flow. For example, a laptop owner might have the ability to learn about public health issues, farming techniques, potential markets for their crops, government programs, etc.
Plus, $100 laptop! Fifteen million potential Linux users! Either would be Slashdot-worthy, even without the global poverty angle.
What "rights of the individual?" The right not to have their work used in a way they don't like?
If any "individual" copyright holder feels that their rights are being harmed, they can go to Google and opt out. That is a courtesy, not a legal requirement, if they can defend this practice.
Opt-in would kill this enormously valuable project dead in its tracks.
Um, Google is a company.
See, a company is allowed to do the sorts of things that fall under the rubric of "fair use".
Fair use, by its very definition, is something which doesn't require the consent of the creator whose work is being used.
Given all the work it would take to recreate the entire book from a series of Google searches, and the ubiquity of OCR software, I don't see that this could cause a huge leap in piracy.
Finally, your "What about e-books" is a complete non-sequitur. Reading an e-book is annoying. But reading two sentences, devising a query that will get you the next three sentences, waiting for the page to load... who would do that?
The problems with your analogy are so obvious, I find it remarkable that you even attempted to make it.
First, people in jail are people. Not "potential people given a nine month incubation." They have memories, experiences, and personalities which should not be taken from them except under the most extraordinary circumstances, if at all.
Next, medical research is both dangerous to a person's life and potentially extremely painful. A frozen embryo has no life to take away, and has no capacity to experience pain.
Using stem cells from otherwise discarded frozen embryos is still a no-brainer.
On that one, RedHat did seem to go beyond their rights as a trademark holder. It seems that, if they derive their distro from RedHat's, then there should be some perfectly legal way of explaining that fact in their advertising, on their website, etc. Anyone who understands Linux should be aware that "derived from" doesn't imply any business agreement beyond the GPL.
Still, I wonder if they talked to RedHat about it. I don't know how reasonable their legal department is. Maybe they tried.
I don't understand why people keep trying to make that comparison.
If you want to argue that RedHat has turned its back on the community, or jumped in bed with big business, or whatever, go right ahead. But it simply isn't possible for any Linux distributor to "become Microsoft", because unlike Microsoft, anybody who can obtain a copy of Distro X can legally rebrand, recompile, and sell it as Distro Y. Somebody running Distro Z can go through Distro X, figure out any new features, and bring those features to Distro Z.
RedHat can't do a thing to stop RH-based distros like CentOS and White Box. The GPL ensures that, while one distro might dominate the Linux landscape, nobody will ever have a lock on Linux itself. Linux World Domination would mean that nobody can dominate.
So please, elaborate your reasoning. What is RedHat doing that scares you?
You asked a loaded question which contained two rather stupid premises:
1) The research from this project "doesn't matter".
2) Taxation is basically theft, and therefore immoral.
Now, either justify your claim that this research "doesn't matter"--that is, it cannot have any long term educational or economic payoff (a difficult feat)--or withdraw your question in favor of one which recognizes that there are potential benefits to the research. Then we can discuss whether those benefits to society are worth inflicting the heinous thievery of taxation upon those poor, mistreated rich folks. As currently stated, your question is illegitimate, and not worth pursuing.
Maybe because the "realistic" comments you have in mind boil down to, "Want! Gimme! Won't share! Me, me, me!"