IIRC, IBM had to pay Microsoft a license for each copy shipped. So, in practicality, they wouldn't be able to "sell copies of the binaries at any price they choose", not without going bust anyway!
Alas the latter is still being actively "sold" and the people who own the rights are still selling hardware and aren't likely to allow it to go FOSS for a long time.
Perhaps, ultimately, this is the solution wrt to OS/2 - the fans could clone it, rather than expecting IBM to pay another army of lawyers to go through the source code and work out which bits they "own" and which bits they're obliged to keep private.
If you're talking about low-level kernel stuff, then yeah, kinda. Higher levels are heavily influenced by DOS/Windows and, in obscure areas, OS/2.
NT and VMS share a developer, Dave Cutler, but nobody who's actually spent any time using either operating system would suggest the two are remotely similar or that one clearly influenced the other (except in some massively generic way, eg "The PDP-11 clearly influenced the Z80A, with its use of logic gates and microcode.")
Kinda. You could run Microsoft Windows code if you had a copy of Microsoft Windows or bought the "full" version of OS/2 that, essentially, came with Microsoft Windows. But a Microsoft Windows-less OS/2 was also sold, which contained no Microsoft Windows code.
At one point, IBM distributed OS/2 2.x on a computer magazine coverdisk (I forget which one) in the UK sans Microsoft Windows. That was, needless to say, before sales started to take off with OS/2 Warp (3.0.)
IBM wouldn't have been able to do this had the code included anything from Microsoft Windows.
(Apologies for the need to spell out "Microsoft Windows" each time, but I know the very first OS/2s came without any type of GUI, and know there's potential for confusion here with people assuming I mean "GUIless" - the Microsoft Windows-less OS/2 had a full GUI, it just couldn't run apps for Microsoft Windows.)
it clearly borrows heavily from some well known BSD licensed unixlike codebase (almost certainly Darwin, given their claims of Mach kernel services).
Erm, Darwin isn't BSD licensed. It's licensed under the APSL, which is essentially a "You can copy it as long as you can't make it proprietary but you allow us to if we want because we're Apple and we can do whatever we want, har har har!" license.
There was something called XMach at one point that's virtually disappeared, this too was a BSD kernel for Mach.
It's worth noting that Mach based Linux also exists, in the form of MkLinux.
The technology that Apple uses in Spotlight comes from the Copland project. It is called VTwin and Apple has been using it since Mac OS 8 with the introduction of Sherlock. VTwin just has an API and file system integration now.
In that case, Microsoft isn't copying anything still, because they've had functionally similar features since Windows 95 (if not earlier.)
No, it's something Apple has been working on for a decade (since its release in 1994) and it's something Microsoft has been working on for a couple years.
Wow. Talk about a rewrite of history. This particular solution may go back to 1994, but it's absolutely moronic to claim that easy scripting wasn't developed prior to 1994 by anyone. Wish I still had that coverdisk, plus the old computer magazines that advertised various "visual" ways of scripting prior to 1990. Kid.
No IM clients existed when Apple invented the QuickTime Conferencing system
Then you agree that the concept of integrating IM and Video wasn't something Apple invented, otherwise I assume you'd have come up with an example rather than talking about something completely irrelevent.
Not that it's true that "no IM clients existed" back then. I first became aware of IRC in 1992, and it certainly already existed at that point. Prior to that, various tools were provided with Unix and other OSes that provided what we'd refer to today as IM, but the major features IRC brought to the table - personal mobility (ie message destinations based upon people via nicknames rather than username/machines combinations), conferencing, et al, were missing. So it'd be fair to refer to IRC as the first I guess.
The CDDL is more liberal than the GPL in one area, in that it's file based rather than final application based. This is a peculiar can of worms though, and it's easy to infringe without believing you are when you start to include material from other projects (including projects licensed under the CDDL - the CDDL isn't compatable with itself, because of a special status given to a set of developers that will likely be different with each project.)
The FSF needs to update the GPL to include rational policy concerning patents. Once we have that, I suspect a lot of companies using problematic half-measures like the CDDL and MPL will feel more comfortable with dual licensing their stuff.
The TabletPC is clearly a Newton clone. XBox is simply Microsoft's answer to the Apple Pippin. The Media Center PC is just a clone of the CDTV, which as we all know is based on the Amiga which was a rival to the ST which ran GEM which was a blatent rip-off of the Macintosh interface.
Now, I'm going to stand back and wait for people to respond who don't realise I'm being sarcastic. They'll read the first sentence and never get down to here...
Konfabulator is an evolutionary enhancement of the desktop applets concept Apple built into Mac OS back in 1984. Given this, and given Apple is using different technologies to achieve a similar but not identical result, I think it's a little unfair to imply Apple is copying anyone here.
Incidentally though, the list of "technologies" Microsoft is supposedly copying from Apple is remarkable for its lack of anything Apple did.
The Search features are something Microsoft has been touting for a long time, and in any case, Google got there first. Microsoft would almost certainly have implemented it regardless of what Apple did.
Easy (ie GUI based) Scripting is something Microsoft and Apple and others have been working on for decades. Hell, I remember one such tool being put on an Amiga magazine coverdisk. Unless Microsoft's solution is practically identical to Apples, which I doubt, it's a little unfair for anyone to accuse Microsoft of "copying" such a vague concept. Let's see what they've come up with.
RSS support in web browsers have been obvious since RSS was invented. What's surprising is that it hasn't been done yet by Apple or Microsoft.
The credit for RSS support should go to RSS's inventors. Apple and Microsoft deserve criticism for waiting this long.
Dashboard is a widget, not information-display, tool as you point out. Sideshow is likely to be Microsoft's latest attempt at creating a usable "Active Desktop", first released in the mid-nineties. The two are not similar technologies and Microsoft isn't likely to have released their's in response to Apple.
Apple was not first with integrated IM/video. I used Yahoo! Messenger to do the same a while back. In any case, it's another "obvious enhancement", like RSS support. Microsoft likely would have implemented it anyway.
Putting 64 bit support in a category of things copied is as dumb as putting the support of more than 16Mb of RAM or SATA disks, and it's been done a zillion times before.
Jobs needs a kick in the nuts if he's complaining Microsoft is copying Apple when it comes to any of these technologies.
That's not a reason to arrest them, even if you seriously believe that. (FWIW, most people I know who are anti-war have been opposed to Saddam Hussein since the mid-eighties, when he was everyone's "friend". Just because you oppose a particular mode of behaviour doesn't mean you support something unrelated. I'm anti-Death Penalty, that doesn't make me pro-murderer. But that's another issue.)
Yes, I read your post. Your post suggested that I was being hypocritical for criticising the US and saying that I'd had no reason to fear peacefully protesting in the UK because of an incident that occurred fifteen years before I went on any marches, an incident that has been condemned the world over, an incident that is far from representative of the usual behaviour of the UK government, and an incident that nobody beyond a handful of extremists governmental apologists considers defensable. (They argue that there were actual terrorists in the group, a line nobody else takes.)
I don't see the connection. That incident was condemned, and not representative of normal government behaviour. The only US incident I can think of that's comparable would be the campus shootings of Vietnam war protesters in the late sixties, again something that a handful of right-wing extremists routinely offer apologia for, but that nobody, again, would claim is typical of US protest control.
Your claim of hypocracy falls on deaf ears here. I had no involvement in Bloody Sunday, it occurred when I was a child, I condemn it completely, and it is completely non-representative of ordinary protests. For ordinary mass protests, with a few honourable exceptions (million man march, et al), the treatment in normal Western Democracies is far more reasonable, humane, and with greater respect for basic human rights, than similar protests in the US. There's none of this bullshit about "Free Speech Zones". Rarely are protesters deliberately put into situations where they cannot avoid being arrested no matter what they lawfully do. The only protest I can think of in Britain in "recent memory" (I'm actually going back to the 1980s for this one) that degenerated into serious violence was the Poll Tax riot, and that's generally been blamed on incompetence by the police and the usual handful of troublemakers than on any deliberate attempt to encourage violence.
This isn't about having a moral high ground. This is about the fact that, at the moment, US governments are currently doing the wrong thing and opposing basic freedoms and distorting politics through it in a way other similar countries simply are not. You can carry on whining at me about something entirely irrelevent (in which case I'll just talk about Kent State in any case), or you can actually stop shooting the messenger.
That's not what the GGP said or advocated. The GGP actively supported arbitrary arrests and imprisonment to quell peaceful protests. My response was a response to that.
The fact is, this kind of BS isn't tolerated in Western Democracies outside of the US. You don't get the kind of overwhelming support for active abuse of protesters that you do inside the US. When abuses happen, they provoke controversy, enquiries are held, and enquiries that cover-up or issue apologia for abuses tend to be discredited to the extent that nobody takes them at face value.
Here, in the US, I just don't see that happen. It's the one serious fault I see with this country, ordinary people do not appear to see the value in a society that tolerates peaceful but public protest.
Ah! So because the authorities in NORTHERN IRELAND did something THIRTY YEARS AGO that the ENTIRE WORLD condemned, it's perfectly ok for US AUTHORITIES to clamp down on protests in NEW YORK.
And what hypocracy is it you're talking about? Are you saying _I_ shot people in Bloody Sunday?
Arbitrary arrest and imprisonment goes against the constitution, so far as I'm aware. I believe that there's something in the constitution about a right of "the people" to "peaceably assemble" and about "freedom of speech".
Now, I've been on mass protests. Except I was fortunate to do so in a free country, Britain. I marched with several hundred thousand people about a topic I must admit I've changed my mind on since in the early nineties. And been with several thousand people protesting on another issue at roughly the same period.
Unlike America, I wasn't arrested or under threat of arrest and the authorities cooperated with the protest and its organizers. In Britain, the right to protest is not considered something to be stamped upon. Riots are rare because the tactics designed to provoke them are rarely if ever used by British law enforcement. You don't, for example, as is common in the US, herd protesters into a closed area, surround them, and then order them to disperse or be arrested.
In most free countries, the right to protest isn't dismissed as easily as you do:
So the police make a bunch of arrests among large crowds of people then drop the charges later.
I really don't have a problem with that. It is a widely practiced tactic in highly charged crowds. If the DNC had been held in Austin Texas the same thing would have happened.
We don't consider extreme limitations on the right to protest compatable with freedom. Indeed, the day law enforcement appears to be deliberately doing what it can to stir up trouble, the day it clearly starts making arbitrary arrests, et al, is probably the day the government doing this work finds itself likely to be thrown out. We don't do that kind of thing. We don't tolerate it. And we find it bizarre the country whose countrymen usually pride themselves on the degree of Freedom they have consider their right to start a business and then fire employees for what they do in their spare time as more important than the right to protest.
Not that I'm saying all Americans are like you. I know plenty that aren't, right and left. But I'm surprised that, generally, you don't get the kind of backlash against Fidel Castro clones in local government in the US as you do in other western democracies. Maybe, because you, as citizens against a government, haven't had to fight for basic democratic freedoms for the last 250 years, many of you have forgotten how important they are.
Nope, you can't copyright the representation of information that's required to perform some function (such as strings that make up a protocol.) Lexmark's attempt to use the DMCA to protect its ink cartridge business was struck down for precisely that reason. The appeals court found that the material supposedly being protected by its "Access Control Mechanism" wasn't copyrightable, and therefore the ACM wasn't one as described by the DMCA.
The example you give of Mickey Mouse would probably fail too, though it would be trademarks not copyrights that would be invoked in this case. The fact I can write "Mickey Mouse" in a Slashdot forum without risk of being sued should give you some clue as to how far trademarks can be taken. Now, if I used it to refer to something other than the Disney character but in a related market ("Hey, look at my new cartoon I made using ComicSetter, with its main star, a little rodent I call "Mickey Mouse"") then that'd be another thing. But simply refering to it isn't (usually, in most juristictions) an infringement.
The creators of the US Constitution did much the same thing. They had no way of knowing that any US citizen would be threatened with torture, arbitrary searches, arrest for speaking their minds, etc, at some point in the future. But they wrote a whole bunch of stuff into the constitution to prevent it from happening anyway.
Knowing abuse is likely, and taking measures to prevent it from happening, is not a bad thing. It's not as if McVoy wasn't showing warning signs by, for example, putting clauses in the license forbidding developers who use his gratis version from working on the development of other SCM systems. That, alone, proves he was an abusive Freedom-hating (in a literal, not Republican propaganda) arsehole from day 1.
He wasn't cloning Bitkeeper. He was researching writing a client that would interoperate with Bitkeeper.
It'd have been hard for him to clone it, as he didn't have a copy. His research was, incidentally, pretty simple: he telnetted to the server, entered the command "HELP", and saw a bunch of commands. He then Google'd for the commands, finding people refering to what they meant, and made intelligent guesses as to what they do.
He wasn't trying to work out its algorithms or anything like that, he just wanted to find out what to send a BK server in order for it to provide XYZ information. The information he was getting would have been utterly useless in the context of a "Bitkeeper clone".
I hope this clarifies things a little. There are a couple of links here that will give you sources.
Maybe it's one of those ear parasite things that Khan comes to love later in life the ends up making the old man lose his memory of the robots?
That could be it. The other thought that occurred to me is that as different actors played the old man in the original and recent serieses, it could be something that has to do when he changes to the next generation. Of course, we don't know how many regenerations he's already been through, and how many occur between the end of this series and the start of the original, but my recollection is that if the regenerations don't occur in carefully controlled circumstances (such as inside that ship of his, you know, the thing shaped a bit like a police telephone box... the Gallactica? I can't remember), all sorts of problems can occur.
So far, the only article I've read where he explains what he did involves him telnetting to a BitMover server, and entering the command "HELP", which gave the game away.
A number of people have speculated he did packet sniffing, but, honestly, I don't think those people have ever done real reverse engineering. First rule of reverse engineering is: you do the easiest things first.
(Cue all the "No, the first rule is you don't talk about reverse engineering" jokes. Har har har not.)
Linus Torvalds chose to use it knowing the bizarre conditions McVoy had stipulated. McVoy stipulated it couldn't be used to develop Free Software alternatives (and, it appears, has extended this stipulation to cover "having a vague connection with someone who develops a Free Software alternative")
I can't believe this comment is being taken seriously by ZDNet UK. I mean, yeah, technically the author of the comment may believe this, but it's garnered only a handful of comments and nobody's agreeing with it. It's also +5 Funny, at the current moment.
What's more, HURD isn't finished and there's no problem with the concept of forking Linux anyway. If RMS wants a kernel now, that works, and for some reason dislikes something about the way Linux is developed, all he has to do is copy the entire thing to Savannah.org and appoint someone to maintain it. It is, after all, licensed under the GPL.
Torvalds has done some dumbass things of late, and criticising Andrew for wanting to create a Free Software client that interoperates with the SCM Torvalds has adopted is one of them. It's also downright unethical, given he knows McVoy is threating lawsuits, and Andrew is limited to the extent to which he can respond to Torvalds, and given the extent to which Torvalds is himself lying about what's happened.
Conspiracy? Nope. Just smart people doing dumb and nasty things.
Oh, and "Ovum's Barnett": If we agreed with you, we wouldn't have GNU based operating systems such as RedHat and Debian. Linus's little kernel would be an asterisk. Without people wanting certain basic freedoms when they receive software, we'd be using Windows and Unix. Why wouldn't we? I find it remarkable people actually pay you money to come up with this drivel.
The RIAA and MPAA do not produce content, they're industry groups that represent the vast majority of content producers. So the RIAA and MPAA wouldn't be "avoided" any more than they are today. How do you avoid the RIAA and MPAA these days, beyond starting your own music publisher or studio and not joining them. Ooooooh, the RIAA and MPAA must be quaking in their boots about the chances of millions of artist-hating slashbots doing that. Can't wait to see your business plans: "1. Hire artists. 2. ????. 3. Not pay them!"
As for your "alternative" scenario, sorry but that could just as easily happen now, and it isn't happening. Judge for yourself how likely it would be that it would occur if copyrights are abolished.
Clue - probably no chance whatsoever. If it's not happening today when it's easy to create little get-outs from copyright law without worrying about loopholes, how likely is it when your only revenue raising means are to resort to loophole-less systems?
And I'm tempted to ask how you think I've "ignored all but two possibilities in a multitude", I've taken the most logically likely-to-happen instance and suggested that's what'll happen. Now, it's true, a handful of millionaires may, out of the goodness of their hearts, fund movies that cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and give them away, in the same volumes as movies are made today, but the only rational explanation I can see for these millionaires doing that in your Libertarian utopia is that they're all personally taking full advantage of the end of the war on drugs.
Here's a clue: artists need to eat. CD stampers need to eat. People who digitize movies and sound need to eat. Recording studios and movie studios need the rent to be paid. Whatever happens, you can bet that content that costs money to produce, and most of it does, will require those who want it pay for it. And, given the number of people who clearly don't want to pay for it now if given half a chance, "force" is always going to be necessary. Contracts and other systems of revenue raising that are more draconian than you see today are inevitable in an environment where the basic protections afforded by copyright are no longer present.
Of course they can. But every time you buy a book or CD or DVD, you'll have to sign a contract as part of the bargain. And, guess what, it'll be even more draconian than regular copyright law would have been. Think fair use defenses would apply? I don't think so...
Governments, for all their faults, create a degree of balance. The scales may be tipped towards the content producers right now, but the situation could be far, far, worse.
Besides which, if you don't want to be imprisoned for willful copyright infringement, don't do it. It's not that hard.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, IBM had to pay Microsoft a license for each copy shipped. So, in practicality, they wouldn't be able to "sell copies of the binaries at any price they choose", not without going bust anyway!
Looks like there are several projects called FreeVMS. However, this one appears to be active.
However, there's AROS, a close clone.
Perhaps, ultimately, this is the solution wrt to OS/2 - the fans could clone it, rather than expecting IBM to pay another army of lawyers to go through the source code and work out which bits they "own" and which bits they're obliged to keep private.
NT and VMS share a developer, Dave Cutler, but nobody who's actually spent any time using either operating system would suggest the two are remotely similar or that one clearly influenced the other (except in some massively generic way, eg "The PDP-11 clearly influenced the Z80A, with its use of logic gates and microcode.")
At one point, IBM distributed OS/2 2.x on a computer magazine coverdisk (I forget which one) in the UK sans Microsoft Windows. That was, needless to say, before sales started to take off with OS/2 Warp (3.0.) IBM wouldn't have been able to do this had the code included anything from Microsoft Windows.
(Apologies for the need to spell out "Microsoft Windows" each time, but I know the very first OS/2s came without any type of GUI, and know there's potential for confusion here with people assuming I mean "GUIless" - the Microsoft Windows-less OS/2 had a full GUI, it just couldn't run apps for Microsoft Windows.)
There was something called XMach at one point that's virtually disappeared, this too was a BSD kernel for Mach.
It's worth noting that Mach based Linux also exists, in the form of MkLinux.
Not that it's true that "no IM clients existed" back then. I first became aware of IRC in 1992, and it certainly already existed at that point. Prior to that, various tools were provided with Unix and other OSes that provided what we'd refer to today as IM, but the major features IRC brought to the table - personal mobility (ie message destinations based upon people via nicknames rather than username/machines combinations), conferencing, et al, were missing. So it'd be fair to refer to IRC as the first I guess.
The FSF needs to update the GPL to include rational policy concerning patents. Once we have that, I suspect a lot of companies using problematic half-measures like the CDDL and MPL will feel more comfortable with dual licensing their stuff.
Now, I'm going to stand back and wait for people to respond who don't realise I'm being sarcastic. They'll read the first sentence and never get down to here...
Incidentally though, the list of "technologies" Microsoft is supposedly copying from Apple is remarkable for its lack of anything Apple did.
The Search features are something Microsoft has been touting for a long time, and in any case, Google got there first. Microsoft would almost certainly have implemented it regardless of what Apple did.
Easy (ie GUI based) Scripting is something Microsoft and Apple and others have been working on for decades. Hell, I remember one such tool being put on an Amiga magazine coverdisk. Unless Microsoft's solution is practically identical to Apples, which I doubt, it's a little unfair for anyone to accuse Microsoft of "copying" such a vague concept. Let's see what they've come up with.
RSS support in web browsers have been obvious since RSS was invented. What's surprising is that it hasn't been done yet by Apple or Microsoft. The credit for RSS support should go to RSS's inventors. Apple and Microsoft deserve criticism for waiting this long.
Dashboard is a widget, not information-display, tool as you point out. Sideshow is likely to be Microsoft's latest attempt at creating a usable "Active Desktop", first released in the mid-nineties. The two are not similar technologies and Microsoft isn't likely to have released their's in response to Apple.
Apple was not first with integrated IM/video. I used Yahoo! Messenger to do the same a while back. In any case, it's another "obvious enhancement", like RSS support. Microsoft likely would have implemented it anyway.
Putting 64 bit support in a category of things copied is as dumb as putting the support of more than 16Mb of RAM or SATA disks, and it's been done a zillion times before.
Jobs needs a kick in the nuts if he's complaining Microsoft is copying Apple when it comes to any of these technologies.
That's not a reason to arrest them, even if you seriously believe that. (FWIW, most people I know who are anti-war have been opposed to Saddam Hussein since the mid-eighties, when he was everyone's "friend". Just because you oppose a particular mode of behaviour doesn't mean you support something unrelated. I'm anti-Death Penalty, that doesn't make me pro-murderer. But that's another issue.)
I don't see the connection. That incident was condemned, and not representative of normal government behaviour. The only US incident I can think of that's comparable would be the campus shootings of Vietnam war protesters in the late sixties, again something that a handful of right-wing extremists routinely offer apologia for, but that nobody, again, would claim is typical of US protest control.
Your claim of hypocracy falls on deaf ears here. I had no involvement in Bloody Sunday, it occurred when I was a child, I condemn it completely, and it is completely non-representative of ordinary protests. For ordinary mass protests, with a few honourable exceptions (million man march, et al), the treatment in normal Western Democracies is far more reasonable, humane, and with greater respect for basic human rights, than similar protests in the US. There's none of this bullshit about "Free Speech Zones". Rarely are protesters deliberately put into situations where they cannot avoid being arrested no matter what they lawfully do. The only protest I can think of in Britain in "recent memory" (I'm actually going back to the 1980s for this one) that degenerated into serious violence was the Poll Tax riot, and that's generally been blamed on incompetence by the police and the usual handful of troublemakers than on any deliberate attempt to encourage violence.
This isn't about having a moral high ground. This is about the fact that, at the moment, US governments are currently doing the wrong thing and opposing basic freedoms and distorting politics through it in a way other similar countries simply are not. You can carry on whining at me about something entirely irrelevent (in which case I'll just talk about Kent State in any case), or you can actually stop shooting the messenger.
The fact is, this kind of BS isn't tolerated in Western Democracies outside of the US. You don't get the kind of overwhelming support for active abuse of protesters that you do inside the US. When abuses happen, they provoke controversy, enquiries are held, and enquiries that cover-up or issue apologia for abuses tend to be discredited to the extent that nobody takes them at face value.
Here, in the US, I just don't see that happen. It's the one serious fault I see with this country, ordinary people do not appear to see the value in a society that tolerates peaceful but public protest.
And what hypocracy is it you're talking about? Are you saying _I_ shot people in Bloody Sunday?
Now, I've been on mass protests. Except I was fortunate to do so in a free country, Britain. I marched with several hundred thousand people about a topic I must admit I've changed my mind on since in the early nineties. And been with several thousand people protesting on another issue at roughly the same period.
Unlike America, I wasn't arrested or under threat of arrest and the authorities cooperated with the protest and its organizers. In Britain, the right to protest is not considered something to be stamped upon. Riots are rare because the tactics designed to provoke them are rarely if ever used by British law enforcement. You don't, for example, as is common in the US, herd protesters into a closed area, surround them, and then order them to disperse or be arrested.
In most free countries, the right to protest isn't dismissed as easily as you do:
We don't consider extreme limitations on the right to protest compatable with freedom. Indeed, the day law enforcement appears to be deliberately doing what it can to stir up trouble, the day it clearly starts making arbitrary arrests, et al, is probably the day the government doing this work finds itself likely to be thrown out. We don't do that kind of thing. We don't tolerate it. And we find it bizarre the country whose countrymen usually pride themselves on the degree of Freedom they have consider their right to start a business and then fire employees for what they do in their spare time as more important than the right to protest.Not that I'm saying all Americans are like you. I know plenty that aren't, right and left. But I'm surprised that, generally, you don't get the kind of backlash against Fidel Castro clones in local government in the US as you do in other western democracies. Maybe, because you, as citizens against a government, haven't had to fight for basic democratic freedoms for the last 250 years, many of you have forgotten how important they are.
The example you give of Mickey Mouse would probably fail too, though it would be trademarks not copyrights that would be invoked in this case. The fact I can write "Mickey Mouse" in a Slashdot forum without risk of being sued should give you some clue as to how far trademarks can be taken. Now, if I used it to refer to something other than the Disney character but in a related market ("Hey, look at my new cartoon I made using ComicSetter, with its main star, a little rodent I call "Mickey Mouse"") then that'd be another thing. But simply refering to it isn't (usually, in most juristictions) an infringement.
Knowing abuse is likely, and taking measures to prevent it from happening, is not a bad thing. It's not as if McVoy wasn't showing warning signs by, for example, putting clauses in the license forbidding developers who use his gratis version from working on the development of other SCM systems. That, alone, proves he was an abusive Freedom-hating (in a literal, not Republican propaganda) arsehole from day 1.
It'd have been hard for him to clone it, as he didn't have a copy. His research was, incidentally, pretty simple: he telnetted to the server, entered the command "HELP", and saw a bunch of commands. He then Google'd for the commands, finding people refering to what they meant, and made intelligent guesses as to what they do.
He wasn't trying to work out its algorithms or anything like that, he just wanted to find out what to send a BK server in order for it to provide XYZ information. The information he was getting would have been utterly useless in the context of a "Bitkeeper clone".
I hope this clarifies things a little. There are a couple of links here that will give you sources.
It was in the first three films they made. I know one of them was called something like "The Trouble with Ewoks".
So far, the only article I've read where he explains what he did involves him telnetting to a BitMover server, and entering the command "HELP", which gave the game away.
Link 1, Link 2.
A number of people have speculated he did packet sniffing, but, honestly, I don't think those people have ever done real reverse engineering. First rule of reverse engineering is: you do the easiest things first.
(Cue all the "No, the first rule is you don't talk about reverse engineering" jokes. Har har har not.)
Linus Torvalds chose to use it knowing the bizarre conditions McVoy had stipulated. McVoy stipulated it couldn't be used to develop Free Software alternatives (and, it appears, has extended this stipulation to cover "having a vague connection with someone who develops a Free Software alternative")
What's more, HURD isn't finished and there's no problem with the concept of forking Linux anyway. If RMS wants a kernel now, that works, and for some reason dislikes something about the way Linux is developed, all he has to do is copy the entire thing to Savannah.org and appoint someone to maintain it. It is, after all, licensed under the GPL.
Torvalds has done some dumbass things of late, and criticising Andrew for wanting to create a Free Software client that interoperates with the SCM Torvalds has adopted is one of them. It's also downright unethical, given he knows McVoy is threating lawsuits, and Andrew is limited to the extent to which he can respond to Torvalds, and given the extent to which Torvalds is himself lying about what's happened.
Conspiracy? Nope. Just smart people doing dumb and nasty things.
Oh, and "Ovum's Barnett": If we agreed with you, we wouldn't have GNU based operating systems such as RedHat and Debian. Linus's little kernel would be an asterisk. Without people wanting certain basic freedoms when they receive software, we'd be using Windows and Unix. Why wouldn't we? I find it remarkable people actually pay you money to come up with this drivel.
As for your "alternative" scenario, sorry but that could just as easily happen now, and it isn't happening. Judge for yourself how likely it would be that it would occur if copyrights are abolished.
Clue - probably no chance whatsoever. If it's not happening today when it's easy to create little get-outs from copyright law without worrying about loopholes, how likely is it when your only revenue raising means are to resort to loophole-less systems?
And I'm tempted to ask how you think I've "ignored all but two possibilities in a multitude", I've taken the most logically likely-to-happen instance and suggested that's what'll happen. Now, it's true, a handful of millionaires may, out of the goodness of their hearts, fund movies that cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and give them away, in the same volumes as movies are made today, but the only rational explanation I can see for these millionaires doing that in your Libertarian utopia is that they're all personally taking full advantage of the end of the war on drugs.
Here's a clue: artists need to eat. CD stampers need to eat. People who digitize movies and sound need to eat. Recording studios and movie studios need the rent to be paid. Whatever happens, you can bet that content that costs money to produce, and most of it does, will require those who want it pay for it. And, given the number of people who clearly don't want to pay for it now if given half a chance, "force" is always going to be necessary. Contracts and other systems of revenue raising that are more draconian than you see today are inevitable in an environment where the basic protections afforded by copyright are no longer present.
Governments, for all their faults, create a degree of balance. The scales may be tipped towards the content producers right now, but the situation could be far, far, worse.
Besides which, if you don't want to be imprisoned for willful copyright infringement, don't do it. It's not that hard.