How do you make a judgement then? How well does it do what it's supposed to do? How well does it do what you need it to do? Well, how much does that matter when _you may not be allowed to use it at all tomorrow_? What value does it have for you then?
Software freedom isnt necessarily the deciding factor if your choice matters the next five minutes. But when you make a choice that must be valid over a decade youd better have a crystal ball to see how whoever decides the license is going to act for the next ten years.
One of the things that really frustrates me is that free software advocates frequently phrase the issues in terms of black and white, all or nothing. Your post ignores the fact that once I buy a piece of software under a certain set of terms, the seller is also bound by the contract. They can't change the terms arbitrarily (although Microsoft gets around this by changing the terms attached to security updates.)
Sometimes, the choice between free and proprietary software is less important than whether the software does what it needs to do. My ability to work depends on speech recognition software for which no viable open source solution exists. (From what I can tell my choices are between the entirely closed NaturallySpeaking, and the partially closed ViaVoice.) I don't particularly like the fact that the software I need to work is only available on a proprietary basis and no free software solutions are ready for prime time, or that this functionality only works on proprietary operating systems. However given a choice between using a proprietary software package on a proprietary operating system, and not doing anything while my crystal ball is fuzzy as to whether free software solutions are available in the near future, I feel that it is better to use what works then to do nothing waiting for something that does work.
One of my big complaints about the free software movement is that freedom is only phrased as the freedom for an elite few to modify the code. Very rarely are other critical needs addressed. This is an ethical blind spot that is a serious problem.
Granted, putting the characters into public domain opens up the door to campy unauthorized portrayals of those characters. On the other hand, one could argue that in the end this is a good thing because the character becomes something of an idiom. For example, Shakespeare in the public domain permits a wide variety of artistic interpretations from the serious (Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet), to the farcical (Strange Brew), to retelling the story through the eyes of different characters (Rosencrans and Guildenstern are dead) and the merely derivative (The Lion King).
Granted in some cases the interpretation or adaptation bears only a superficial relationship to the source material (The Count of Monte Cristo) but this is balanced by the fact that you can shop around for better adaptations. Generally the original source material survives quite well while the embarrassing adaptations tend to be forgotten (Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein for example). I actually think that humorous adaptations can only improve appreciation for the original source material. I do not know of anybody who seriously complains about "What's Opera Doc" and the "Rabbit of Sevile."
But to support another poster, Batman the television series wasn't nearly as campy as Batman in movie serial form. The Adam West Batman just followed in the same tradition as the earlier movie versions and closely followed the comics code version of Batman. Stan Lee primarily made his mark by introducing more realism into the comics industry. In fact, I remember switching from reading primarily DC comics to marvel comics as a preteen feeling that I had "grown-up" enough to shift from the strictly G-rated DC comics to the PG-13 marvel comics. I remember when Dark Knight Returns was revolutionary for its depiction of Batman with the same levels of tragedy and horror that had previously been reserved for horror titles such as Swamp Thing and Hellblazer. However that is off-topic. I think that the bottom line is that if Batman were in public domain, then we probably would've seen more darker interpretations throughout the publication history of the character.
There are some serious limitations to SpamAssassin as an approach for limiting spam.
1: The addition of new recognized spam phrases must be done manually. I can't just pipe the spam into the program with the option "this is spam." The fact that I can teach Bayesian programs by piping spam into them is a major advantage over rule-based programs.
2: The definition of what is spam and what isn't spam is in the hands of someone else. SpamAssassin has what I find to be an unacceptably high false positive rate including some messages that I consider to be important such as calls for proposals, membership renewals for professional organizations. In contrast mail that I get because I purchased someting online before I discovered spam gourmet seems to get through.
3: A Bayesian approach is not just about tagging spam, but about differentiating between spam and non-spam. That is a subtle but important distinction. SpamAssassin looks for features thare are typical of spam. However it has no idea what my legitimate email looks like.
Information that is specific to me becomes an automatic whitelist. Lets say for example that I get an email from a new employee in my workplace. The name, telephone exchange and address of my workplace mapks that message as being a high probability of not being spam. Bayesian filters are better at detecting personal messages than spam resulting in a low false positive rate and a higher false negative rate.
4: Perhaps another reason is that I'm not convinced that rule-based programs scale well. For an examle with a non-trivial message. spamassassin takes 4.24 seconds to process an 8k message while my program (written (rather badly) in python) delivers a verdict in.740 seconds. (On a solaris machine I have no control over.) Just sampling a few in my inbox spamassassin consistantly requires about 5x the time of my rather poorly written python script and I can probiably optimize even further. (I suspect that for large messages I do not need to scan the entire message) I suspect this will get worse as more rules are added to spamassassin.
The problem here is that the photographer is trying to charge for the wrong part of the work. The photographer is trying to charge high prices for the easy part of the work - making copies - and keep prices low for the hard part of the work - setting up a good pose with good lighting and a good background - because the technology used to allow this pricing model.
I think this is a major misconception in this discussion. Perhaps we're all spoiled by one-hour photo places but the production of a good quality print from a negative requires quite a bit more time than just feeding the negative through a machine. Quality print making is a craft and at the higher levels an art in and of itself. Setting up the shots is the easy part, creating prints that don't look like they came out a photo booth requires about twice as much time as is usually spent in the studio. This is usually why the second step in professional photography involves showing the customer a low quality proof sheet and you pay for the prints. One of the reasons why I never really pursued photography was because I spent hours watching my grandfather obsess over every little quirk in the lighting, texture, tone, and color of every print he produced. Too much picky little detail for my blood. (Besides which, my abilities as a visual designer extend just far enough to appreciate good from bad.)
I paid for your expertise at arranging the shots, not your abiltiy to make copies of pictures.
In which case, then certainly I respect your right to hire a photographer to only come in and set up the shots, and hand over the negatives at the end of the day. If I was that photographer I would make certain that you signed away the right to gripe about the quality of any prints that you make from the negative. Complaining that the photographer charges the most money for the part of the process the requires the most work, and perhaps contributes the most to the quality of the final product seems a bit absurd to me.
On the other hand, I suspect the most good professional photographers if given such a request would say that you don't need a professional photographer, you just need your brother Joe and a caseload of film.
I think that this is one of those arguments that is really trivial outside of server contexts. Most users don't care about uptime as long as rebooting a computer is a trivial task that provides an easy excuse to make a trip to the coffee pot or watercooler. My experience with Linux was that while as an operating system it was very difficult to crash, there were certain programs (Netscape 4) that could bring it screeching to a halt to the point where a hardware reboot was the easiest way to fix the problem.
Early in running Windows XP and Windows 2000, I had some problems due to a bug in the bios, however since then the only unintentional downtime in one year has been due to power failures. As a result, I think that most of the FUD regarding the instability of Windows compared to other operating systems no longer applies to the current offerings from Microsoft. For the average user, one crash a month or even one crash a week is a relatively trivial nuisance (and I am probably overestimating the crash ability of Windows XP here.)
I suspect that part of the difference is that the BSD license reflects more of a research focus where the primary criteria for winning is recognition. Some innovations are best released into the public domain because the public is best served by the maximum number of implementations, commercial and open. The openess of stories from the brothers grim permits hundreds of interpretations.
In this scenario Microsoft is no worse a freeloader than any other entity that uses the software.
But this is one inconsistancy w/ gpl advocate logic. Copyright should not be used to create artificial scarcity for ideas because they are nonrivalous resources but public domain should be discouraged because ideas are rivalous resources.
Probably should thow in the cluster of urban fantasy writers such as Charles DeLint, Will Shetterly, Emma Bull and Jan Siegel.
It Gaiman in many ways seems to be pulling into novel format a theology that seems to be at the core of a lot of British fantasy including many of the DC vertigo line which is that god exists, he is a major wanker, but fortunately he is not the only game in town. Probably the best books in this genre is the His Dark Materials trilogy.
And of course Ursula le Guin is still out there publishing the good stuff. One of the problems with fantasy is that for every author like le Guin who asks a different question every novel you have at least five hacks like Lackey and Salvatore.
I downloaded a set of three ISO CD images for Mandrake 9.0 Beta 2 over my 33.6 dialup connection. The connection had to be redialed periodically, but each time wget just kept right on going where it left off... no problem.
Arrrg! No offense, but this is one of the biggest problems that I see the open source community has in regards to dealing with user problems, the tendency to respond to user problems by saying "Oh that's not a problem, I just use this very obscure feature of this very obscure program to deal with the problem." Downloading large files over multiple dial-up connections is not a big deal for us power users willing to tie up the telephone for an extended period of time to try out a new piece of software. The 99 percent of the computer using public will say "That is too much work, it is not worth my time."
There are also outfits that will burn stuff like OO to a CD-R and send it to you for a price that is much more reasonable than MS licensing fees. If you want to talk about _features_ Word has that OO lacks, okay, but don't try to make the fact that OO can be downloaded a strike against it.
It's not the fact that it can be downloaded that's the problem. It's the fact that the only distribution channels require going out of your way to get the software that becomes a problem. 99 percent of the computer using public will say "Why should I bother searching the Web for this product, when Microsoft-something came preinstalled on my computer?" Linux is probably in a better position because you can get a distribution shrink-wrapped at most department stores. But even so, you're dealing with the fact that most of the computer users will fight to having to try anything new. They have spent hours learning how to get things done using their favorite software package. Convincing them to switch will require reducing the barriers to adoption and long download times and obscure distribution channels are significant barriers.
One of the issues is that for many applications open source software has been (and in some cases, still is) so far behind the innovation curve that it is more worthwhile to adopt a proprietary solution. $579 for an item that will be used for two years is really small potatoes compared to other business expenses, and I don't know many people who actually pay full retail price for Microsoft Office. Most people I know get Microsoft Office either cheap as part of a computer bundle, through the educational discount, or through bulk pricing. It has only been recently that OpenOffice and other applications have offered the same feature sets with a similar interface. For me personally, there are a few key applications which are both not available and not even on the horizon for the Linux desktop that justify my plopping down several hundred dollars for them.
Another factor is that in many cases while the free solution offers superior functionality, (I am personally a latex user myself) but at the expense of a steeper learning curve and accessibility. Once Microsoft decided that they were going into a GUI environment, they devoted a huge amount of resources to the problem coming out with an extremely slick product compared to the Linux desktop that still frequently looks and feels like the product of a hobbyist. The more powerful open source programs such as emacs, vim and latex (programs that I use on Windows) require memorizing complex and arcane keystroke sequences. Even the open source GUI applications that I have worked with are frequently quirky in their interface design.
Finally, for many people the last mile problem is a major issue in terms of software adoption. OpenOffice may be free, but downloading OpenOffice over a modem connections is still a serious task. There is great software out there, but installing it is still a pain in the rear unless you can find a CD copy. Most people are just going to use whatever comes on the computer, or whatever they can pick up in blister pack at Wal-Mart.
In many cases, I find that the exclusive focus on access to source code and the licensing issues is really missing some of the big problems with the adoption of open source software and the issues of freedom and access in general. Access to source code in licensing issues are important. But accessibility, usability, and the availability of applications designed to do what we need to do are perhaps even more important but considerably less talked about. There is no point in giving me the freedom to modify source code that I don't understand, for a program that doesn't meet my needs, that requires a completely new interface language, and I can't use anyway because it does not interface with software for my disability. The bottom line is that 99 percent of the population doesn't care about access to source code, and perhaps a majority does not care about licenses. Until the open source movement starts treating accessibility, usability, and functionality as "freedoms" to be just as zealously promoted as access to source code, it's not going to be a much interest beyond a political clique.
I'm wondering if this law is really about having police in theaters able to arrest or ticket people with cell phones. I suspect a large part of it has to do with the fact that we live in a lawsuit happy culture, in which theaters are reluctant to enforce their rights to boot the noxious patrons because of the threat of a lawsuit.
I am simply amazed that so many people think this is trying to force OSS or Free Software on 'everybody.' Nothing could be farther from the truth... it is merely an attempt to force opennenss on government, to protect citizen's access to information irrespective of what operating system or user software they use, be it Free Software, Apple, or, God forbid, Microsoft.
I guess one of the problems with this is that openness as defined exclusively in terms of source code (which is only open if one is an experienced computer programmer, and sometimes not even then). For example, what about one of the most glaring flaws in open source software, disability access? Doesn't openness demanded that government employees be able to access information regardless of physical ability? What if that access to electronic data requires the use a proprietary software? For me this is not a rhetorical question, but a fact of my day-to-day life that there exists no open source software that permits me to work without pain.
In addition, I am not convinced that all cases of government procurement of software should be treated the same way. Is it really a fundamental violation of democracy when a teacher uses a grant to purchase a dozen copies of sim city? In most cases, it is a struggle to just get the software into the classroom and used in appropriate ways.
I think that open source software should be pushed for cases in which it both exists, and meets the basic application requirements. However there are application areas where open source software either doesn't exist, or is so inferior that it fails to meet the basic application requirements needed. This is one reason why I am personally opposed to all or nothing mandates.
I guess my position is that it is rather foolish to treats all cases of software procurement identically. There are cases in which transparency is critically important. However there also cases in which transparency is less important than availability and ease-of-use. For example transparency is very important if you are creating a database system to link all of the Social Security offices in the United States. I am not convinced the transparency is all that important when you give an elementary teacher a $500 grant at the beginning of the semester to buy instructional software. Or if as part of a program to help disabled users, a government office distributes copies of Dragon NaturallySpeaking or ViaVoice (both of which have closed-source cores).
The people have the right to know exactly what source code the government is using to protect them. We have the right to know what code protects our privacy in, for example, records which are ruled sealed.
While I agree with this for cases where transparency is important, I am less convinced that this is true for all applications. For example, I know quite a few teachers who use proprietary software for teaching specific topics from doing data analysis on Palm and Texas Instrument systems, to geometer's sketchpad. This is not a case where the software is being used to store confidential information. Granted it would be nice if open source alternatives to these packages became available, I am a little bit reluctant to support an initiative that would cut off funding for supporting these tools without an alternative available.
An additional benefit is cost-effectiveness. Our tax dollars pay for this stuff, and in almost all cases, OSS / FS is a cheaper solution, both in terms of initial price and total cost of ownership.
This is something that really needs to be evaluated carefully. At least I have found that for many of the tasks that I need to do using a computer the open source software either doesn't exist, or is so far behind the other alternatives that deploying would involve more money. For example, gnu/Linux and a variety of GUI frameworks for Linux lack a mature accessibility framework. The only mature speech recognition engine for Linux is not open source at this time. The Sphinx product is not yet usable. ADA compliance is one area in which I feel that mandating a complete open source shop would run into problems.
I don't object to pushing the government towards open source operating systems and office suites. However I do think that there are some areas where transparency is less important than getting the job done. As someone who supports teachers in instructional environments, I really don't want my hands tied if I run into a situation where the only solution to my problem is a proprietary software package.
Now, regarding government development of software. In all cases, government-funded projects should produce something which is freely available to the public. That means public domain, GPL, or Open Source Licenses. These licenses (or lack thereof) make the results of government-funded projects available to the public. In regards to the GPL, it requires that you GPL any modifications. But this is a good thing. It is good that the government promote recipricol relationship communities, as the GPL does. This is in the public interest. It is in the public's interest that any software produced or funded or supported by the US Government become public domain, GPL, or covered under any of the OSI certified licenses. It is not in the public's interest that such fall under a proprietary license: that means that citizens pay TWICE for a product. Once to support its development, then again to buy it.
Isn't this not one of the big myths about the GPL? The GPL does not prevent a vendor from charging for GPL software. Therefore, it does not prevent citizens from having to pay twice. You would still see independent vendors like Red Hat charging money to redistribute the software with their own value-added components. In fact I would argue that the ability to create commercial products from public domain information is a good thing. For example, maps are built from a variety of information sources including public domain information from the USGS. The openness of the source material for these maps create an environment where mapmakers can compete by adding features not found in the original source material such such as paper quality, laminated maps, digitized maps, maps that highlight tourist features. The legislative record is public domain, the newspapers can compete by providing expansion and analysis.
But applying the GPL or any other OSI certified license to government produced software would be a very bad thing for the public interest. These licenses only work because the original creator has a right (defined by copyright law) to enforce the license. These is not a right that should be extended to the government because of its potential to be used as a form of prior restraint. I am willing to accept the argument that the government can restrict the publication of government information for national security purposes. I am unwilling to accept that the government can place other restrictions on the use of its information.
Maybe they could say "Please don't judge our product on the license agreement! Our license is designed to maximize our stranglehold on you... and if you disallow our software due to it's license, well, we won't be able to take advantage of you".
Actually, while I don't have a problem with the government mandating a strong preference for open source software. I'm a little bit concerned about the government mandating open source software. There are some areas where open source software is seriously lacking. Linux currently does not have a coherent, widely adopted assessability framework. Personally, I find myself stuck with closed source software because the tools that I need in order to work are only available through closed source products under Microsoft Windows. As a result, I think there are some areas where closed source software should be considered on a case-by-case basis such as American Disabilities Act compliance, while encouraging those vendors to open up their source code.
Perhaps instead they could say "We'd like to package up taxpayer-funded research and sell it back to the tax payers! All for profit! Please don't take that away from us - because we'd hate to have to pay for more research."
One of the natures of the commons that makes the commons so valuable is the fact that everyone can benefit from using the commons. For example, the fact that the roadways are constructed as a commons does not prevent services such as Federal Express, taxi cabs, and limo rentals from making money providing transportation using roadways. U.S. geological service maps are excellent resources for both recreational hikers, environmentalists, and property developers. GPS as a commons permits not only high school kids to perform research projects, but also technology vendors to bundle GPS into a large variety of hardware devices. Census data is used by both advertisers and students.
However I'm not exactly certain what this lobbying group wants to see changed. The U.S. government is not in a position to release data under anything else other than the public domain, and changing copyright law in order to provide copyrights to government agencies would probably be a very bad idea. The GPL is still a copyright based license. It depends on the original creator having the rights to enforce how the information is used. Giving these rights to the government would be a form of prior restraint, something that is only permitted for national security reasons.
Certainly this means that government records can be resold to me. For example, the court record is public domain information. The local newspaper publishes key abstracts from the court record and sells me a newspaper. Granted I could go to the courthouse every morning and look at the transcripts myself. However I am more than willing to pay a publisher money for someone else to do the work of creating the abstracts.
Even so, by this time the guy should know what the perfect gift is. (For me, it was a spontaneous thing w/ no ring on a roller coaster. It's a family tradition.(The absence of a ring, not the roller coaster.)) He should know if she will appreciate it because it came from him and reflects a lot of thought or if nothing but the diamond will do. If you know what her values are, then the rest should be obvious.
We did simple silver bands but we allready had reputations for eccentricity.
Honestly this is a good litmus for idetifying who is worth having at your wedding and who is better off being left wondering where their invitation is. Those that respect your relationship will be more concerned with helping you through the hell that is wedding planning. The rest can politely be told where to stick it.
I guess that I don't see the existence of multiple office suites to be a serious problem as long as there is enough differences between them to distinguish them. Perhaps one of the problems is that the office suite monoculture produced by Microsoft Office has promoted a single narrow way of doing things. One of my complaints with StarOffice is that it acts a little bit too much like Microsoft office for my taste. (Another problem that I personally have with OpenOffice is that somehow in producing a cross platform office software, they manage to sacrifice compatibility with Microsoft Windows native accessibility APIs.) Personally I gave up on Microsoft Word not because it is proprietary software, but because I find Microsoft Word to be very poor at creating documents the way I want to create them.
Honestly, I see more choices as an advantage rather than a problem. I think the major challenge is to avoid falling into the trap of simply imitating Microsoft Office. I come to the opposite conclusion, rather than putting all of our eggs into one basket imitating Microsoft Office, open source software could perhaps better make its mark by rethinking data analysis and document preparation from the ground up, and focusing software for these tasks to different markets. The basic office suite is a "one size fits most" model. Too often I think that the open source community is too heavily invested into the "beat Microsoft" mentality, rather than focusing on meeting the needs of a population of computer users who are not served well by proprietary software. The playing field is more than big enough to support niche products.
Perhaps not eternal, but certainly very long-lived. For example, one of the first things that I did when I started to learn LaTeX was to check out a much dog-eared copy of the original manual published in 1985. In contrast, just about all of the data from my master's degree disappeared when the hard drive it was on crashed after three years of operation. Compact discs suffer their own wear and tear. It's not that unusual for me to check out an 80-year-old volume for philosophy project. I suspect one of the reasons why this college can get away with it is because of its status as a community college and not a research institution that depends on access to primary sources published before the 1970s. Converting that volume of material to digital format is a nontrivial task.
I think the better approach to looking at usability is not to focus on different types of media through which we can communicate with the computer, but to focus on levels of abstraction and simplification. For the moment, many tasks that we use computers for involved some pretty low level formatting. Half of the work of setting up a spreadsheet involves fiddling around with cell formatting, and a large chunk of my writing time is spent tweaking the output format or entering data into bibliographic databases so that the computer can format them. Going down to the nitty-gritty details at the lower level of abstraction should rarely be necessary.
I actually think that the command line is a good idea, but currently command lines are too low level, require understanding too much jargon, and commands typically do only single atomic actions. An ideal command would be along the lines of "Find all articles about discourse analysis and Usenet in peer reviewed journals in the last five years."
A problem here is that you're mixing patent issues with copyright issues. This is also drafting a bit far afield from the basic problem that government works are automatically placed into the public domain. They are also not patented either. At least from what I can tell this excludes government modification of GPL licensed software because not only does the GPL prevent placing more restrictions on software, it also prevents removing restrictions.
But if the IP is covered by patent, then it really cannot be considered public domain. Furthermore, md5 does not appear to be in the public domain to begin with. It is copyright 1991 RSA data security and released under a liberal license. (Which raises some interesting questions about the patent case. Since RSA owns the code, and Pumatech claims a patent on the use of the code, does the patent interfere with a copyright holder's rights?) You seem to be suffering from the confusion that public domain equals widely published.
In fact there is a serious problem with redefining copyright to permit the government to apply the GPL to their works. The GPL depends on the creator of the software holding the copyright to the software. I suspect that the GPL also depends on the continued goodwill that the programmer will not decide at some point in the future to pack of all the marbles, go home, and stop publishing a given software package under the GPL in order to collect royalties. This is one advantage that public domain has over copyleft and even liberal licenses. Once something is in the public domain it can never be withdrawn from the public domain. There is minimal risk that the terms under which the work is distributed will change in the future.
I'm not comfortable with the idea of granting the government the ability to "own" critical information such as census data, geographic maps, and the congressional record. The arbitrary nature of national security restrictions on governmental data is tricky enough. I personally don't want to live in a nation in which newspapers could be forced to pay a royalty on court records if Congress felt that it was a good way to raise revenue. Granted the public domain nature of this data means that the local newspaper can charge fifty cents plus exposure to advertising for printing the court record. On the other hand, it also gives me the right to choose one to the courthouse and demand it for myself.
Certainly the GPL is a good tool for individuals and projects. However it depends on individual property rights that were granted to citizens and denied to the government for some pretty strong reasons.
On another note, I wonder why my tax dollars go to pay for software which, because it is in the public domain, can be reused in a commercial application and cause me to have to pay for it again.
The GPL serves the very useful public function of ensuring that publically available IP cannot be co-opted by an entity and monopolized.
Actually, that is one of the benefits of a commons. For example highways as a commons can accomodate commercial and non-comercial traffic. Excluding commercial traffic seriously undermines the quality of the commons. In fact, the success of http and html is largely due to its entry into the public enabling commercial and non-commercial use.
I find a frustrating inconsistancy in the claim that ip should not apply to electronic works because they are not resources that can be diminished but public doman is not sufficient from preventing a work from being monopolized. If it is in the public domain, then it can't be monopolized, because everyone has the right to make a copy.
For example, there about a dozen editions of Moby Dick out there. And of course the GPL like the public domain availability of Moby Dick does not prohibit anyone from charging you for a copy. However it does open the door for non-commercial distribution.
No, you're not. Nowhere in the GPL does it says you have to release your experiments to the public. Please reread the GPL. Only when you distribute you're changes to the software, do you have to rerelease the changes to GPL. Also, GPL doesn't allow you to put your derivative works in the public domain. There are no problems putting derivative works (works linked against libraries in Windows) in the public domain.
This is actually something that bothers me because government works must be released into the public domain. It would appear that the GPL blocks release of government modified software.
>>The was a daemonnews thread a while back about Bill Gates saying how governments should use BSD-style lisences for the absolue maximum effectevness on stuff they develope. It just allows more embracing and extending to happen.
I was always under the impression that at least with the U.S. government works automatically fell into the public domain. (Which I see as a possible conflict with the GPL since it does not permit the relase of works under public domain.)
I'm not convinced that that even small-time criminals will be forced to downgrade. I can pick up source code for twofish at the local library or on the web and just about any library capable of DES can produce 3DES. As such the cost of developing a strong encryption program is trivial. A quick google search found an example of how to use OpenSSL to produce DES-encrypted code. I find it doubtful that DES will disappear in the new future, because it appears to be the lowest denominator for regulation.
Which points to the fundamental futility of regulating cryptographic code. Source code for AES, Blowfish, Twofish, and DES has been published widely as part of public review processes. Developing a new cipher is tough but using an existing cipher is relatively easy. Weak ciphers such as DES can be made stronger by using multiple rounds of encryption. The materials required for producing a cryptographic program are free.
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How do you make a judgement then? How well does it do what it's supposed to do? How well does it do what you need it to do? Well, how much does that matter when _you may not be allowed to use it at all tomorrow_? What value does it have for you then?
Software freedom isnt necessarily the deciding factor if your choice matters the next five minutes. But when you make a choice that must be valid over a decade youd better have a crystal ball to see how whoever decides the license is going to act for the next ten years.
One of the things that really frustrates me is that free software advocates frequently phrase the issues in terms of black and white, all or nothing. Your post ignores the fact that once I buy a piece of software under a certain set of terms, the seller is also bound by the contract. They can't change the terms arbitrarily (although Microsoft gets around this by changing the terms attached to security updates.)
Sometimes, the choice between free and proprietary software is less important than whether the software does what it needs to do. My ability to work depends on speech recognition software for which no viable open source solution exists. (From what I can tell my choices are between the entirely closed NaturallySpeaking, and the partially closed ViaVoice.) I don't particularly like the fact that the software I need to work is only available on a proprietary basis and no free software solutions are ready for prime time, or that this functionality only works on proprietary operating systems. However given a choice between using a proprietary software package on a proprietary operating system, and not doing anything while my crystal ball is fuzzy as to whether free software solutions are available in the near future, I feel that it is better to use what works then to do nothing waiting for something that does work.
One of my big complaints about the free software movement is that freedom is only phrased as the freedom for an elite few to modify the code. Very rarely are other critical needs addressed. This is an ethical blind spot that is a serious problem.
Granted, putting the characters into public domain opens up the door to campy unauthorized portrayals of those characters. On the other hand, one could argue that in the end this is a good thing because the character becomes something of an idiom. For example, Shakespeare in the public domain permits a wide variety of artistic interpretations from the serious (Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet), to the farcical (Strange Brew), to retelling the story through the eyes of different characters (Rosencrans and Guildenstern are dead) and the merely derivative (The Lion King).
Granted in some cases the interpretation or adaptation bears only a superficial relationship to the source material (The Count of Monte Cristo) but this is balanced by the fact that you can shop around for better adaptations. Generally the original source material survives quite well while the embarrassing adaptations tend to be forgotten (Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein for example). I actually think that humorous adaptations can only improve appreciation for the original source material. I do not know of anybody who seriously complains about "What's Opera Doc" and the "Rabbit of Sevile."
But to support another poster, Batman the television series wasn't nearly as campy as Batman in movie serial form. The Adam West Batman just followed in the same tradition as the earlier movie versions and closely followed the comics code version of Batman. Stan Lee primarily made his mark by introducing more realism into the comics industry. In fact, I remember switching from reading primarily DC comics to marvel comics as a preteen feeling that I had "grown-up" enough to shift from the strictly G-rated DC comics to the PG-13 marvel comics. I remember when Dark Knight Returns was revolutionary for its depiction of Batman with the same levels of tragedy and horror that had previously been reserved for horror titles such as Swamp Thing and Hellblazer. However that is off-topic. I think that the bottom line is that if Batman were in public domain, then we probably would've seen more darker interpretations throughout the publication history of the character.
There are some serious limitations to SpamAssassin as an approach for limiting spam.
.740 seconds. (On a solaris machine I have no control over.) Just sampling a few in my inbox spamassassin consistantly requires about 5x the time of my rather poorly written python script and I can probiably optimize even further. (I suspect that for large messages I do not need to scan the entire message) I suspect this will get worse as more rules are added to spamassassin.
1: The addition of new recognized spam phrases must be done manually. I can't just pipe the spam into the program with the option "this is spam." The fact that I can teach Bayesian programs by piping spam into them is a major advantage over rule-based programs.
2: The definition of what is spam and what isn't spam is in the hands of someone else. SpamAssassin has what I find to be an unacceptably high false positive rate including some messages that I consider to be important such as calls for proposals, membership renewals for professional organizations. In contrast mail that I get because I purchased someting online before I discovered spam gourmet seems to get through.
3: A Bayesian approach is not just about tagging spam, but about differentiating between spam and non-spam. That is a subtle but important distinction. SpamAssassin looks for features thare are typical of spam. However it has no idea what my legitimate email looks like.
Information that is specific to me becomes an automatic whitelist. Lets say for example that I get an email from a new employee in my workplace. The name, telephone exchange and address of my workplace mapks that message as being a high probability of not being spam. Bayesian filters are better at detecting personal messages than spam resulting in a low false positive rate and a higher false negative rate.
4: Perhaps another reason is that I'm not convinced that rule-based programs scale well. For an examle with a non-trivial message. spamassassin takes 4.24 seconds to process an 8k message while my program (written (rather badly) in python) delivers a verdict in
The problem here is that the photographer is trying to charge for the wrong part of the work. The photographer is trying to charge high prices for the easy part of the work - making copies - and keep prices low for the hard part of the work - setting up a good pose with good lighting and a good background - because the technology used to allow this pricing model.
I think this is a major misconception in this discussion. Perhaps we're all spoiled by one-hour photo places but the production of a good quality print from a negative requires quite a bit more time than just feeding the negative through a machine. Quality print making is a craft and at the higher levels an art in and of itself. Setting up the shots is the easy part, creating prints that don't look like they came out a photo booth requires about twice as much time as is usually spent in the studio. This is usually why the second step in professional photography involves showing the customer a low quality proof sheet and you pay for the prints. One of the reasons why I never really pursued photography was because I spent hours watching my grandfather obsess over every little quirk in the lighting, texture, tone, and color of every print he produced. Too much picky little detail for my blood. (Besides which, my abilities as a visual designer extend just far enough to appreciate good from bad.)
I paid for your expertise at arranging the shots, not your abiltiy to make copies of pictures.
In which case, then certainly I respect your right to hire a photographer to only come in and set up the shots, and hand over the negatives at the end of the day. If I was that photographer I would make certain that you signed away the right to gripe about the quality of any prints that you make from the negative. Complaining that the photographer charges the most money for the part of the process the requires the most work, and perhaps contributes the most to the quality of the final product seems a bit absurd to me.
On the other hand, I suspect the most good professional photographers if given such a request would say that you don't need a professional photographer, you just need your brother Joe and a caseload of film.
I think that this is one of those arguments that is really trivial outside of server contexts. Most users don't care about uptime as long as rebooting a computer is a trivial task that provides an easy excuse to make a trip to the coffee pot or watercooler. My experience with Linux was that while as an operating system it was very difficult to crash, there were certain programs (Netscape 4) that could bring it screeching to a halt to the point where a hardware reboot was the easiest way to fix the problem.
Early in running Windows XP and Windows 2000, I had some problems due to a bug in the bios, however since then the only unintentional downtime in one year has been due to power failures. As a result, I think that most of the FUD regarding the instability of Windows compared to other operating systems no longer applies to the current offerings from Microsoft. For the average user, one crash a month or even one crash a week is a relatively trivial nuisance (and I am probably overestimating the crash ability of Windows XP here.)
I suspect that part of the difference is that the BSD license reflects more of a research focus where the primary criteria for winning is recognition. Some innovations are best released into the public domain because the public is best served by the maximum number of implementations, commercial and open. The openess of stories from the brothers grim permits hundreds of interpretations.
In this scenario Microsoft is no worse a freeloader than any other entity that uses the software.
But this is one inconsistancy w/ gpl advocate logic. Copyright should not be used to create artificial scarcity for ideas because they are nonrivalous resources but public domain should be discouraged because ideas are rivalous resources.
Probably should thow in the cluster of urban fantasy writers such as Charles DeLint, Will Shetterly, Emma Bull and Jan Siegel.
It Gaiman in many ways seems to be pulling into novel format a theology that seems to be at the core of a lot of British fantasy including many of the DC vertigo line which is that god exists, he is a major wanker, but fortunately he is not the only game in town. Probably the best books in this genre is the His Dark Materials trilogy.
And of course Ursula le Guin is still out there publishing the good stuff. One of the problems with fantasy is that for every author like le Guin who asks a different question every novel you have at least five hacks like Lackey and Salvatore.
I downloaded a set of three ISO CD images for Mandrake 9.0 Beta 2 over my 33.6 dialup connection. The connection had to be redialed periodically, but each time wget just kept right on going where it left off... no problem.
Arrrg! No offense, but this is one of the biggest problems that I see the open source community has in regards to dealing with user problems, the tendency to respond to user problems by saying "Oh that's not a problem, I just use this very obscure feature of this very obscure program to deal with the problem." Downloading large files over multiple dial-up connections is not a big deal for us power users willing to tie up the telephone for an extended period of time to try out a new piece of software. The 99 percent of the computer using public will say "That is too much work, it is not worth my time."
There are also outfits that will burn stuff like OO to a CD-R and send it to you for a price that is much more reasonable than MS licensing fees. If you want to talk about _features_ Word has that OO lacks, okay, but don't try to make the fact that OO can be downloaded a strike against it.
It's not the fact that it can be downloaded that's the problem. It's the fact that the only distribution channels require going out of your way to get the software that becomes a problem. 99 percent of the computer using public will say "Why should I bother searching the Web for this product, when Microsoft-something came preinstalled on my computer?" Linux is probably in a better position because you can get a distribution shrink-wrapped at most department stores. But even so, you're dealing with the fact that most of the computer users will fight to having to try anything new. They have spent hours learning how to get things done using their favorite software package. Convincing them to switch will require reducing the barriers to adoption and long download times and obscure distribution channels are significant barriers.
One of the issues is that for many applications open source software has been (and in some cases, still is) so far behind the innovation curve that it is more worthwhile to adopt a proprietary solution. $579 for an item that will be used for two years is really small potatoes compared to other business expenses, and I don't know many people who actually pay full retail price for Microsoft Office. Most people I know get Microsoft Office either cheap as part of a computer bundle, through the educational discount, or through bulk pricing. It has only been recently that OpenOffice and other applications have offered the same feature sets with a similar interface. For me personally, there are a few key applications which are both not available and not even on the horizon for the Linux desktop that justify my plopping down several hundred dollars for them.
Another factor is that in many cases while the free solution offers superior functionality, (I am personally a latex user myself) but at the expense of a steeper learning curve and accessibility. Once Microsoft decided that they were going into a GUI environment, they devoted a huge amount of resources to the problem coming out with an extremely slick product compared to the Linux desktop that still frequently looks and feels like the product of a hobbyist. The more powerful open source programs such as emacs, vim and latex (programs that I use on Windows) require memorizing complex and arcane keystroke sequences. Even the open source GUI applications that I have worked with are frequently quirky in their interface design.
Finally, for many people the last mile problem is a major issue in terms of software adoption. OpenOffice may be free, but downloading OpenOffice over a modem connections is still a serious task. There is great software out there, but installing it is still a pain in the rear unless you can find a CD copy. Most people are just going to use whatever comes on the computer, or whatever they can pick up in blister pack at Wal-Mart.
In many cases, I find that the exclusive focus on access to source code and the licensing issues is really missing some of the big problems with the adoption of open source software and the issues of freedom and access in general. Access to source code in licensing issues are important. But accessibility, usability, and the availability of applications designed to do what we need to do are perhaps even more important but considerably less talked about. There is no point in giving me the freedom to modify source code that I don't understand, for a program that doesn't meet my needs, that requires a completely new interface language, and I can't use anyway because it does not interface with software for my disability. The bottom line is that 99 percent of the population doesn't care about access to source code, and perhaps a majority does not care about licenses. Until the open source movement starts treating accessibility, usability, and functionality as "freedoms" to be just as zealously promoted as access to source code, it's not going to be a much interest beyond a political clique.
I'm wondering if this law is really about having police in theaters able to arrest or ticket people with cell phones. I suspect a large part of it has to do with the fact that we live in a lawsuit happy culture, in which theaters are reluctant to enforce their rights to boot the noxious patrons because of the threat of a lawsuit.
I am simply amazed that so many people think this is trying to force OSS or Free Software on 'everybody.' Nothing could be farther from the truth ... it is merely an attempt to force opennenss on government, to protect citizen's access to information irrespective of what operating system or user software they use, be it Free Software, Apple, or, God forbid, Microsoft.
I guess one of the problems with this is that openness as defined exclusively in terms of source code (which is only open if one is an experienced computer programmer, and sometimes not even then). For example, what about one of the most glaring flaws in open source software, disability access? Doesn't openness demanded that government employees be able to access information regardless of physical ability? What if that access to electronic data requires the use a proprietary software? For me this is not a rhetorical question, but a fact of my day-to-day life that there exists no open source software that permits me to work without pain.
In addition, I am not convinced that all cases of government procurement of software should be treated the same way. Is it really a fundamental violation of democracy when a teacher uses a grant to purchase a dozen copies of sim city? In most cases, it is a struggle to just get the software into the classroom and used in appropriate ways.
I think that open source software should be pushed for cases in which it both exists, and meets the basic application requirements. However there are application areas where open source software either doesn't exist, or is so inferior that it fails to meet the basic application requirements needed. This is one reason why I am personally opposed to all or nothing mandates.
I guess my position is that it is rather foolish to treats all cases of software procurement identically. There are cases in which transparency is critically important. However there also cases in which transparency is less important than availability and ease-of-use. For example transparency is very important if you are creating a database system to link all of the Social Security offices in the United States. I am not convinced the transparency is all that important when you give an elementary teacher a $500 grant at the beginning of the semester to buy instructional software. Or if as part of a program to help disabled users, a government office distributes copies of Dragon NaturallySpeaking or ViaVoice (both of which have closed-source cores).
The people have the right to know exactly what source code the government is using to protect them. We have the right to know what code protects our privacy in, for example, records which are ruled sealed.
While I agree with this for cases where transparency is important, I am less convinced that this is true for all applications. For example, I know quite a few teachers who use proprietary software for teaching specific topics from doing data analysis on Palm and Texas Instrument systems, to geometer's sketchpad. This is not a case where the software is being used to store confidential information. Granted it would be nice if open source alternatives to these packages became available, I am a little bit reluctant to support an initiative that would cut off funding for supporting these tools without an alternative available.
An additional benefit is cost-effectiveness. Our tax dollars pay for this stuff, and in almost all cases, OSS / FS is a cheaper solution, both in terms of initial price and total cost of ownership.
This is something that really needs to be evaluated carefully. At least I have found that for many of the tasks that I need to do using a computer the open source software either doesn't exist, or is so far behind the other alternatives that deploying would involve more money. For example, gnu/Linux and a variety of GUI frameworks for Linux lack a mature accessibility framework. The only mature speech recognition engine for Linux is not open source at this time. The Sphinx product is not yet usable. ADA compliance is one area in which I feel that mandating a complete open source shop would run into problems.
I don't object to pushing the government towards open source operating systems and office suites. However I do think that there are some areas where transparency is less important than getting the job done. As someone who supports teachers in instructional environments, I really don't want my hands tied if I run into a situation where the only solution to my problem is a proprietary software package.
Now, regarding government development of software. In all cases, government-funded projects should produce something which is freely available to the public. That means public domain, GPL, or Open Source Licenses. These licenses (or lack thereof) make the results of government-funded projects available to the public. In regards to the GPL, it requires that you GPL any modifications. But this is a good thing. It is good that the government promote recipricol relationship communities, as the GPL does. This is in the public interest. It is in the public's interest that any software produced or funded or supported by the US Government become public domain, GPL, or covered under any of the OSI certified licenses. It is not in the public's interest that such fall under a proprietary license: that means that citizens pay TWICE for a product. Once to support its development, then again to buy it.
Isn't this not one of the big myths about the GPL? The GPL does not prevent a vendor from charging for GPL software. Therefore, it does not prevent citizens from having to pay twice. You would still see independent vendors like Red Hat charging money to redistribute the software with their own value-added components. In fact I would argue that the ability to create commercial products from public domain information is a good thing. For example, maps are built from a variety of information sources including public domain information from the USGS. The openness of the source material for these maps create an environment where mapmakers can compete by adding features not found in the original source material such such as paper quality, laminated maps, digitized maps, maps that highlight tourist features. The legislative record is public domain, the newspapers can compete by providing expansion and analysis.
But applying the GPL or any other OSI certified license to government produced software would be a very bad thing for the public interest. These licenses only work because the original creator has a right (defined by copyright law) to enforce the license. These is not a right that should be extended to the government because of its potential to be used as a form of prior restraint. I am willing to accept the argument that the government can restrict the publication of government information for national security purposes. I am unwilling to accept that the government can place other restrictions on the use of its information.
Maybe they could say "Please don't judge our product on the license agreement! Our license is designed to maximize our stranglehold on you... and if you disallow our software due to it's license, well, we won't be able to take advantage of you".
Actually, while I don't have a problem with the government mandating a strong preference for open source software. I'm a little bit concerned about the government mandating open source software. There are some areas where open source software is seriously lacking. Linux currently does not have a coherent, widely adopted assessability framework. Personally, I find myself stuck with closed source software because the tools that I need in order to work are only available through closed source products under Microsoft Windows. As a result, I think there are some areas where closed source software should be considered on a case-by-case basis such as American Disabilities Act compliance, while encouraging those vendors to open up their source code.
Perhaps instead they could say "We'd like to package up taxpayer-funded research and sell it back to the tax payers! All for profit! Please don't take that away from us - because we'd hate to have to pay for more research."
One of the natures of the commons that makes the commons so valuable is the fact that everyone can benefit from using the commons. For example, the fact that the roadways are constructed as a commons does not prevent services such as Federal Express, taxi cabs, and limo rentals from making money providing transportation using roadways. U.S. geological service maps are excellent resources for both recreational hikers, environmentalists, and property developers. GPS as a commons permits not only high school kids to perform research projects, but also technology vendors to bundle GPS into a large variety of hardware devices. Census data is used by both advertisers and students.
However I'm not exactly certain what this lobbying group wants to see changed. The U.S. government is not in a position to release data under anything else other than the public domain, and changing copyright law in order to provide copyrights to government agencies would probably be a very bad idea. The GPL is still a copyright based license. It depends on the original creator having the rights to enforce how the information is used. Giving these rights to the government would be a form of prior restraint, something that is only permitted for national security reasons.
Certainly this means that government records can be resold to me. For example, the court record is public domain information. The local newspaper publishes key abstracts from the court record and sells me a newspaper. Granted I could go to the courthouse every morning and look at the transcripts myself. However I am more than willing to pay a publisher money for someone else to do the work of creating the abstracts.
Even so, by this time the guy should know what the perfect gift is. (For me, it was a spontaneous thing w/ no ring on a roller coaster. It's a family tradition.(The absence of a ring, not the roller coaster.)) He should know if she will appreciate it because it came from him and reflects a lot of thought or if nothing but the diamond will do. If you know what her values are, then the rest should be obvious.
We did simple silver bands but we allready had reputations for eccentricity.
Honestly this is a good litmus for idetifying who is worth having at your wedding and who is better off being left wondering where their invitation is. Those that respect your relationship will be more concerned with helping you through the hell that is wedding planning. The rest can politely be told where to stick it.
I guess that I don't see the existence of multiple office suites to be a serious problem as long as there is enough differences between them to distinguish them. Perhaps one of the problems is that the office suite monoculture produced by Microsoft Office has promoted a single narrow way of doing things. One of my complaints with StarOffice is that it acts a little bit too much like Microsoft office for my taste. (Another problem that I personally have with OpenOffice is that somehow in producing a cross platform office software, they manage to sacrifice compatibility with Microsoft Windows native accessibility APIs.) Personally I gave up on Microsoft Word not because it is proprietary software, but because I find Microsoft Word to be very poor at creating documents the way I want to create them.
Honestly, I see more choices as an advantage rather than a problem. I think the major challenge is to avoid falling into the trap of simply imitating Microsoft Office. I come to the opposite conclusion, rather than putting all of our eggs into one basket imitating Microsoft Office, open source software could perhaps better make its mark by rethinking data analysis and document preparation from the ground up, and focusing software for these tasks to different markets. The basic office suite is a "one size fits most" model. Too often I think that the open source community is too heavily invested into the "beat Microsoft" mentality, rather than focusing on meeting the needs of a population of computer users who are not served well by proprietary software. The playing field is more than big enough to support niche products.
Perhaps not eternal, but certainly very long-lived. For example, one of the first things that I did when I started to learn LaTeX was to check out a much dog-eared copy of the original manual published in 1985. In contrast, just about all of the data from my master's degree disappeared when the hard drive it was on crashed after three years of operation. Compact discs suffer their own wear and tear. It's not that unusual for me to check out an 80-year-old volume for philosophy project. I suspect one of the reasons why this college can get away with it is because of its status as a community college and not a research institution that depends on access to primary sources published before the 1970s. Converting that volume of material to digital format is a nontrivial task.
I think the better approach to looking at usability is not to focus on different types of media through which we can communicate with the computer, but to focus on levels of abstraction and simplification. For the moment, many tasks that we use computers for involved some pretty low level formatting. Half of the work of setting up a spreadsheet involves fiddling around with cell formatting, and a large chunk of my writing time is spent tweaking the output format or entering data into bibliographic databases so that the computer can format them. Going down to the nitty-gritty details at the lower level of abstraction should rarely be necessary.
I actually think that the command line is a good idea, but currently command lines are too low level, require understanding too much jargon, and commands typically do only single atomic actions. An ideal command would be along the lines of "Find all articles about discourse analysis and Usenet in peer reviewed journals in the last five years."
A problem here is that you're mixing patent issues with copyright issues. This is also drafting a bit far afield from the basic problem that government works are automatically placed into the public domain. They are also not patented either. At least from what I can tell this excludes government modification of GPL licensed software because not only does the GPL prevent placing more restrictions on software, it also prevents removing restrictions.
But if the IP is covered by patent, then it really cannot be considered public domain. Furthermore, md5 does not appear to be in the public domain to begin with. It is copyright 1991 RSA data security and released under a liberal license. (Which raises some interesting questions about the patent case. Since RSA owns the code, and Pumatech claims a patent on the use of the code, does the patent interfere with a copyright holder's rights?) You seem to be suffering from the confusion that public domain equals widely published.
In fact there is a serious problem with redefining copyright to permit the government to apply the GPL to their works. The GPL depends on the creator of the software holding the copyright to the software. I suspect that the GPL also depends on the continued goodwill that the programmer will not decide at some point in the future to pack of all the marbles, go home, and stop publishing a given software package under the GPL in order to collect royalties. This is one advantage that public domain has over copyleft and even liberal licenses. Once something is in the public domain it can never be withdrawn from the public domain. There is minimal risk that the terms under which the work is distributed will change in the future.
I'm not comfortable with the idea of granting the government the ability to "own" critical information such as census data, geographic maps, and the congressional record. The arbitrary nature of national security restrictions on governmental data is tricky enough. I personally don't want to live in a nation in which newspapers could be forced to pay a royalty on court records if Congress felt that it was a good way to raise revenue. Granted the public domain nature of this data means that the local newspaper can charge fifty cents plus exposure to advertising for printing the court record. On the other hand, it also gives me the right to choose one to the courthouse and demand it for myself.
Certainly the GPL is a good tool for individuals and projects. However it depends on individual property rights that were granted to citizens and denied to the government for some pretty strong reasons.
On another note, I wonder why my tax dollars go to pay for software which, because it is in the public domain, can be reused in a commercial application and cause me to have to pay for it again.
The GPL serves the very useful public function of ensuring that publically available IP cannot be co-opted by an entity and monopolized.
Actually, that is one of the benefits of a commons. For example highways as a commons can accomodate commercial and non-comercial traffic. Excluding commercial traffic seriously undermines the quality of the commons. In fact, the success of http and html is largely due to its entry into the public enabling commercial and non-commercial use.
I find a frustrating inconsistancy in the claim that ip should not apply to electronic works because they are not resources that can be diminished but public doman is not sufficient from preventing a work from being monopolized. If it is in the public domain, then it can't be monopolized, because everyone has the right to make a copy.
For example, there about a dozen editions of Moby Dick out there. And of course the GPL like the public domain availability of Moby Dick does not prohibit anyone from charging you for a copy. However it does open the door for non-commercial distribution.
No, you're not. Nowhere in the GPL does it says you have to release your experiments to the public. Please reread the GPL. Only when you distribute you're changes to the software, do you have to rerelease the changes to GPL. Also, GPL doesn't allow you to put your derivative works in the public domain. There are no problems putting derivative works (works linked against libraries in Windows) in the public domain.
This is actually something that bothers me because government works must be released into the public domain. It would appear that the GPL blocks release of government modified software.
>>The was a daemonnews thread a while back about Bill Gates saying how governments should use BSD-style lisences for the absolue maximum effectevness on stuff they develope. It just allows more embracing and extending to happen.
I was always under the impression that at least with the U.S. government works automatically fell into the public domain. (Which I see as a possible conflict with the GPL since it does not permit the relase of works under public domain.)
I'm not convinced that that even small-time criminals will be forced to downgrade. I can pick up source code for twofish at the local library or on the web and just about any library capable of DES can produce 3DES. As such the cost of developing a strong encryption program is trivial. A quick google search found an example of how to use OpenSSL to produce DES-encrypted code. I find it doubtful that DES will disappear in the new future, because it appears to be the lowest denominator for regulation.
Which points to the fundamental futility of regulating cryptographic code. Source code for AES, Blowfish, Twofish, and DES has been published widely as part of public review processes. Developing a new cipher is tough but using an existing cipher is relatively easy. Weak ciphers such as DES can be made stronger by using multiple rounds of encryption. The materials required for producing a cryptographic program are free.