I wonder if they'll interconnect to Pittsburgh's I-net. Its the fiber network Pittsburgh got as a result of its cable franchise renewal. Last I heard it connects the city government, educational, nonprofit sites at 100mbps. That would be a truly innovative municipal infrastructure, using wireless for the last hop to homes and fiber for the backbone. The group behind the wireless project, 3 Rivers Connect worked on that project after all.
The original MBONE's routing architecture wasn't scalable. More sophisticated routing schemes have been devised fairly recently but to my knowledge there are next to no ISPs that offer multicast connectivity to consumers.
Marshal Eubanks of Multicast Tech did an interview on cnet radio (go here and search for multicast) he was pretty optimistic about multicast being deployed. He gave the startling figure that 20% of broadband users had access to the multicast internet. I was shocked by this because I have scoured the 'net looking for a consumer isp that would offer it to consumers and haven't found anything. Anyone have any info?
still wrong, and I agree with Alan that this isn't someone familiar with organized religion.
Religion is strongly hierarchical, so I would eliminate it right off the bat as not relevant to a discussion of grassroots politics.
I don't think the average religious person is nearly as knowledgable about the community's history and "doctrine", is able to communicate as well with the range of other community members, is able to participate in important community institutions and discourse as the average person in the free software community. For things as obscure as the SSSCA and DMCA to be discussed by the community at large is truly remarkable, that kind of discourse just doesn't happen within tradional political organizing campaigns.
as much as Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman and Slashdot editors would like to believe that involvement with free software necessarily involves certain political views, that's not the case. You're not going be able to mobilize all Linux users, or Linux developers, for denouncing gun control, eliminating copyright or guaranteeing children the right to view porn in public libraries for the simple reason that most of those users and developers don't believe in those things.
There are definitely shared values in the free software community which are threatened by the goings on in the political world. The SSSCA provides the easy example, banning free operating systems would probably be something that would would unite people for political action.
I think there are other issues as well that very large parts of the community could agree on, encryption and patents come to mind. I think there is a split in the community between libertarians and progressives that will play itself out politically. But those kinds of political growing pains are natural as a political entity comes into being.
I went and read their tco estimation in their whitepaper and came across something that really made me question their conclusions.
They compare tco for 24 node clusters of different architectures of beowulfs against the bladed cluster. The biggest expense by far for the traditonal systems is sysadmin time, over half, this after they spend most of the article talking about power. They estimate sysadmin costs for each of the traditional beowulfs at $60k over a 4 year period, while the bladed cluster at $800. Where does the $800 come from? They say that they haven't had to do any maintence on their system in the 9 months its been running! That doesn't sound like a very scientific data sampling to me.
There are other bladed designs, non-transmeta based, presumably the sysadmin costs would be the same. The last chart demonstrates that sysadmin costs are what's important, and that power, space, and downtime not nearly so.
Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.
Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.
The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.
This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.
Its interesting that you have made the same analysis as the Peruvian congressman that wants their government to use only free software but come to the opposite conclusion.
I dunno, I agree w/ Phil Greenspun. Manufacturers getting wacked over the head by the content industry and a crippled product certainly didn't help. Maybe you're right, I went and checked with the Library of Congress and they only collected $3million in 1999 (LOC 2000 Annual Report, in the appendix p9).
Minidisc isn't big in the general consumer market but is way more successful than DAT in the low end audio recording community. The lessons from DAT are clear in how this product has been developed, MD's lossy compression essentially emulates analog's generation loss. Manufacturers did this for a very specific reason, to avoid the Digital Audio Home Recording Act. Now we're likely to see the next step in that process with SSSCA, which will probably outlaw general purpose computers.
If they just wanted to sell bits, fine. But Verizon talked about how they would get into content back in '94 as they lobbied to get what was eventually the '96 Telecom Act passed. Its not like some shlep Verizon VP said last week, "Oh yeah, there's this content thing, lets give that a try." They've thought about content for a long time. I don't know what their exact strategy is, it looks like some sort of convenient political feint. The Chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, recently talked about content holding broadband back, I think Verizon is just trying to suck up on that so that they can get a pass in 271 proceedings.
They also are actively lobbying to kill competition in their own territory through Tauzin-Dingell. Verizon is way more of an entrenched monopoly than the music industry and way bigger. They don't want to compete, and they have legions of lobbyists to ensure that they don't have to. Looking for demons? There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of Verizon. I can't imagine that it will be writ that Verizon freed the music industry, there's plenty more profit in it for them in control, and that's something they know how to do.
Who remembers the DAT tax? Before doing digital audio on computers was made practical by mp3 and cd-r there was DAT. And the music industry clamped down hard to prevent it from becoming a consumer product. So they got a tax placed on DAT media and devices and had a chip implanted in every DAT device to prevent copying.
Thought it was relevant to this, but didn't think the slashdotters would let me do a feature;)
You should definitely be suspicious of Verizon. If they were just going to sell bits then there would be nothing to worry about. But Verizon has plans to get into content as well that's where the fat profits and high growth are, they wanna be like AOL/TW and have that "synergy" going on by owning the pipe and the content.
They are just doing this so that they don't get cut out of the competition later. They're slow since they are so big, so it'll take them a while.
I don't think the music industry could be described as "free market". The scarcity of its product is artificial, determined by copyright law which is the result of a bargain struck by the stakeholders. The major labels have manipulated the current bargain to gain a strangelhold on the industry.
Now that we have new technology that will change the way the bargain works the major labels are looking to tighten their grip and kill off the potential of new competition. Read some Larry Lessig, he refers to them as the dinosaurs looking to kill off the mammals.
The important thing to remember is that this is a bargain between all members of society. Don't believe free market drivel that tells you that you aren't a stakeholder.
I was surprised that the ABA would take a position on a political issue like this. I could understand if the ABA would take a position about a law being good or bad as it effected the practice of the law. The only effect longer copyright has on the practice of law is more fees for IP lawyers. That the article essentially admitted this lays stark the raw greed that motivated the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
Are you familiar with the history of the oil, banana, and garment industries in Latin America? It is thick with big American corporations forcing poor countries to accept their terms, backed up by the US State Dept and sometimes the DoD. United Fruit (Chiquita) is the prototypical example of this, at one point it completely controlled Guatemala backed by US Marines. Even mainstream texts acknowledge this. Lets see there's also Argentina, Nicuragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Panama...
The oil companies tend to be the most vicious historically, and I would be surprised if Microsoft was as bad as them anytime soon, look at how Colombia is now.
But those cerebral, "IP intense" industries surprise you with how vicious they can be. Look at the pharmaceutical industy, they got the US to file a WTO case against Brazil. This is after they refused to sell AIDS drugs in Brazil, so Brazil made their own and gave them away free to everyone who needed them resulting in them cutting their mortality rate due to AIDS in half. This is what the US pharma industry wanted to stop and they were successful in getting the US government to go to bat for them. But, your point is also bourne out, part of the reason the US backed off is that the issue did get into the press.
I think the community has enough shared values to unite around politically. The act of releasing source code, whether GPL, BSD, public domain, is a political statement about control.
Take SSSCA (aka CDPTA or whatever they're calling it now) which would make software which did not include strong copy protection illegal. This would essentially outlaw OS's that make source code freely available. I think there's a significant community organized around a set of values that this legislation would threaten. Don't you?
Further this community fantastically networked compared to, say, groups trying to organize opposition to toxic chemicals. The effort required to find and connect people affected by or that care about an issue like that are enormous. With the OSS community that's already done.
I am not certain that neo-liberal international fora will agree with the Congressman's position. MS will say "we cannot sell to the public sector in Peru w/o having our IP expropriated" and I wouldn't be shocked if a WTO or FTAA tribunal was sympathetic.
I would be extremely surprised if MS isn't talking to USTR to apply pressure. MS is definitely not shy talking to USTR (think about US pressure on China to stop piracy) or about trying to get other countries laws changed (a la Sri Lanka).
I wouldn't underestimate corporate power's ability to use these type of international fora as their instruments. They are the ones who drove their creation afterall. I would think the tribunals that hear these cases would be likely to be sympathetic to MS's arguement that the software business generally is a victim of this bill.
The debate between MS and the Peruvian Congressman seems to be really over a fundamental clash of values, ie the definition of "the public good" in a market fundamentalist manner, ie short term profit is the only measure that needs to be looked at vs defining it in terms of cooperation and transparency. This is the same debate that seems to come up with the neoliberal globalists that advocate institutions like the WTO and FTAA and the anti-corporate globalization movement.
Cool, I knew about the case but hadn't known it was on PBS. I didn't see it mentioned on the website that the company is seeking $1billion in damages.
I also didn't see anything mentioning the FTAA, which is often called the NAFTA for the Western Hemisphere in case people don't get the connection between NAFTA and the FTAA.
It will be very interesting to see whether MS will get any of the "free" trade orgs into this or (more likely) get the US to lean on Peru. They use words like "discriminatory" which have specific meaning with respect to international trade.
A World Trade Organization ('member the big protest in Seattle?) action would require action by the US government on MS's behalf. That's pretty unlikely given the likely size of the trade, it would probably be more trouble than its worth.
Under the in process Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement ('member the protests in Quebec City?) MS could sue Peru directly and receive compensation and overturn the law (if that statement doesn't bother you replace the word "Peru" with "US" or whatever country you live in and see how that makes you feel).
In any event its very likely that MS's Washington lobbyist corp has talked to the office of the US Trade Rep and Peru will suffer in some way for its impudence to MS.
organizing the OSS community for activism
on
Ask Alan Cox, Activist
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Free software programmers and the extended community are arguably the most organized non-hierarchical, grassroots constituency in the world. The community includes the tens of thousands developers and millions of endusers tightly networked through institutions like sourceforge, slashdot, countless LUGs, etc. The ability to produce projects of the scale and complexity of the Linux kernel, the Debian distribution, or the engineering behind the Internet itself is a testament to the community's ability to organize more than anything else.
Despite this incredible organizing for software production, support and distribution very little of this gets translated into the political realm. In his last slashdot interview Lawerence Lessig chided the community for this.
Organizers of traditional political campaigns for social justice or equitable distribution of power would drool over having a constituency as organized as that which we have. How do you think the community can translate its effective organizing in the technical arena into the political realm?
Good forum, it made me nostalgic thinking about how the 'net has grown up.
Rather than having the suits go after alterslash, wouldn't a much better outcome be to incorporate the value that is added into the site? I think its damn cool and useful, like kernel traffic and its obviously a fan site. He's not making any money.
If the suits are so uptight then just rip off what's he's doing into slashdot or have him and a few people be editors for stuff.
The logic you used is scarily like what GM and Walmart say when going after fan sites that have their trademark's in the domain name.
Why is VP3 different with respect to patents? On2 has patents, they seem doing a good thing and try to let people use their IP. But they could be bought in a heartbeat and work that you and others put into it would be gone.
Good point. Satellite could shake up the pay tv market but to this point hasn't caused cable to exhibit any price discipline. Its no where near the money making machine that cable is but its new enough as a service and still growing.
What do you think about an Echostar / DirecTV merger?
Actually, Microsoft is becoming a media giant and its looks like it will be able to join the club. Bill Gates and Paul Allen have been investing in cable, telco, etc forever. Microsoft is bankrolling the Comcast / ATT merger, and has a plethora of media interests MSNBC, MSN, ISP for QWEST, ISP for DirecTV (and maybe soon Echostar as well), Xbox, cell phones, set top boxes. They are extraordinarily well positioned for broadband / interactive TV / video on demand services that are about to be rolled out.
Its very clear that Microsoft has its sights set on cornering the new media market. And I agree that this pales to what they have done on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they'll interconnect to Pittsburgh's I-net. Its the fiber network Pittsburgh got as a result of its cable franchise renewal. Last I heard it connects the city government, educational, nonprofit sites at 100mbps. That would be a truly innovative municipal infrastructure, using wireless for the last hop to homes and fiber for the backbone. The group behind the wireless project, 3 Rivers Connect worked on that project after all.
The original MBONE's routing architecture wasn't scalable. More sophisticated routing schemes have been devised fairly recently but to my knowledge there are next to no ISPs that offer multicast connectivity to consumers.
Marshal Eubanks of Multicast Tech did an interview on cnet radio (go here and search for multicast) he was pretty optimistic about multicast being deployed. He gave the startling figure that 20% of broadband users had access to the multicast internet. I was shocked by this because I have scoured the 'net looking for a consumer isp that would offer it to consumers and haven't found anything. Anyone have any info?
I don't see why they just couldn't use the same ASCAP/BMI stuff that they use for normal radio and apply it to internet radio also.
Web radio stations are already supposed to pay ASCAP/BMI, this is on top of and far more than those fees.
I wish people would take it upon themselves to be more informed before posting.
He's
:)
I am "he"
still wrong, and I agree with Alan that this isn't someone familiar with organized religion.
Religion is strongly hierarchical, so I would eliminate it right off the bat as not relevant to a discussion of grassroots politics.
I don't think the average religious person is nearly as knowledgable about the community's history and "doctrine", is able to communicate as well with the range of other community members, is able to participate in important community institutions and discourse as the average person in the free software community. For things as obscure as the SSSCA and DMCA to be discussed by the community at large is truly remarkable, that kind of discourse just doesn't happen within tradional political organizing campaigns.
as much as Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman and Slashdot editors would like to believe that involvement with free software necessarily involves certain political views, that's not the case. You're not going be able to mobilize all Linux users, or Linux developers, for denouncing gun control, eliminating copyright or guaranteeing children the right to view porn in public libraries for the simple reason that most of those users and developers don't believe in those things.
There are definitely shared values in the free software community which are threatened by the goings on in the political world. The SSSCA provides the easy example, banning free operating systems would probably be something that would would unite people for political action.
I think there are other issues as well that very large parts of the community could agree on, encryption and patents come to mind. I think there is a split in the community between libertarians and progressives that will play itself out politically. But those kinds of political growing pains are natural as a political entity comes into being.
I went and read their tco estimation in their whitepaper and came across something that really made me question their conclusions.
They compare tco for 24 node clusters of different architectures of beowulfs against the bladed cluster. The biggest expense by far for the traditonal systems is sysadmin time, over half, this after they spend most of the article talking about power. They estimate sysadmin costs for each of the traditional beowulfs at $60k over a 4 year period, while the bladed cluster at $800. Where does the $800 come from? They say that they haven't had to do any maintence on their system in the 9 months its been running! That doesn't sound like a very scientific data sampling to me.
There are other bladed designs, non-transmeta based, presumably the sysadmin costs would be the same. The last chart demonstrates that sysadmin costs are what's important, and that power, space, and downtime not nearly so.
Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.
a rkeyBill.html
Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.
Quick info on the bill from the Center for Digital Democracy (lead group on the open access fight)
http://democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/m
The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.
This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.
Its interesting that you have made the same analysis as the Peruvian congressman that wants their government to use only free software but come to the opposite conclusion.
I dunno, I agree w/ Phil Greenspun. Manufacturers getting wacked over the head by the content industry and a crippled product certainly didn't help. Maybe you're right, I went and checked with the Library of Congress and they only collected $3million in 1999 (LOC 2000 Annual Report, in the appendix p9).
Minidisc isn't big in the general consumer market but is way more successful than DAT in the low end audio recording community. The lessons from DAT are clear in how this product has been developed, MD's lossy compression essentially emulates analog's generation loss. Manufacturers did this for a very specific reason, to avoid the Digital Audio Home Recording Act. Now we're likely to see the next step in that process with SSSCA, which will probably outlaw general purpose computers.
If they just wanted to sell bits, fine. But Verizon talked about how they would get into content back in '94 as they lobbied to get what was eventually the '96 Telecom Act passed. Its not like some shlep Verizon VP said last week, "Oh yeah, there's this content thing, lets give that a try." They've thought about content for a long time. I don't know what their exact strategy is, it looks like some sort of convenient political feint. The Chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, recently talked about content holding broadband back, I think Verizon is just trying to suck up on that so that they can get a pass in 271 proceedings.
They also are actively lobbying to kill competition in their own territory through Tauzin-Dingell. Verizon is way more of an entrenched monopoly than the music industry and way bigger. They don't want to compete, and they have legions of lobbyists to ensure that they don't have to.
Looking for demons? There's plenty of reason to be skeptical of Verizon. I can't imagine that it will be writ that Verizon freed the music industry, there's plenty more profit in it for them in control, and that's something they know how to do.
Who remembers the DAT tax? Before doing digital audio on computers was made practical by mp3 and cd-r there was DAT. And the music industry clamped down hard to prevent it from becoming a consumer product. So they got a tax placed on DAT media and devices and had a chip implanted in every DAT device to prevent copying.
;)
Thought it was relevant to this, but didn't think the slashdotters would let me do a feature
Anyhoo, here's some reference links
The right way to tax dat by RMS
Phillip Greenspun comments and gave testimony before the Senate.
What happens to the money that the Library of Congress collects.
result in Verizon and Kazaa being the sole distributor of said licensed music
No, compulsory license means anyone can get access to it at the same rate.
You should definitely be suspicious of Verizon. If they were just going to sell bits then there would be nothing to worry about. But Verizon has plans to get into content as well that's where the fat profits and high growth are, they wanna be like AOL/TW and have that "synergy" going on by owning the pipe and the content.
They are just doing this so that they don't get cut out of the competition later. They're slow since they are so big, so it'll take them a while.
I don't think the music industry could be described as "free market". The scarcity of its product is artificial, determined by copyright law which is the result of a bargain struck by the stakeholders. The major labels have manipulated the current bargain to gain a strangelhold on the industry.
Now that we have new technology that will change the way the bargain works the major labels are looking to tighten their grip and kill off the potential of new competition. Read some Larry Lessig, he refers to them as the dinosaurs looking to kill off the mammals.
The important thing to remember is that this is a bargain between all members of society. Don't believe free market drivel that tells you that you aren't a stakeholder.
I was surprised that the ABA would take a position on a political issue like this. I could understand if the ABA would take a position about a law being good or bad as it effected the practice of the law. The only effect longer copyright has on the practice of law is more fees for IP lawyers. That the article essentially admitted this lays stark the raw greed that motivated the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.
Are you familiar with the history of the oil, banana, and garment industries in Latin America? It is thick with big American corporations forcing poor countries to accept their terms, backed up by the US State Dept and sometimes the DoD. United Fruit (Chiquita) is the prototypical example of this, at one point it completely controlled Guatemala backed by US Marines. Even mainstream texts acknowledge this. Lets see there's also Argentina, Nicuragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Panama ...
The oil companies tend to be the most vicious historically, and I would be surprised if Microsoft was as bad as them anytime soon, look at how Colombia is now.
But those cerebral, "IP intense" industries surprise you with how vicious they can be. Look at the pharmaceutical industy, they got the US to file a WTO case against Brazil. This is after they refused to sell AIDS drugs in Brazil, so Brazil made their own and gave them away free to everyone who needed them resulting in them cutting their mortality rate due to AIDS in half. This is what the US pharma industry wanted to stop and they were successful in getting the US government to go to bat for them. But, your point is also bourne out, part of the reason the US backed off is that the issue did get into the press.
I think the community has enough shared values to unite around politically. The act of releasing source code, whether GPL, BSD, public domain, is a political statement about control.
Take SSSCA (aka CDPTA or whatever they're calling it now) which would make software which did not include strong copy protection illegal. This would essentially outlaw OS's that make source code freely available. I think there's a significant community organized around a set of values that this legislation would threaten. Don't you?
Further this community fantastically networked compared to, say, groups trying to organize opposition to toxic chemicals. The effort required to find and connect people affected by or that care about an issue like that are enormous. With the OSS community that's already done.
I am not certain that neo-liberal international fora will agree with the Congressman's position. MS will say "we cannot sell to the public sector in Peru w/o having our IP expropriated" and I wouldn't be shocked if a WTO or FTAA tribunal was sympathetic.
I would be extremely surprised if MS isn't talking to USTR to apply pressure. MS is definitely not shy talking to USTR (think about US pressure on China to stop piracy) or about trying to get other countries laws changed (a la Sri Lanka).
I wouldn't underestimate corporate power's ability to use these type of international fora as their instruments. They are the ones who drove their creation afterall. I would think the tribunals that hear these cases would be likely to be sympathetic to MS's arguement that the software business generally is a victim of this bill.
The debate between MS and the Peruvian Congressman seems to be really over a fundamental clash of values, ie the definition of "the public good" in a market fundamentalist manner, ie short term profit is the only measure that needs to be looked at vs defining it in terms of cooperation and transparency. This is the same debate that seems to come up with the neoliberal globalists that advocate institutions like the WTO and FTAA and the anti-corporate globalization movement.
Cool, I knew about the case but hadn't known it was on PBS. I didn't see it mentioned on the website that the company is seeking $1billion in damages.
I also didn't see anything mentioning the FTAA, which is often called the NAFTA for the Western Hemisphere in case people don't get the connection between NAFTA and the FTAA.
It will be very interesting to see whether MS will get any of the "free" trade orgs into this or (more likely) get the US to lean on Peru. They use words like "discriminatory" which have specific meaning with respect to international trade.
A World Trade Organization ('member the big protest in Seattle?) action would require action by the US government on MS's behalf. That's pretty unlikely given the likely size of the trade, it would probably be more trouble than its worth.
Under the in process Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement ('member the protests in Quebec City?) MS could sue Peru directly and receive compensation and overturn the law (if that statement doesn't bother you replace the word "Peru" with "US" or whatever country you live in and see how that makes you feel).
In any event its very likely that MS's Washington lobbyist corp has talked to the office of the US Trade Rep and Peru will suffer in some way for its impudence to MS.
Free software programmers and the extended community are arguably the most organized non-hierarchical, grassroots constituency in the world. The community includes the tens of thousands developers and millions of endusers tightly networked through institutions like sourceforge, slashdot, countless LUGs, etc. The ability to produce projects of the scale and complexity of the Linux kernel, the Debian distribution, or the engineering behind the Internet itself is a testament to the community's ability to organize more than anything else.
Despite this incredible organizing for software production, support and distribution very little of this gets translated into the political realm. In his last slashdot interview Lawerence Lessig chided the community for this.
Organizers of traditional political campaigns for social justice or equitable distribution of power would drool over having a constituency as organized as that which we have. How do you think the community can translate its effective organizing in the technical arena into the political realm?
Good forum, it made me nostalgic thinking about how the 'net has grown up.
Rather than having the suits go after alterslash, wouldn't a much better outcome be to incorporate the value that is added into the site? I think its damn cool and useful, like kernel traffic and its obviously a fan site. He's not making any money.
If the suits are so uptight then just rip off what's he's doing into slashdot or have him and a few people be editors for stuff.
The logic you used is scarily like what GM and Walmart say when going after fan sites that have their trademark's in the domain name.
Why is VP3 different with respect to patents? On2 has patents, they seem doing a good thing and try to let people use their IP. But they could be bought in a heartbeat and work that you and others put into it would be gone.
What they should do is give the patent to a conservancy, like collabnet's or the Knowledge Conservancy.
Good point. Satellite could shake up the pay tv market but to this point hasn't caused cable to exhibit any price discipline. Its no where near the money making machine that cable is but its new enough as a service and still growing.
What do you think about an Echostar / DirecTV merger?
Actually, Microsoft is becoming a media giant and its looks like it will be able to join the club. Bill Gates and Paul Allen have been investing in cable, telco, etc forever. Microsoft is bankrolling the Comcast / ATT merger, and has a plethora of media interests MSNBC, MSN, ISP for QWEST, ISP for DirecTV (and maybe soon Echostar as well), Xbox, cell phones, set top boxes. They are extraordinarily well positioned for broadband / interactive TV / video on demand services that are about to be rolled out.
Its very clear that Microsoft has its sights set on cornering the new media market. And I agree that this pales to what they have done on the desktop.