Anonymous Coward says: The dictionary doesn't make any distinction between the victim having possession of anything.
Before you claim "the dictionary doesn't", try reading dictionary.com, at least.
As for the legal defintion, it's similar.
The legal definition you just linked to says "Stealing is the same as larceny". And that dictionary defines larceny as "The wrongful and fraudulent taking and carrying away, by one person, of the mere personal goods, of another, from any place"
Please point to any authoritative source that defines stealing that involve the victim no longer in possession of some good.
With pleasure:
\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
Legally, this isn't any different than bashing in a window at Valve Central, sneaking in, and stealing a disk with the code on it.
Oh, yes there is a difference. Legally it's the same as climbing into a window and taking pictures of the place.
But a crime is only theft if something of value is removed. The crook must take it with him. If the object was left behind in the victim's possession, then it wasn't stolen and there is no theft.
If they had downloaded the code and then (somehow) deleted the originals, that might be theft.
(If a photographer sneaks into your house and takes naked pictures of you, is that "theft"? Of course not... it's some other crime)
As an open source supporter, I can see some pirates trying to make themselves martyrs by saying they were pushing open source
Um, OK, "piracy" (meaning the unauthorized copying of computer software) has nothing to do with Open Source.
Open Source and "Software Pirates" are enemies! They're competitors for the same user-demographic: people who want computer software for free. The free availability of "pirated" Windows and Windows applications is one of the major forces holding back the success of Linux and other Free Software.
Why learn The Gimp when you can grab PhotoShop warez?
Are these guys going to be made poster children for punishing pirates?
Seems likely. Although their offense is much greater than what normal "software pirates" do (because they weren't just copying a published work, but infiltrating computer systems to access an unpublished product), the BSA will probably run some ads warning that any "pirates" may face the same harsh punishment.
No, there isn't really. In both the HL2 case and P2P music-trading networks, the word "steal" is incorrect. You can be sure that whatever charges spring from these recent arrests, "stealing" and "theft" won't be amoung them.
By definition, if something has been stolen, the victim no longer has it. It's technically possible to steal source code, but only if the original owner is then unable to use it (either because all copies are gone, OR because a criminal has fraudlently transfered copyright to himself)
Some people will claim that the HL2 "code theft" is different because it involved intrusion into the company's computer systems. That does mean there was another, more serious crime involve, but is irrelevant to the correctness of the word "steal".
Despite your personal bias the majority of computer users do not
It's not bias, it's conventional wisdom. That doesn't mean the idea is correct, but does mean it's popular.
nor will they ever, install windows or any other opperating system on their computer.
Well no, I guess they don't. Most people can't handle that, so they pull in a friendly nerd to do the job.
Using your experience as a basis for that of the computer using masses is naive.
I have no personal experience with Windows. I was just parroting what "everyone" says about it. Even pro-Windows people have said "to get best performance, just reinstall occasionally". Including the Windows magazine cover stories that explain how to "revitalize your system performance with 10 top cleaning tips"
Because most of those people where Communists and Socialists
Interestingly, one of the reasons that the 1930s anti-Jewish program was so popular is that previously, the only German political faction which assigned equal treatment to Jews was the Communist party. (Whose strong eglatarianism prohibited racial discrimination, and whose atheism obseleted religion discrimination)
So because the Communist USSR was threatening Germany from the east, the Communists' support for Jews actually made their treatment worse.
anti-Semetic in the proper sense of the work (being against Jews, Arabs, Ethiopians, etc)
How are Ethiopians Semites?
Anyway, in Germany the more appropriate word is "JewHate" (Judenhas). "anti-Semitism" was coined later as a euphemism. And although Britain probably exhibited JewHate to an extent, there are important distinctions. They looked at is as a "cultural" factor- once a Jew converted to Christianity, he was entirely redeemed (and could even go on to lead the government). Germany in the 1900s on came to be dominated by a "racial" judenhas, which was the belief that Jews were intrinsticlly, physically evil, and not merely followers of discredited old religions. (The rise of biological science, including Darwinism, contributed to the dominance of this idea)
Just to be clear, the medieval peculiarity you are referring to was the prohibition against Jews owning land.
No. The relatively short-lived landowning prohibition was a fairly minor factor in how the Jews became major financiers.
A few of the more important contributions: 1. Moneylending was a sin (usury) for Christians, but not Jews. 2. Jews were forbidden to work on Saturday, and working on Sunday would've invited Christian retaliation, so they could do less work overall in normally laborious fields.
But more important than any of those: 3. Jews were religiously required to be literate. They HAD to read the Torah. (Whereas Christian churches at various times discouraged non-clergy from reading the Bible). Jews often had a literacy rate 100 times higher than the surrounding Christian population. You can't be a banker, bookkeeper, or industrialist without the ability to handle paperwork.
No, from talking to Germans who lived at that time. They were told the concentration camps where like summer camps and they wanted to believed that.
I could just as well claim that YOU want to believe that the Germans YOU talked to are innocent. Sure, NOW they want to pretend they didn't approve, because it would get them in trouble NOW.
But simply because most people at the time "did not want" to believe that their government was doing something so horrendous.
Wrong. There were more than 500,000 Germans directly involved in the killing, and previously there were no shortages of volunteers for nationwide anti-Jewish pogroms or other major violence.
the people dont want to believe they are being manipulated,
Exactly. You don't want to believe you've been manipulated.
Al Gore has as much claim to "initiative in creating the Internet" as Ronald Reagan has in "winning the Cold War".
Both were things he pushed along as a politician, although they were inevitable forces of history that no one man could cause or prevent.
To review, Gore did not popularise the concept
Yes he did. The concept in question is "The Internet" as a baseline utility available to EVERYONE. With his "Information Superhighway" proposal, Gore was the first politician to say that all Americans should have network access.
If the US Congress hadn't pushed to bring a network based on government standards to the people, we might all today be stuck paying Compuserve, Prodigy, GE, or AOL for a specific site hosting in a different proprietary format for each Balkanized section of home network users. That would not be "The Internet".
(even Microsoft didn't see the Internet coming, most of the senior old men of Congress are only even very vaguely aware of what it is)
Gore knew more than most, and certainly more than Microsoft or Congress. He was beating the "Information Superhighway" drum back in 1988.
Also note that "took the initiative in creating" is a way of explicitly stating that "I didn't create, but suggested to others that they should create". GW Bush, for example, didn't overthrow Saddam Hussein, he just took the initiative and then got other people to do the work.
If you're fighting, and not in uniform, you're a spy, and can be shot out of hand.
That's a popular myth. Go read the actual Geneva Convention sometime, and you could learn something.
Art. 4. A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:[ (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
You are a POW if you meet either (1) or (2). You only need a uniform if you are not one of the major parties of the conflict!
If you are local residents resisting invaders (check), or one side of the war just doesn't use uniforms (check again), then that "spy" thing just doesn't apply.
Note, however, that the various US-hired "security consultants" fighting in Iraq ARE unlawful combatants... because they work FOR a military, but aren't PART of it, and aren't in uniform.
AC says: A rationally greedy company would not reveal its most prized intellectual property to the world at large.
Nope. That's an oversimplification, just like claiming a "rationally greedy" company would never give away product for free- but sometimes, they actually do!
In the case of "prized intellectual property", the company might reveal it if the profit-potential of the IP was being undermined by a GPL competitor (like what Linux is doing to Solaris). If you can't beat em, join em.
The Java situation is more complicated, but there are still many possible explanations for how Opening the code may increase Sun's revenue. Sun doesn't get much money from directly selling Java, only by related support / software. Thus if Java became more popular by going Open Source, Sun's total revenue could rise, even if they have less control of Java itself.
The worst PITA with Linux was at first, that most HOWTOs assume, that you want to compile everything by yourself, when your distro already includes the required packages -
Well yes, the intended audience for TDLP HOWTOs is experts of a caliber to roll their own distros.
The HOWTOs, simply, tell you how things are done- they do not catalog the fact that someone else may have already done it for you. It would be reasonable to prefix each HOWTO with a boilerplate: "Check if $YOUR_DISTRO manual describes this feature before reading any more here"
Really, to be generic "Linux" guides, they can't get into SUSE/Linspire/Debian/Redhat specifics.
The statician Hermann Chernoff was first to developed the idea of using faces
Which has NOTHING to do with this AT ALL...
Using one kind of traffic (urban pedestrian) to represent another kind of traffic (HTTP) makes simple sense, and is in no way Chernoff-derived.
Actually, if someone just wants a simple metaphor, faces probably are the best choice,
Absolutely not. Faces are entirely inappropriate for traffic level or any variable with a large (or unknown) upper bound. Chernoff faces are most applicable to display a related bundle of indirectly related quantities that are constrained to a well-defined possible range. (Especially if those quantities are derivatives). For example, (inflation, new jobs/month, reserve interest rate) is a good triplet chart with Chernoff faces.
But the size of your bank account or hits to your webpage simply wouldn't make sense.
For example, something like "Add/Remove Programs" in windows
Package management isn't included with a normal copy of Microsoft(tm) Windows(r). Only if you buy the corporate admin pack to you get a package manager.
Another example would be a top-quality media playe
How can I get one of those for Windows(r)? It certainly doesn't include one. I wouldn't mind the somewhat gunky interface (needlessly non-rectangular border) of Microsoft Media Player, if it could actually open most AVI files.
But it can't. There are files mplayer reads fine, but Microsoft's player just says "Failed to download codec".
Wrong, it's a painful problem even for major apps. Just look at the download page for Eclipse, which uses SWT. They need to create a custom release for every OS a user might have. Look at em all: Windows, x86LinuxMotif, x86LinuxGTK, Solaris, QNX, AIX, HPUX, or OSX.
Eclipse is careful to provide packages even for fairly oddball systems... but most developers won't even do that. They're provide the Windows version, and maybe Mac or x86LinuxGTK, and consider anything else a waste of server space. Not much portability.
Or what if I have some other machine with a complete JRE? Can I run a SWT program on x86 Solaris, PPC NetBSD, or StrongArm Linux? No.
All in all, a SWT Java application is only marginally more cross-platform than a C++ program written to a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or WxWidgets. If SWT were a normal component of every JRE, things would be better.
There's no reason SWT couldn't have AWT as a fallback implementation, but until that time...
BSD-like would be an even bigger mistake. It would free both IBM and Microsoft to release modified, incompatible versions of Java, without providing any of their code changes.
A rationally greedy company will prefer using GPL to BSD, to ensure that no other company re-closes the source they just opened. But they'll probably prefer a special APL or MPL style license instead, which gives them (and only them) the power to incorporate derivatives in non-OpenSource products.
this might just be a talltale that the teacher told to entertain the class,
That's a popular urban legend... simple man impresses a modern-art crowd with his crude painting (either random splotches or a solid color). Variations of the concept have been used in TV shows like All In The Family and Commish.
The idea may be taken from the Ern Malley affair...
Ever asked why no one in Germany resisted Hitler? They always thought "it's not gonna be THAT worse, calm down!". They didn't believe the thing about Auschwitz even if they saw it afterwards.
Incorrect. They didn't resist Hitler because they supported him. They did believe about Auschwitz, and enjoyed it, because they hated Jews. (Judenhas was actually a policy that helped Hitler maintain popularity amoung the non-Nazi voters!)
The myth of Hitler coercing the German public is designed to shield the people from their own guilt. They got the leader they wanted, and deserved.
This is one of those cases where following the bottom line is going to get you the wrong result.
Similar to the reason why prisons must never be allowed to use convicts for profitable labor. Allow anyone to earn money from something, and they'll just naturally attempt to optimize earnings.
We should be considering the facts of the case, not the facts about the people debating the case.
But the main "fact" supporting Brown's case is merely his personal opinion that Linux would've been too much work for Linus possibly to have done on his own.
Since his argument is based only on intuition and not fact, the intelligence/education/experience of the parties are acceptable points of consideration.
Pointing out that he's just an English BA and not a Computer Science PhD is a completely valid attack on his authority to judge if a computer program is within a certain person's capacity.
Brown has no ability as a computer programmer- thus how can he claim to measure that skill in others?
Slashdot Mirror
The dictionary doesn't make any distinction between the victim having possession of anything.
Before you claim "the dictionary doesn't", try reading dictionary.com, at least.
As for the legal defintion, it's similar.
The legal definition you just linked to says "Stealing is the same as larceny". And that dictionary defines larceny as "The wrongful and fraudulent taking and carrying away, by one person, of the mere personal goods, of another, from any place"
Please point to any authoritative source that defines stealing that involve the victim no longer in possession of some good.
With pleasure:
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief.
Legally, this isn't any different than bashing in a window at Valve Central, sneaking in, and stealing a disk with the code on it.
Oh, yes there is a difference. Legally it's the same as climbing into a window and taking pictures of the place.
But a crime is only theft if something of value is removed. The crook must take it with him. If the object was left behind in the victim's possession, then it wasn't stolen and there is no theft.
If they had downloaded the code and then (somehow) deleted the originals, that might be theft.
(If a photographer sneaks into your house and takes naked pictures of you, is that "theft"? Of course not... it's some other crime)
deprived of something: total control of their own software so it IS theft
Ok then! So we only need one word to replace every kind of crime!
Tresspassing is now "theft of control of your own real estate borders"
Rape is "theft of use of your own genitalia"
Murder is "theft of your life"
It's all theft!
As an open source supporter, I can see some pirates trying to make themselves martyrs by saying they were pushing open source
Um, OK, "piracy" (meaning the unauthorized copying of computer software) has nothing to do with Open Source.
Open Source and "Software Pirates" are enemies! They're competitors for the same user-demographic: people who want computer software for free. The free availability of "pirated" Windows and Windows applications is one of the major forces holding back the success of Linux and other Free Software.
Why learn The Gimp when you can grab PhotoShop warez?
Are these guys going to be made poster children for punishing pirates?
Seems likely. Although their offense is much greater than what normal "software pirates" do (because they weren't just copying a published work, but infiltrating computer systems to access an unpublished product), the BSA will probably run some ads warning that any "pirates" may face the same harsh punishment.
Is there a difference?
No, there isn't really. In both the HL2 case and P2P music-trading networks, the word "steal" is incorrect. You can be sure that whatever charges spring from these recent arrests, "stealing" and "theft" won't be amoung them.
By definition, if something has been stolen, the victim no longer has it. It's technically possible to steal source code, but only if the original owner is then unable to use it (either because all copies are gone, OR because a criminal has fraudlently transfered copyright to himself)
Some people will claim that the HL2 "code theft" is different because it involved intrusion into the company's computer systems. That does mean there was another, more serious crime involve, but is irrelevant to the correctness of the word "steal".
Despite your personal bias the majority of computer users do not
It's not bias, it's conventional wisdom. That doesn't mean the idea is correct, but does mean it's popular.
nor will they ever, install windows or any other opperating system on their computer.
Well no, I guess they don't. Most people can't handle that, so they pull in a friendly nerd to do the job.
Using your experience as a basis for that of the computer using masses is naive.
I have no personal experience with Windows. I was just parroting what "everyone" says about it. Even pro-Windows people have said "to get best performance, just reinstall occasionally". Including the Windows magazine cover stories that explain how to "revitalize your system performance with 10 top cleaning tips"
Because most of those people where Communists and Socialists
Interestingly, one of the reasons that the 1930s anti-Jewish program was so popular is that previously, the only German political faction which assigned equal treatment to Jews was the Communist party. (Whose strong eglatarianism prohibited racial discrimination, and whose atheism obseleted religion discrimination)
So because the Communist USSR was threatening Germany from the east, the Communists' support for Jews actually made their treatment worse.
anti-Semetic in the proper sense of the work (being against Jews, Arabs, Ethiopians, etc)
How are Ethiopians Semites?
Anyway, in Germany the more appropriate word is "JewHate" (Judenhas). "anti-Semitism" was coined later as a euphemism. And although Britain probably exhibited JewHate to an extent, there are important distinctions. They looked at is as a "cultural" factor- once a Jew converted to Christianity, he was entirely redeemed (and could even go on to lead the government). Germany in the 1900s on came to be dominated by a "racial" judenhas, which was the belief that Jews were intrinsticlly, physically evil, and not merely followers of discredited old religions. (The rise of biological science, including Darwinism, contributed to the dominance of this idea)
Just to be clear, the medieval peculiarity you are referring to was the prohibition against Jews owning land.
No. The relatively short-lived landowning prohibition was a fairly minor factor in how the Jews became major financiers.
A few of the more important contributions:
1. Moneylending was a sin (usury) for Christians, but not Jews.
2. Jews were forbidden to work on Saturday, and working on Sunday would've invited Christian retaliation, so they could do less work overall in normally laborious fields.
But more important than any of those:
3. Jews were religiously required to be literate. They HAD to read the Torah. (Whereas Christian churches at various times discouraged non-clergy from reading the Bible). Jews often had a literacy rate 100 times higher than the surrounding Christian population. You can't be a banker, bookkeeper, or industrialist without the ability to handle paperwork.
No, from talking to Germans who lived at that time. They were told the concentration camps where like summer camps and they wanted to believed that.
I could just as well claim that YOU want to believe that the Germans YOU talked to are innocent. Sure, NOW they want to pretend they didn't approve, because it would get them in trouble NOW.
But simply because most people at the time "did not want" to believe that their government was doing something so horrendous.
Wrong. There were more than 500,000 Germans directly involved in the killing, and previously there were no shortages of volunteers for nationwide anti-Jewish pogroms or other major violence.
the people dont want to believe they are being manipulated,
Exactly. You don't want to believe you've been manipulated.
Al Gore has as much claim to "initiative in creating the Internet" as Ronald Reagan has in "winning the Cold War".
Both were things he pushed along as a politician, although they were inevitable forces of history that no one man could cause or prevent.
To review, Gore did not popularise the concept
Yes he did. The concept in question is "The Internet" as a baseline utility available to EVERYONE. With his "Information Superhighway" proposal, Gore was the first politician to say that all Americans should have network access.
If the US Congress hadn't pushed to bring a network based on government standards to the people, we might all today be stuck paying Compuserve, Prodigy, GE, or AOL for a specific site hosting in a different proprietary format for each Balkanized section of home network users. That would not be "The Internet".
nor did he raise funding the technology,
Oh yes he did
(even Microsoft didn't see the Internet coming, most of the senior old men of Congress are only even very vaguely aware of what it is)
Gore knew more than most, and certainly more than Microsoft or Congress. He was beating the "Information Superhighway" drum back in 1988.
Also note that "took the initiative in creating" is a way of explicitly stating that "I didn't create, but suggested to others that they should create". GW Bush, for example, didn't overthrow Saddam Hussein, he just took the initiative and then got other people to do the work.
That's a popular myth. Go read the actual Geneva Convention sometime, and you could learn something.
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
(2) Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfil the following conditions:[ (a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
You are a POW if you meet either (1) or (2). You only need a uniform if you are not one of the major parties of the conflict!
If you are local residents resisting invaders (check), or one side of the war just doesn't use uniforms (check again), then that "spy" thing just doesn't apply.
Note, however, that the various US-hired "security consultants" fighting in Iraq ARE unlawful combatants... because they work FOR a military, but aren't PART of it, and aren't in uniform.
AC says:
A rationally greedy company would not reveal its most prized intellectual property to the world at large.
Nope. That's an oversimplification, just like claiming a "rationally greedy" company would never give away product for free- but sometimes, they actually do!
In the case of "prized intellectual property", the company might reveal it if the profit-potential of the IP was being undermined by a GPL competitor (like what Linux is doing to Solaris). If you can't beat em, join em.
The Java situation is more complicated, but there are still many possible explanations for how Opening the code may increase Sun's revenue. Sun doesn't get much money from directly selling Java, only by related support / software. Thus if Java became more popular by going Open Source, Sun's total revenue could rise, even if they have less control of Java itself.
You don't see a lot of people going around installing windows all of the time.
Umm, yes you do.
"Remember kids, to keep Microsoft(tm) Windows(r) running smoothly, reboot every day and reinstall 3 times a year!"
because we're talking about why people stay away from Windows
Wrong. Look at the top of the page: "What Keeps You Off of Windows". YOU, in that case, was evidently a developer, so it entirely matters.
The worst PITA with Linux was at first, that most HOWTOs assume, that you want to compile everything by yourself, when your distro already includes the required packages -
Well yes, the intended audience for TDLP HOWTOs is experts of a caliber to roll their own distros.
The HOWTOs, simply, tell you how things are done- they do not catalog the fact that someone else may have already done it for you. It would be reasonable to prefix each HOWTO with a boilerplate: "Check if $YOUR_DISTRO manual describes this feature before reading any more here"
Really, to be generic "Linux" guides, they can't get into SUSE/Linspire/Debian/Redhat specifics.
The statician Hermann Chernoff was first to developed the idea of using faces
Which has NOTHING to do with this AT ALL...
Using one kind of traffic (urban pedestrian) to represent another kind of traffic (HTTP) makes simple sense, and is in no way Chernoff-derived.
Actually, if someone just wants a simple metaphor, faces probably are the best choice,
Absolutely not. Faces are entirely inappropriate for traffic level or any variable with a large (or unknown) upper bound. Chernoff faces are most applicable to display a related bundle of indirectly related quantities that are constrained to a well-defined possible range. (Especially if those quantities are derivatives). For example, (inflation, new jobs/month, reserve interest rate) is a good triplet chart with Chernoff faces.
But the size of your bank account or hits to your webpage simply wouldn't make sense.
For example, something like "Add/Remove Programs" in windows
Package management isn't included with a normal copy of Microsoft(tm) Windows(r). Only if you buy the corporate admin pack to you get a package manager.
Another example would be a top-quality media playe
How can I get one of those for Windows(r)? It certainly doesn't include one. I wouldn't mind the somewhat gunky interface (needlessly non-rectangular border) of Microsoft Media Player, if it could actually open most AVI files.
But it can't. There are files mplayer reads fine, but Microsoft's player just says "Failed to download codec".
SWT is pure Java.
True, but meaningless.
It does not use any native code.
WRONG! SWT uses native code.
For applications this isn't a big deal,
Wrong, it's a painful problem even for major apps. Just look at the download page for Eclipse, which uses SWT. They need to create a custom release for every OS a user might have. Look at em all: Windows, x86LinuxMotif, x86LinuxGTK, Solaris, QNX, AIX, HPUX, or OSX.
Eclipse is careful to provide packages even for fairly oddball systems... but most developers won't even do that. They're provide the Windows version, and maybe Mac or x86LinuxGTK, and consider anything else a waste of server space. Not much portability.
Or what if I have some other machine with a complete JRE? Can I run a SWT program on x86 Solaris, PPC NetBSD, or StrongArm Linux? No.
All in all, a SWT Java application is only marginally more cross-platform than a C++ program written to a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or WxWidgets. If SWT were a normal component of every JRE, things would be better.
There's no reason SWT couldn't have AWT as a fallback implementation, but until that time...
Sigh... would poster and moderator both read the article?
And would YOU read any SCO newspaper article from the past two years?
It's not about Linux, it's about the ancient rights to Unix
SCO claims differently. They say the "ancient rights to Unix" apply to Linux too, and have a little lawsuit going on to prove it...
or under a BSD-style license.
BSD-like would be an even bigger mistake. It would free both IBM and Microsoft to release modified, incompatible versions of Java, without providing any of their code changes.
A rationally greedy company will prefer using GPL to BSD, to ensure that no other company re-closes the source they just opened. But they'll probably prefer a special APL or MPL style license instead, which gives them (and only them) the power to incorporate derivatives in non-OpenSource products.
this might just be a talltale that the teacher told to entertain the class,
That's a popular urban legend... simple man impresses a modern-art crowd with his crude painting (either random splotches or a solid color). Variations of the concept have been used in TV shows like All In The Family and Commish.
The idea may be taken from the Ern Malley affair...
Ever asked why no one in Germany resisted Hitler? They always thought "it's not gonna be THAT worse, calm down!". They didn't believe the thing about Auschwitz even if they saw it afterwards.
Incorrect. They didn't resist Hitler because they supported him. They did believe about Auschwitz, and enjoyed it, because they hated Jews. (Judenhas was actually a policy that helped Hitler maintain popularity amoung the non-Nazi voters!)
The myth of Hitler coercing the German public is designed to shield the people from their own guilt. They got the leader they wanted, and deserved.
The internet existed before Gore
Wrong. The ARPANET existed. It was "an internet".
Don't confuse "internet" with "the Internet". An understandable mistake, but that's an important difference.
This is one of those cases where following the bottom line is going to get you the wrong result.
Similar to the reason why prisons must never be allowed to use convicts for profitable labor. Allow anyone to earn money from something, and they'll just naturally attempt to optimize earnings.
We should be considering the facts of the case, not the facts about the people debating the case.
But the main "fact" supporting Brown's case is merely his personal opinion that Linux would've been too much work for Linus possibly to have done on his own.
Since his argument is based only on intuition and not fact, the intelligence/education/experience of the parties are acceptable points of consideration.
Pointing out that he's just an English BA and not a Computer Science PhD is a completely valid attack on his authority to judge if a computer program is within a certain person's capacity.
Brown has no ability as a computer programmer- thus how can he claim to measure that skill in others?