I don't understand what you are saying. What I meant was that the dev team can completely ignore submitted patches. This takes zero work.
The original poster seemed to be under some impression that an open-source game server somehow compelled the people running the server to put any patch submitted to them into it and thus it was easy to compromise. This is absolutely bogus.
I have worked on commercial software for three different commercial companies, including a very large one (three letters, starts with S), and also on a "smaller" open-source project (fltk).
Even this small open source project gets me far more "code review" than anything at any commercial place. Nobody looks at commercial code, they do not have the time. EVERY single fix and improvement is suggested, located, and coded by me. All I get are bug reports, almost all of those are "I ran it for 3 hours, I forget what I did, and it crashed!"
In fltk, certainly there are bugs reported, and just like the commercial stuff the same bug is reported dozens of times, by people too lazy to even check if the bug is already in the database. But I also get many patches where people actually found out about the bugs. The number of patches I have received for the commercial software (where many of the users have access to the source code)? ZERO!
The other comment about accepting blocks of unknown code is bogus. The submitted patches are all about 1 line long and I can easily tell if they really fix the problem. Same is true for the commercial software, incidentally. Any contributed code is always read over and analyzed.
I can catagorically state that my OSS software is higher quality than my commercial software. Now I spend about 10x or more time on the commercial software, and it is probably 20-30x more complicated than the OSS stuff. Therefore it is more valuable, but that does not mean it is better.
Unfortunately the real difference I am talking about is the difference between commercial development and a hobby. Unfortunately for your argument, it is obvious to me that "hobby" software is much higher quality than commercial. The difference is in the motivation of the authors, and the fact that they know their work is visible to the world.
The people running the servers don't have to accept any patches sent to them, you know.
You might as well claim that the open nature of HTTP means that any kid can write over any web page on the internet. They can't. All they can do is download a page and write their own version and maybe show that to friends. It does not affect people looking at the original page. Same thing here.
There is no problem with a completely open-source server. I do agree that an open-source client is a problem. I don't see any real solution other than to have closed source clients with an encryption key inside them. The client source could still be entirely open and compilable with a -DKEY=xyzzy switch, so there would be no secrets, but could not be used to produce a client that would talk to a specific host.
If you don't think Microsoft is attacking open source you have been living in a cave.
I don't remember one recent pronoucement from Microsoft where they attack the quality of Linux without making sure they indicate that all the problems with Linux are due to the anarchist/communist/terrorists methods used to make it.
I'm sure you will find a lot of other projects on SourceForge that won't accept outside contributions. Some because they want to hold the copyright and thus be able to do other things besides GPL their code, some because they are arrogant and don't believe anybody else's ideas are good enough, and some for the very realistic reason that they have no time to figure out if the contributed code really is good and worth adding, and some for a combination of all these reasons.
The thing with OSS code is that the user can fork it if the original authors are not interested in accepting their changes. That is the big difference.
The original author has no trouble selling them if they want. The original author also can sell or even give the rights to another company to make a closed-source version.
You seem to think it is ok for people to steal others work and make money from it, and call that freedom and capitalism. That's pretty strange.
Free software IS capitialism. Everybody writing it is writing for entirely selfish purposes. Not every reward is money. I would estimate 99% of free software is written to boost the writer's ego and to gain admiration, and perhaps even to advertise their talents and get paid. Maybe 1% is written by somebody literally thinking they are improving the world.
The GPL is explicitly designed so that a persons creative efforts continue to belong to them, while still allowing maximum exposure and distribution and advertising.
If free software was not capitalism, it would be public domain.
In older Basic's this was totally compatable by just substituting the keywords. If they were stored as tokens it would even come up in your language instantly.
Compatability is probably impossible in modern VB or any other language, for two reasons: first there is new syntax rules where the parser cannot use context to figure out if a word is a keyword or a variable name. Second is that everything is stored as text so that formatting by the programmer can be preserved, so there is no tokenized version that will come up correctly, and translating back & forth would lose too much information even if the translator flagged and renamed conflicting variable names.
That's because the bonus put him into a higher tax bracket. Say he makes 40K and that is taxed at 25% or 10K, with the bonus he makes 60K and his income tax might be 33%, or 20K. Since this 10K increase in tax has to be put entirely into withholding on that 20K bonus, it looks like 50% of it went to taxes.
While someone distributing software without permission is in breach of copyright, it's different to distributing software in breach of the GPL. In the former, the copyright owner can stop distribution/use of the code, but he can't compel the distributer to release the source code, nor to hand over copyright in the modifications made to the code.
WRONG! The GPL is exactly the same as copyright. The copyright owner can only stop the distribution/use of the code, just like you said. (They can also sue for copyright violations, which might be a way for either a normal copyright holder or somebody who put their stuff under the GPL to get the infringer to do more than stop distributing, but again the situation is identical between the GPL and copyright).
What the GPL does is offer the right to violate the copyright if you release the source code. It does not force you to release the source code!
Get that straight. There are many people who are interested in spreading the FUD that the GPL somehow forces you to give away your source code. That is absolutely and utterly false.
Currently Windows is programmed in C++, and it is fairly standard C++ as well. So by your argument, there should be no interoperability problems between Windows and Linux, as Linux also has a standards-compliant C++ compiler.
I think the people trying to write Wine would disagree.
Although I would agree with you in principle, your selection of SAMBA vs NFS is absolutly the worst one possible and completely contradicts your argument. SAMBA is 100% for interoperability with Microsoft and has absolutely zero technical improvements. This is obvious because nobody uses SAMBA or SMB except when at least one of the machines is a Microsoft product. All advances outside of Microsoft in shared file systems completely ignore SAMBA and SMB (yes they ignore NFS as well).
You are confused. A "defensive patent" can be on a totally unrelated thing. The idea is that you can prevent Eolas from using their patent to attack you by threatening to attack right back with that other patent.
The reason the original poster said these are useless for Eolas style attacks is that Eolas makes nothing except lawsuits. Thus they cannot be violating any of your other patents. I agree with the original poster that documenting your invention is just as useful as patenting it.
I also agree that Microsoft has avoided using patents for evil purposes. It would be nice if they actually said that all their patents will be used only for defensive purposes.
I can't possibly see how the GPL, which does not permit redistribution under a different license, nor distribution in binary-only form, nor being linked against from a non-GPL program, is less restrictive than a license that allows all these.
Of course it is more restrictive than that. I notice you conviently forgot to mention the advertising clause. In this case, there is NO reason why you could not dual-license your code GPL+BSD.
Let me see if I can make this more clear: the ONLY reason to not GPL your code is because you want a restriction that the GPL does not have. The advertising clause is such a restriction. It does not matter if you include a check for a million dollars with your code, you can't say "look my license gives you a million dollars more than the GPL does, therefore it is less restrictive", because you are still lying. Your license has a restriction the GPL does not have.
Restrictions are not a linear number. It is a set. It is quite possible for two different sets to each be "less" than the other because they intersect and do not contain things the other one does. Therefore the GPL is less restrictive than the BSD+advertising clause, and the BSD+advertising clause is less restrictive than the GPL. AT THE SAME TIME! In reality the restrctions are a partial set.
Releasing under both the GPL and the BSD+advertising clause makes the intersection of these restrictions. This is the only way to be less restrictive than both of them at the same time. No other arrangement is less restrictive than one of them.
You would not agree if I said "it's obvious that the GPL is less restrictive than your license, because it does not have the advertising clause." I fail to see why you think anybody would agree with the opposite.
Wine is not listening to that port without a lot of elaborate setup.
However there certainly are examples of Wine successfully running.exe files imbedded in virus email and actually emailing copies out. And even doing this without the user knowing (they clicked on the exe just like a Windows user).
Probably more of a concern is that I know that a Linux machine's disk can be trashed by a Windows virus. It wrote over the files right over NFS (or perhaps over Samba to a server that then went to this machine via NFS).
Nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your code GPL+BSD except that you don't want to give up restrictions (in your example the advertising clause) that the GPL would require you to.
It does not matter how many other restrictions of the GPL your other license lacks. If you cite even one restriction that says "that's why I can't GPL it" then you are admitting that you can't use the GPL because you want more restrictions. There is NOTHING wrong with wanting that, but there is something wrong with trying to twist the argument into "I'm being less restrictive thant the GPL". You are not being less restrictive than the GPL, because if you were you would not care if you also made it GPL.
So I stand by my original argument: everybody unwilling to release their code GPL and claiming that they are being "less restrictive" is lying.
A huge advantage of NeWS is that the widgets were in effect "open source" because they were interpreted PostScript. Possibly more important, NeWS was written so that an app could easily define it's own widgets or replace widgets in it's namespace without interfering with other programs. This allowed experimentation and allowed perhaps 5 (or fewer) people to write in weeks the tNT toolkit, which is the equivalent of GTK at least.
Non-news toolkits would probably not use these widgets at first. However they can take full advantage of the postscript drawing environment to draw things, eliminating the copying of bitmaps that is most of the slowness of current X11 apps. The local namespace means a toolkit can easily write a Postscript backend, and change it over time, that does exactly what they need so the front end can talk to it. In effect they can invent their own communication protocol from client to server. They can then move widgets over, or perhaps decide that is not a good idea, and move lower-level drawing ops over (there are good arguments that widgets maybe should reside on the client, as long as the instructions to draw them are simple, in many cases the interface to a widget is far more complicated and thus slow than the interface needed to draw an image of the widet. The further beauty of NeWS is that it does not disallow this).
X11 apps would probably talk through an xlib emulator to a PostScript backend that converts the calls to NeWS. This is entirely practical on current hardware, though Sun botched things considerably by making the NeWS+X11 hybrid, which ran both NeWS and X11 slowly, and seriously broke the widget model by requiring you to use the built-in window object so that X11 window managers would work. I would completely ignore this merge and base any development on pure NeWS.
You are confusing NeWS with Display Postscript. The NeWS postscript interpreter was written at Sun, and is well known for being incompatable with real Postscript.
The incompatabilities were almost all improvements: you could use nul as a dictionary index, and any numeric value was usable in an if statement without putting "0 ne" after it, those are two that really annoyed me when they "fixed" NeWS in later versions. And of course NeWS added postscript commands to turn a path and ctm into a window (a feature missing now from every single supposedly "advanced" alternative including longhorn and Quartz/Aqua) and change what window you drew into and handle events (the event stuff was a mess and I would replace it).
I absolutely agree that open-source NeWS, even 15 years late, would be a huge benefit. I would argue that the best code would be the earlier versions, before the X11 merge. Nowadays it is perfectly obvious that the best way to emulate X11 would be atop the new system, not beside it. That merge seriously screwed up NeWS performance and the command set.
Trying to do that is why installing programs is such a nightmare. If there was some mega-library containing all of Gnome it would probably be a lot easier to install those programs. And the code is so cross-linked that everything gets swapped in anyway.
I would prefer to see much more static linking and larger monolithic shared libraries that don't themselves call much other than libc. Then add checksums to the read-only code pages so Linux can map identical pages to the same memory and swap locations. Fiddle with the static linkers so pages from the same library are much more likely to be identical, and aggressively change things so unused code is not linked (for instance unused C++ virtual functions). I believe this would result in much less memory usage than relying on shared libraries, and get rid of a lot of DLL hell.
I have noticed several times in Anime (especially older Anime from the 80's) that it appears the makers have confused the Star of David with the Pentagram, and had characters drawing it on the floor with candles to summon demons, or wearing pendants with it that have paranormal powers. Did anybody ever comment on this, did it raise any kind of controversy, or what?
Yes it looks like all the "bad" worlds have a liberal slant. However it is also true that liberal distopias (sp?) make for a more interesting background for a game. The evil powers were overcome with greed, resulting in fantastic effects that even they did not plan on, possibly resulting in a world where everybody including the evil is in bad shape, where there is no way to fix it so the game play is limited to a controllable microcosm.
A conservative distopia would be a Communist dictatorship, or a world like 1984. In that the individual cannot do anything, so there is no game. If they could then it is not a conservative distopia, as there is possibility of overthrowing the evil government. Perhaps you could play a nasty enforcer, locating those who dare to speak out against the government and getting rid of them, but it seems people don't want to identify so closely with an evil character.
I would say conversely that all the "good world" games, especially those space-trading ones, present an Ayn Rand fantasy world where everybody seems quite happy despite the absolute freedom to even shoot your competitors.
As far as I know, you cannot legally do such a powerpoint presentation. However there is "fair use", and more importantly the fact that nobody really cares if you use the images for a powerpoint presentation, unless maybe it is to a big stadium of people or used to sell a product, so generally the law can be ignored.
A poster did indicate that the images, which are obviously desktop backgrounds, were from a site that pretty much encouraged people to download the images and install them on their machine and display them on their screen. This could be taken as an indication that the authors intended to grant the right to reuse the images, even though they did not say that anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand what you are saying. What I meant was that the dev team can completely ignore submitted patches. This takes zero work.
The original poster seemed to be under some impression that an open-source game server somehow compelled the people running the server to put any patch submitted to them into it and thus it was easy to compromise. This is absolutely bogus.
I have worked on commercial software for three different commercial companies, including a very large one (three letters, starts with S), and also on a "smaller" open-source project (fltk).
Even this small open source project gets me far more "code review" than anything at any commercial place. Nobody looks at commercial code, they do not have the time. EVERY single fix and improvement is suggested, located, and coded by me. All I get are bug reports, almost all of those are "I ran it for 3 hours, I forget what I did, and it crashed!"
In fltk, certainly there are bugs reported, and just like the commercial stuff the same bug is reported dozens of times, by people too lazy to even check if the bug is already in the database. But I also get many patches where people actually found out about the bugs. The number of patches I have received for the commercial software (where many of the users have access to the source code)? ZERO!
The other comment about accepting blocks of unknown code is bogus. The submitted patches are all about 1 line long and I can easily tell if they really fix the problem. Same is true for the commercial software, incidentally. Any contributed code is always read over and analyzed.
I can catagorically state that my OSS software is higher quality than my commercial software. Now I spend about 10x or more time on the commercial software, and it is probably 20-30x more complicated than the OSS stuff. Therefore it is more valuable, but that does not mean it is better.
Unfortunately the real difference I am talking about is the difference between commercial development and a hobby. Unfortunately for your argument, it is obvious to me that "hobby" software is much higher quality than commercial. The difference is in the motivation of the authors, and the fact that they know their work is visible to the world.
The people running the servers don't have to accept any patches sent to them, you know.
You might as well claim that the open nature of HTTP means that any kid can write over any web page on the internet. They can't. All they can do is download a page and write their own version and maybe show that to friends. It does not affect people looking at the original page. Same thing here.
There is no problem with a completely open-source server. I do agree that an open-source client is a problem. I don't see any real solution other than to have closed source clients with an encryption key inside them. The client source could still be entirely open and compilable with a -DKEY=xyzzy switch, so there would be no secrets, but could not be used to produce a client that would talk to a specific host.
If you don't think Microsoft is attacking open source you have been living in a cave.
I don't remember one recent pronoucement from Microsoft where they attack the quality of Linux without making sure they indicate that all the problems with Linux are due to the anarchist/communist/terrorists methods used to make it.
I'm sure you will find a lot of other projects on SourceForge that won't accept outside contributions. Some because they want to hold the copyright and thus be able to do other things besides GPL their code, some because they are arrogant and don't believe anybody else's ideas are good enough, and some for the very realistic reason that they have no time to figure out if the contributed code really is good and worth adding, and some for a combination of all these reasons.
The thing with OSS code is that the user can fork it if the original authors are not interested in accepting their changes. That is the big difference.
The original author has no trouble selling them if they want. The original author also can sell or even give the rights to another company to make a closed-source version.
You seem to think it is ok for people to steal others work and make money from it, and call that freedom and capitalism. That's pretty strange.
My god you are wrong there.
Free software IS capitialism. Everybody writing it is writing for entirely selfish purposes. Not every reward is money. I would estimate 99% of free software is written to boost the writer's ego and to gain admiration, and perhaps even to advertise their talents and get paid. Maybe 1% is written by somebody literally thinking they are improving the world.
The GPL is explicitly designed so that a persons creative efforts continue to belong to them, while still allowing maximum exposure and distribution and advertising.
If free software was not capitalism, it would be public domain.
In older Basic's this was totally compatable by just substituting the keywords. If they were stored as tokens it would even come up in your language instantly.
Compatability is probably impossible in modern VB or any other language, for two reasons: first there is new syntax rules where the parser cannot use context to figure out if a word is a keyword or a variable name. Second is that everything is stored as text so that formatting by the programmer can be preserved, so there is no tokenized version that will come up correctly, and translating back & forth would lose too much information even if the translator flagged and renamed conflicting variable names.
How about you re-install your sense of humor?
That's because the bonus put him into a higher tax bracket. Say he makes 40K and that is taxed at 25% or 10K, with the bonus he makes 60K and his income tax might be 33%, or 20K. Since this 10K increase in tax has to be put entirely into withholding on that 20K bonus, it looks like 50% of it went to taxes.
It has been established quite clearly that such in-house copying is not considered distribution.
While someone distributing software without permission is in breach of copyright, it's different to distributing software in breach of the GPL. In the former, the copyright owner can stop distribution/use of the code, but he can't compel the distributer to release the source code, nor to hand over copyright in the modifications made to the code.
WRONG! The GPL is exactly the same as copyright. The copyright owner can only stop the distribution/use of the code, just like you said. (They can also sue for copyright violations, which might be a way for either a normal copyright holder or somebody who put their stuff under the GPL to get the infringer to do more than stop distributing, but again the situation is identical between the GPL and copyright).
What the GPL does is offer the right to violate the copyright if you release the source code. It does not force you to release the source code!
Get that straight. There are many people who are interested in spreading the FUD that the GPL somehow forces you to give away your source code. That is absolutely and utterly false.
Currently Windows is programmed in C++, and it is fairly standard C++ as well. So by your argument, there should be no interoperability problems between Windows and Linux, as Linux also has a standards-compliant C++ compiler.
I think the people trying to write Wine would disagree.
Although I would agree with you in principle, your selection of SAMBA vs NFS is absolutly the worst one possible and completely contradicts your argument. SAMBA is 100% for interoperability with Microsoft and has absolutely zero technical improvements. This is obvious because nobody uses SAMBA or SMB except when at least one of the machines is a Microsoft product. All advances outside of Microsoft in shared file systems completely ignore SAMBA and SMB (yes they ignore NFS as well).
You are confused. A "defensive patent" can be on a totally unrelated thing. The idea is that you can prevent Eolas from using their patent to attack you by threatening to attack right back with that other patent.
The reason the original poster said these are useless for Eolas style attacks is that Eolas makes nothing except lawsuits. Thus they cannot be violating any of your other patents. I agree with the original poster that documenting your invention is just as useful as patenting it.
I also agree that Microsoft has avoided using patents for evil purposes. It would be nice if they actually said that all their patents will be used only for defensive purposes.
I can't possibly see how the GPL, which does not permit redistribution under a different license, nor distribution in binary-only form, nor being linked against from a non-GPL program, is less restrictive than a license that allows all these.
Of course it is more restrictive than that. I notice you conviently forgot to mention the advertising clause. In this case, there is NO reason why you could not dual-license your code GPL+BSD.
Let me see if I can make this more clear: the ONLY reason to not GPL your code is because you want a restriction that the GPL does not have. The advertising clause is such a restriction. It does not matter if you include a check for a million dollars with your code, you can't say "look my license gives you a million dollars more than the GPL does, therefore it is less restrictive", because you are still lying. Your license has a restriction the GPL does not have.
Restrictions are not a linear number. It is a set. It is quite possible for two different sets to each be "less" than the other because they intersect and do not contain things the other one does. Therefore the GPL is less restrictive than the BSD+advertising clause, and the BSD+advertising clause is less restrictive than the GPL. AT THE SAME TIME! In reality the restrctions are a partial set.
Releasing under both the GPL and the BSD+advertising clause makes the intersection of these restrictions. This is the only way to be less restrictive than both of them at the same time. No other arrangement is less restrictive than one of them.
You would not agree if I said "it's obvious that the GPL is less restrictive than your license, because it does not have the advertising clause." I fail to see why you think anybody would agree with the opposite.
Wine is not listening to that port without a lot of elaborate setup.
.exe files imbedded in virus email and actually emailing copies out. And even doing this without the user knowing (they clicked on the exe just like a Windows user).
However there certainly are examples of Wine successfully running
Probably more of a concern is that I know that a Linux machine's disk can be trashed by a Windows virus. It wrote over the files right over NFS (or perhaps over Samba to a server that then went to this machine via NFS).
Nothing prevents you from dual-licensing your code GPL+BSD except that you don't want to give up restrictions (in your example the advertising clause) that the GPL would require you to.
It does not matter how many other restrictions of the GPL your other license lacks. If you cite even one restriction that says "that's why I can't GPL it" then you are admitting that you can't use the GPL because you want more restrictions. There is NOTHING wrong with wanting that, but there is something wrong with trying to twist the argument into "I'm being less restrictive thant the GPL". You are not being less restrictive than the GPL, because if you were you would not care if you also made it GPL.
So I stand by my original argument: everybody unwilling to release their code GPL and claiming that they are being "less restrictive" is lying.
Unfortunately, they'll lose a lof of their NDA-bility should they later wish to support more hardware peripherals under Open/Free/Solaris than Linux.
Nothing would prevent them from writing their own closed-source drivers for such hardware.
A huge advantage of NeWS is that the widgets were in effect "open source" because they were interpreted PostScript. Possibly more important, NeWS was written so that an app could easily define it's own widgets or replace widgets in it's namespace without interfering with other programs. This allowed experimentation and allowed perhaps 5 (or fewer) people to write in weeks the tNT toolkit, which is the equivalent of GTK at least.
Non-news toolkits would probably not use these widgets at first. However they can take full advantage of the postscript drawing environment to draw things, eliminating the copying of bitmaps that is most of the slowness of current X11 apps. The local namespace means a toolkit can easily write a Postscript backend, and change it over time, that does exactly what they need so the front end can talk to it. In effect they can invent their own communication protocol from client to server. They can then move widgets over, or perhaps decide that is not a good idea, and move lower-level drawing ops over (there are good arguments that widgets maybe should reside on the client, as long as the instructions to draw them are simple, in many cases the interface to a widget is far more complicated and thus slow than the interface needed to draw an image of the widet. The further beauty of NeWS is that it does not disallow this).
X11 apps would probably talk through an xlib emulator to a PostScript backend that converts the calls to NeWS. This is entirely practical on current hardware, though Sun botched things considerably by making the NeWS+X11 hybrid, which ran both NeWS and X11 slowly, and seriously broke the widget model by requiring you to use the built-in window object so that X11 window managers would work. I would completely ignore this merge and base any development on pure NeWS.
You are confusing NeWS with Display Postscript. The NeWS postscript interpreter was written at Sun, and is well known for being incompatable with real Postscript.
The incompatabilities were almost all improvements: you could use nul as a dictionary index, and any numeric value was usable in an if statement without putting "0 ne" after it, those are two that really annoyed me when they "fixed" NeWS in later versions. And of course NeWS added postscript commands to turn a path and ctm into a window (a feature missing now from every single supposedly "advanced" alternative including longhorn and Quartz/Aqua) and change what window you drew into and handle events (the event stuff was a mess and I would replace it).
I absolutely agree that open-source NeWS, even 15 years late, would be a huge benefit. I would argue that the best code would be the earlier versions, before the X11 merge. Nowadays it is perfectly obvious that the best way to emulate X11 would be atop the new system, not beside it. That merge seriously screwed up NeWS performance and the command set.
Trying to do that is why installing programs is such a nightmare. If there was some mega-library containing all of Gnome it would probably be a lot easier to install those programs. And the code is so cross-linked that everything gets swapped in anyway.
I would prefer to see much more static linking and larger monolithic shared libraries that don't themselves call much other than libc. Then add checksums to the read-only code pages so Linux can map identical pages to the same memory and swap locations. Fiddle with the static linkers so pages from the same library are much more likely to be identical, and aggressively change things so unused code is not linked (for instance unused C++ virtual functions). I believe this would result in much less memory usage than relying on shared libraries, and get rid of a lot of DLL hell.
I have noticed several times in Anime (especially older Anime from the 80's) that it appears the makers have confused the Star of David with the Pentagram, and had characters drawing it on the floor with candles to summon demons, or wearing pendants with it that have paranormal powers. Did anybody ever comment on this, did it raise any kind of controversy, or what?
Yes it looks like all the "bad" worlds have a liberal slant. However it is also true that liberal distopias (sp?) make for a more interesting background for a game. The evil powers were overcome with greed, resulting in fantastic effects that even they did not plan on, possibly resulting in a world where everybody including the evil is in bad shape, where there is no way to fix it so the game play is limited to a controllable microcosm.
A conservative distopia would be a Communist dictatorship, or a world like 1984. In that the individual cannot do anything, so there is no game. If they could then it is not a conservative distopia, as there is possibility of overthrowing the evil government. Perhaps you could play a nasty enforcer, locating those who dare to speak out against the government and getting rid of them, but it seems people don't want to identify so closely with an evil character.
I would say conversely that all the "good world" games, especially those space-trading ones, present an Ayn Rand fantasy world where everybody seems quite happy despite the absolute freedom to even shoot your competitors.
As far as I know, you cannot legally do such a powerpoint presentation. However there is "fair use", and more importantly the fact that nobody really cares if you use the images for a powerpoint presentation, unless maybe it is to a big stadium of people or used to sell a product, so generally the law can be ignored.
A poster did indicate that the images, which are obviously desktop backgrounds, were from a site that pretty much encouraged people to download the images and install them on their machine and display them on their screen. This could be taken as an indication that the authors intended to grant the right to reuse the images, even though they did not say that anywhere.