You don't mention it but I presume that you would like to see academic works under copyleft instead of copyright. It seems that the win here would be in the removal of barriers to distribution and not barriers to use of texts, as merging academic texts is not the same as merging source code texts.
Removing barriers to distribution makes perfect sense to me, academia is a publicly subsidized institution, as such its products should be available without restriction to the public. I think incorporating capitalism's incentive system in academia is dangerous. As you said, education should be the incentive, not money. Having money be the incentive causes researchers to not share their work with each other and undermines the credibility of the academic process. There was a good article in the Atlantic a while back about this, see here.
The biggest barrier that I can see is the cozy relationship between the publishers and the old boy academic network. They both can profit more under restricted distribution than open distribution. More public investment in academia would lessen the need for academics to turn to capitalism for incentive. There is some awareness of this issue afoot on campuses but there is no movement by academics that I am aware of.
almost everyone is able to connect to the Internet for at least some period of time now you want to do a broadcast great webcasting
"Almost everyone" excludes the poor, microradio has the potential to be a tool for them. Don't get me wrong, I think webcasting is great. One of its exciting applications is in forming microradio networks, whereby a microradio transmitter rebroadcasts a web stream or archived mp3 show. Traditional networks of content providers (Pacifica, CBS, etc) use proprietary communications networks to syndicate content (satellite or fiber). Its very exciting that the Internet is being used to network grassroots media outlets (witness the problems with Pacifica), see microradio.net and radio4all for more info on webcasting and microradio networks.
You're right but it might be more accurate to say the spectrum will get bogged down. The 2.4GHZ band that these devices operate in is unregulated. If everyone sets up wireless networks from their house between the interference from each other and microwave ovens and whatever other devices operate in that chunk of spectrum, it will be unusable as a communications medium. So, it seems unlikely to me that these do it yourself networks can succeed on a wide scale given the small amount of spectrum we have available without some sort of regulation.
Unfortunately the public mechanism that we have for arbitrating use of spectrum (the FCC) is under the thumb of the NAB. Witness what is happening with low power radio. The NAB pours millions into an effort to kill a proposal to grant thousands of low power radio licenses, that would bring diversity to the airwaves and permit the kind of civil society to flourish that these do it yourself networking projects have. If these projects become successful industry will in all likelihood manipulate the regulatory mechanism to quash any competition to their wireless services like MMDS.
We need to learn from what has happened to low power radio and not get behind like we are in open access. We need to create mechanisms for civil society to self regulate public resources, with the stakeholders doing the regulation not the government. And we need to make sure we keep access to our spectrum and not let the NAB lock it up.
You are right. The FCC had a proposal to grant thousands of low power licenses and the NAB poured millions into quashing this. Right now a bill that will kill this is on an appropriations bill, waiting for Congress to resume.
Other posters have commented that Yahoo! will obey the French court's order to protect other interests it might have in France. Considering this case in light of the negotiations being conducted under the auspices of the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction, the French court would have the ability to have a US court enforce its decision.
This convention will have very profound impact on the 'net (and ecommerce in particular), as jurisdictional matters on the 'net are such a tossup. For more info see the Consumer Project on Technology's page on the Hague Convention.
So long as Excite continues to maintain it's public Internet lines as well, I see no problem with this. Of course, if they don't maintain those lines to a reasonable level, all of a sudden their customers will suffer when tempting to get to 95+% of the internet - a sure fire way of losing customers.
You put your finger on the crux of the issue. Given lively competition among service providers to end users this is not a concern. However, what's more valuable at this point, 95% of Internet content or consumers connected at high speed? The value of the Internet to the big money forces now is not in current content, its future markets. This is why Excite@home can lose $1B, as the article says, right now the game is to jockey for position in future markets.
If E@h (or any other high speed provider) can obtain a dominant market position they can dictate terms to content providers. More insidious, if a content provider owns a service provider they can exclude other content providers. Aol/TimeWarner? Didn't TimeWarner try to play hardball with Disney?
This is what Aol would have like to have done with the dialup crowd but all phone lines being equal it wasn't very compelling to content providers in the way that high speed access to consumers could be.
You really do want some kind of authentication when relaying for machines not on your network. I have used ssh's portforwarding feature and it works fine. Set up the foward of a port on localhost to a machine running sshd and smtp and then configure your mail client to send to localhost.
A free software business model provides a service, as such, must leverage the fact that the software is used widely. This is contrasted by the traditional software business model which leverages the market by creating artificial scarcity by restricting software distribution.
Phil Greenspun builds on one of the central observations of the GNU Manifesto, that software benefits society the most when it is used by the most people, in this article about software pricing. He argues that selling software like a traditional manufactured goods doesn't promote good quality software or provide full benefit to society. He proposes selling a portfolio of software packages via a subscription service for which subscribers pay a flat fee, revenues are distributed to authors according to how many people use their software. He doesn't advocate free or closed software in the article but it is not hard to see a RedHat or SourceForge providing the subscription service.
Gated speaks the OSPF routing protocol which can handle dynamic routing. This should allow you to switch to the T1 when the cable modem goes down.
I don't think its possible to have all incoming packets come through the cable modem and all outgoing packets go through the T1. If your packets leave via the T1 they will have a different IP address than if they leave over the cable modem. To do this you would need an upstream router to readdress packets to the other ip address.
You may want to look at Linux 2.4 Advanced Routing HOWTO which lets you set up routing rules based on things other than destination address, including port number which may be of interest to you.
This is an excellent point. If the Internet had been encumbered by patents would it be what it is today? Probably not, it would more likely resemble a DIVX world and the RIAA would have already won, instead of a place where anyone can be a publisher.
The gcc maintainers are free to reject the patch, which they will if it breaks portability. If Apple wants their changes in mainstream gcc (which is what the article says) then they will submit good patches.
I'm all for more FLOPS and its great that Compaq has given us their compiler. I just meant to suggest that the true value of gcc is greater than its raw performance numbers, without it its hard to imagine what the Free Software movement would have looked like. To make gcc better one has to do it in the context of making other platforms better, which is why I didn't think that contributing in a real way would be interesting to a hardware vendor. They would rather give their platform an advantage, as Compaq has done with their compiler.
You make a good point about having a whole distro compiled with a Compaq optimized compiler. That might be the carrot that causes them to submit a patch that has their improvements to gcc. Right now the linux kernel is tied to gcc and I can't count the number of times I've tried to use the vendor's optimized compiler to build some sourceware and given up in frustration and had it build with no problem with gcc. So making gnu/linux systems better overall might be what convinces Compaq its in its own interest to contribute to gcc, apparently they don't think that's the case now.
But can Compaq produce a compiler that beats gcc on 20+ architectures? Or even better, can Compaq help to improve gcc to reach that level of performance? Improving gcc is probably not as enticingly sexy to the vendors that are making noises around Free Software as improving Linux itself, so I would not expect Compaq, or the other big vendors to do that soon.
That said, of course it would be great if gcc performed better. Cygnus has ported gcc to VLIW architectures before, so I would expect that will help. Also, hopefully now that Redhat has bought Cygnus some of that IPO money will go towards engineers working on improving gcc.
On the issue of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, RMS wrote an article that had an interesting spin on the tax it imposes on digital recording systems. He advocated distributing the money to artists (not the record companies) based on a result of a survey and removing any restrictions on copying. This solution makes sense to me, as under the current law, legal users are made to pay for copying they don't do. If we're going to pay for copying, we might as well have the right to do it.
Actually they have a lot of say in the matter of spectrum allocation through the millions of dollars they spend on lobbying. They will certainly oppose a grassroots wireless network that would compete with their services.
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Removing barriers to distribution makes perfect sense to me, academia is a publicly subsidized institution, as such its products should be available without restriction to the public. I think incorporating capitalism's incentive system in academia is dangerous. As you said, education should be the incentive, not money. Having money be the incentive causes researchers to not share their work with each other and undermines the credibility of the academic process. There was a good article in the Atlantic a while back about this, see here.
The biggest barrier that I can see is the cozy relationship between the publishers and the old boy academic network. They both can profit more under restricted distribution than open distribution. More public investment in academia would lessen the need for academics to turn to capitalism for incentive. There is some awareness of this issue afoot on campuses but there is no movement by academics that I am aware of.
"Almost everyone" excludes the poor, microradio has the potential to be a tool for them. Don't get me wrong, I think webcasting is great. One of its exciting applications is in forming microradio networks, whereby a microradio transmitter rebroadcasts a web stream or archived mp3 show. Traditional networks of content providers (Pacifica, CBS, etc) use proprietary communications networks to syndicate content (satellite or fiber). Its very exciting that the Internet is being used to network grassroots media outlets (witness the problems with Pacifica), see microradio.net and radio4all for more info on webcasting and microradio networks.
See also Coalition for the Future of Music which is organizing a conference in January which will take up this issue.
http://femmefatale.nu/dmca/freedom%20in%20webcasti ng3.htm
Unfortunately the public mechanism that we have for arbitrating use of spectrum (the FCC) is under the thumb of the NAB. Witness what is happening with low power radio. The NAB pours millions into an effort to kill a proposal to grant thousands of low power radio licenses, that would bring diversity to the airwaves and permit the kind of civil society to flourish that these do it yourself networking projects have. If these projects become successful industry will in all likelihood manipulate the regulatory mechanism to quash any competition to their wireless services like MMDS.
We need to learn from what has happened to low power radio and not get behind like we are in open access. We need to create mechanisms for civil society to self regulate public resources, with the stakeholders doing the regulation not the government. And we need to make sure we keep access to our spectrum and not let the NAB lock it up.
You are right. The FCC had a proposal to grant thousands of low power licenses and the NAB poured millions into quashing this. Right now a bill that will kill this is on an appropriations bill, waiting for Congress to resume.
For more info see on the bill see this article.
For more on the media industry's lobbying to take away your airwaves see this report from the Center for Public Integrity.
This convention will have very profound impact on the 'net (and ecommerce in particular), as jurisdictional matters on the 'net are such a tossup. For more info see the Consumer Project on Technology's page on the Hague Convention.
So long as Excite continues to maintain it's public Internet lines as well, I see no problem with this. Of course, if they don't maintain those lines to a reasonable level, all of a sudden their customers will suffer when tempting to get to 95+% of the internet - a sure fire way of losing customers.
You put your finger on the crux of the issue. Given lively competition among service providers to end users this is not a concern. However, what's more valuable at this point, 95% of Internet content or consumers connected at high speed? The value of the Internet to the big money forces now is not in current content, its future markets. This is why Excite@home can lose $1B, as the article says, right now the game is to jockey for position in future markets.
If E@h (or any other high speed provider) can obtain a dominant market position they can dictate terms to content providers. More insidious, if a content provider owns a service provider they can exclude other content providers. Aol/TimeWarner? Didn't TimeWarner try to play hardball with Disney?
This is what Aol would have like to have done with the dialup crowd but all phone lines being equal it wasn't very compelling to content providers in the way that high speed access to consumers could be.
We need a vigilant FTC. Check out The Media Access Project, they are part of a coalition that filed with the FTC to block the Aol/TimeWarner merger.
You really do want some kind of authentication when relaying for machines not on your network.
I have used ssh's portforwarding feature and it works fine. Set up the foward of a port on localhost to a machine running sshd and smtp and then configure your mail client to send to localhost.
A free software business model provides a service, as such, must leverage the fact that the software is used widely. This is contrasted by the traditional software business model which leverages the market by creating artificial scarcity by restricting software distribution.
Phil Greenspun builds on one of the central observations of the GNU Manifesto, that software benefits society the most when it is used by the most people, in this article about software pricing. He argues that selling software like a traditional manufactured goods doesn't promote good quality software or provide full benefit to society. He proposes selling a portfolio of software packages via a subscription service for which subscribers pay a flat fee, revenues are distributed to authors according to how many people use their software. He doesn't advocate free or closed software in the article but it is not hard to see a RedHat or SourceForge providing the subscription service.
Gated speaks the OSPF routing protocol which can handle dynamic routing. This should allow you to switch to the T1 when the cable modem goes down.
I don't think its possible to have all incoming packets come through the cable modem and all outgoing packets go through the T1. If your packets leave via the T1 they will have a different IP address than if they leave over the cable modem. To do this you would need an upstream router to readdress packets to the other ip address.
You may want to look at Linux 2.4 Advanced Routing HOWTO which lets you set up routing rules based on things other than destination address, including port number which may be of interest to you.
This is an excellent point. If the Internet had been encumbered by patents would it be what it is today? Probably not, it would more likely resemble a DIVX world and the RIAA would have already won, instead of a place where anyone can be a publisher.
The gcc maintainers are free to reject the patch, which they will if it breaks portability. If Apple wants their changes in mainstream gcc (which is what the article says) then they will submit good patches.
I'm all for more FLOPS and its great that Compaq has given us their compiler. I just meant to suggest that the true value of gcc is greater than its raw performance numbers, without it its hard to imagine what the Free Software movement would have looked like. To make gcc better one has to do it in the context of making other platforms better, which is why I didn't think that contributing in a real way would be interesting to a hardware vendor. They would rather give their platform an advantage, as Compaq has done with their compiler.
You make a good point about having a whole distro compiled with a Compaq optimized compiler. That might be the carrot that causes them to submit a patch that has their improvements to gcc. Right now the linux kernel is tied to gcc and I can't count the number of times I've tried to use the vendor's optimized compiler to build some sourceware and given up in frustration and had it build with no problem with gcc. So making gnu/linux systems better overall might be what convinces Compaq its in its own interest to contribute to gcc, apparently they don't think that's the case now.
But can Compaq produce a compiler that beats gcc on 20+ architectures? Or even better, can Compaq help to improve gcc to reach that level of performance? Improving gcc is probably not as enticingly sexy to the vendors that are making noises around Free Software as improving Linux itself, so I would not expect Compaq, or the other big vendors to do that soon.
That said, of course it would be great if gcc performed better. Cygnus has ported gcc to VLIW architectures before, so I would expect that will help. Also, hopefully now that Redhat has bought Cygnus some of that IPO money will go towards engineers working on improving gcc.
On the issue of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, RMS wrote an article that had an interesting spin on the tax it imposes on digital recording systems. He advocated distributing the money to artists (not the record companies) based on a result of a survey and removing any restrictions on copying. This solution makes sense to me, as under the current law, legal users are made to pay for copying they don't do. If we're going to pay for copying, we might as well have the right to do it.
The article says that it would use a ccNUMA-like design. SGI used this technology to scale to 512 processors with their Origin line.
Actually they have a lot of say in the matter of spectrum allocation through the millions of dollars they spend on lobbying. They will certainly oppose a grassroots wireless network that would compete with their services.