* Check for warez/serialz -- disable them and alert the vendors. Vendors can subscribe to "MS Auto Alert" program.
* Check for downloaded MP3s (from a database of known MD5s) -- disable them and alert the record distributors. RIAA can subscribe to "MS Locked Tunes" for service.
* Check for P2P programs -- disable them and alert local gov't authorities. Gov'ts can give big grants to MS for this as part of their "Anti-Terror-and-Pro-Business-Computers" bill.
* Check for web/ftp/irc servers -- disable them and alert ISP as to uploading violations. ISPs can join the "MSN One-Stream" network.
* Check for NAT -- diable and notify ISP... part of the push towards "MS-IPv6-PLUS!"
* Check for competitors' products (DRDOS, Java, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc) -- disable them and alert user that their software was incompatable with the latest service pack. This one is free for end-users!
To continue to distribute changes you would require the permission of the copyright holder.
But wouldn't this permission take the form of an agreement very simmilar to the GPL? After all, that's what GNUCash's authors wanted the terms to be...
More likely the court would rule that Novell cannot distribute anything based on Reiser FS and leave it to Novell and Reiser to negotiate any licensing agreement they desire.
Of course, again, Hans Reiser would want the agreement to have the same terms as the GPL...
When I write code and give it to you under the terms of the GPL, I am giving you permission to modify and redistribute my code (with certain restrictions) in ways my copyright wouldn't allow you to do. A court saying that I'm not allowed to do that is sort of like a court saying I'm not allowed to let you use my frying pan -- sure, you have no God-given right to use the pan, it's MINE after all, but it would be difficult for a court to forbid me from giving you that permission.
And more: if a court orders that Novel, for example, can use MY code in ways that I expressly forbid (and I hold the copyright), then it stands that I can use their code, or yours, in ways that you don't want me to (and which your copyright gives you the exclusive rights to).
The GPL simply formalizes the permissions that I give you for my intellectual property that, by default, you wouldn't otherwise have.
* Could a court revolk my GPL-given right to modify GNUCash?
* Could a court grant the right to Novel to sell a modified, binary-only version of Reiser v 4?
How, exactly, could the GPL be ruled against? There may be small, fringe issues, but overall, the GPL rests on the exclusive rights to modify and copy given to IP owners of their works. When a copyrighted work is GPL'ed, the owner gives me extra rights. It is difficult to see how a court could forbid me from allowing you to sell or give away some PHP code that I wrote.
August 11, 2003 AP Wire In a surprise 6-3 decision today, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the GNU Public Lisense is not enforcable and that programmers, users, and sellers do not need copyright holders' permission in order to modify, copy, or redistribute any machine- or human- readable code.
With IP law thus crippled, Free Software advocates expressed shock and confusion about how to proceed. "Now that I can just legally use a copy of NT with a cracked serial," Linux creator Linux Torvalds moaned in Washington, DC, "There doesn't seem much point..."
I have RCN in Manhattan, and I've found the cable internet to be great. I get 250kb/s download and over 100kb/s up. They never publicly fret about IP, etc. It just works.
My wife and I each are forced to have several dozen usernames and passwords for various websites, programs, email accounts, accounts at work's computer systems, etc. It seems that each sys admin/org has a different policy for creating these accounts, so that we are unable to memorize a few possibilities and choose from among those. (sometimes usernames/passwords are assigned, sometimes they insist on having #s, sometimes capital letters, etc.)
My wife has several files and pieces of paper with all of her passwords written down. She has to keep these on 3 or 4 computers, in her wallet, in her hotmail account, etc.
How problematic is this? Can this ever be solved? How?
2600 and others (even you) often say that it is true that you did some things that were wrong, but nothing anywhere near as bad as what you were accused of and nothing warranting the treatmeant you got. But from a self-critical point of view: what was it that you did that was "wrong" and what punishment would have been fair?
Free Software has again helpped a proprietary company. But maybe this will be good for Freedom, ultimately, as more companies realize that they can benefit when "their" software is Free.
The fact that KHTML is Free software let Apple quickly and easily break free from a hold that MS had them in. They tried bundling the OmniWeb browser, but that was clearly inferior to MS IE...
Right now Apple is tripping over themselves to get AppleWorks good enough to replace the need for MS Office. Maybe Open Office will soon help here (Apple has focused on making X11 apps more seemlessly integrated with OSX).
If Apple, Dell, HP, etc, collaborated with Free Software projects more, they could remove the need for users to get certain software from MS. That, in turn, would allow them to chart their own paths in terms of their wares and give them the opportunity to team up with others who are threatened by MS.
Soon, Apple will turn to FreeSoftware for Ogg code.
Apple's costs for distributing their free (beer) value-add-software packages are making them consider (and actually) charge for their "i" crap. (see http://www.thinksecret.com/news/freeiapps.html) FreeNet would go a long way to help them spread out their bandwidth. If only they gave us the right to redistribute their code. And hell, why not let us improve the code too, and give it away for free.
...My impression of the Service Pack's "Set Program Access and Defaults" was that it offered an easy, centralized way for users to make MS products their defaults. Your choices for each item (Browser, email, ect) are something like
Use Internet Explorer or Use Your Current 3rd Party browser
The easy, inviting option is the MS ones. The use of "Your Current 3rd Party Brower" instead of "Mozilla" or "Opera" or whatever is detected, lends an air of complexity. The 3rd Party choices aren't laid out, but the MS choice always is.
But before you can choose your specific programs, you need to first choose whether you want to use "MS Windows" "Non MS" or "Custom"... A single place to change to ALL MS. The "Non MS" button would only work if you have 3rd party programs already installed, right? So if you choose it and things get fucked-up, you'd probably want to revert to "MS." The "Custom" option is the Advanced one, and it includes a check box "Enable Access to this Program " which seems to mean that even though you're disabling IE, you have to take an additional, criptic step to really disable it.
Compared to the process of, say, the "File Types" config, where you choose a program for any file-type, this interface privilages the MS products. But of course, setting a File Type no longer means that a certain program becomes the default...
Give away free MP3s of all your songs on your site, and allow them to be redistributed -- make sure your running Gnutella with your songs too. Allow the audience to record your concerts and distribute them.
Then tour a lot, sell t-shirts, sell CDs of the best stuff that you're giving away for free with value-adds (like good artwork, autographs, lyrics sheets, etc.), solicit donations/payback (be specific & upfront about your costs and needs).
Right, I got "insightful" more for an early MS-bashing post than anything else;)
But the default install of Windows is not clean, it is cluttered with CRUFT dictated by MS and OEM interests, not users needs.
Some of the stuff is just MS trying to make things easy for dummies. But a LOT of stuff is dictated by their politics. Red Hat doesn't install chkconfig because they figure "dummies" will have no need for it. MS cripples XP and tries to make you sign up for this and that and use their apps over competitors.
I Recently got a VAIO laptop with XP, and it was a nightmare getting it to let me rip a CD to good quality MP3s. Many of the 3rd party apps I downloaded complained about Windows missing some thing or other... Why would MS want to make this so difficult? Maybe to make us use MS-only ASF...?
I found it very difficult to turn off MS Messenger -- You can't just exit it and it's not in the startup menu -- you have to start it, go to preferences, flip through all the tabs, and uncheck "start automatically". Why should this program bypass the normal way that apps auto-start on bootup?...maybe because of AOL...?
The sign-on to Passport was done in such a way as to make me think that it was part of the registration process -- and XP warned me that if I didn't register, my computer would stop working.
The article implies that a brand-spanking new PC with Windows is cruft-free, e.g., The "Connect to the Internet" shortcut is still on the desktop, and the "How to use Windows" dialog appears at logon...
But these things are CRUFT! And there's MORE in a "virgin" Windows box:
MS Messenger is running in the tray -- asking you sign up for Passport when you 1st log on
Windows Media Player is crippled so you can't make good MP3s (or on XP even download and use som other MP3 making software)
OEMs install dozens of bullshit programs, many of which launch on boot-up and leave their menus all over the screen
A bunch of crap litters the "Send to" right-click menu
MS Media player acts like some weird-ass app with no menu, no window, etc...
It takes a LONG time to get things cleaned up and usable. You used to be able to just wipe the disk and install Windows from scratch, but more and more OEMs are not allowing thins, only giving you some crappy RESTORE disks...
I think the crux of the article comes with the claim that in order to be serious and get many users, KDE needs to attract commercial developers -- hence a stable, backwards compatable API is needed.
But "commercial" and "proprietary" don't need to be synonymous. Proprietary software companies can't afford to recompile and tweak their source because of potential support and debugging issues that may come up. But Free software, whether it's commericially made or the result of a hobby, CAN afford to have things break a lot -- there is a wide pool of potential tweakers who can fix things, should there be a demand.
This puts proprietary developers at a disadvantage. On Windows, they can write and compile once, and be (somewhat) sure that their program will run on MS's OS for the next 2 or 3 or 5 years. On Linux, if they don't Free their code, they're fucked by Sunday.
But as Linus Torvalds always says, breaking compatability is a FEATURE of Free software: improvements and security cascade, and the system isn't bogged down with millions of compatability work-arounds.
Their xTunes software looks like a feature-for-feature clone of iTunes. I read somewhere that apple asked MediaFour no to name their software "xpod"...
In other words, I can see Apple attacking this company, Tex9, for tradmark infringment, as is their way...
I see that xTunes is GPLed, and that xPod is a pluggin...it doesn't seem to be GPLed currently...Tex9 may end up making it proprietary or something...
This was the first computer conference I've ever attended. Most of it was what I expected it would be -- a bunch of bullshit: the big companies and the little companies were hawking their wares, acting slick and SELLING SELLING SELLING.
There were a ton of proprietary software vendors, wholely clueless that Linux users may prefer Linux because of the Freedom. NuSphere, for example, was showing off their Linux port of the Windows PHP IDE product...acting like Linux was just another platform, like a port to a Mac. (The port was incomplete.) Compaq held an expensive-looking gameshow contest with questions like "Why is Compaq considered a leading expert in Linux?" and where all the answers were "all of the above." Ximian came accross as a slick, funded, bullshit corporation, selling their MS Exchange connector. I fear the future of GNOME in their hands. Best propritary software was the guy from Taiwan, selling a program that grabs all relevent Windows config files and translates them to the correct Linux equivs (Sendmail, Appache, SAMBA, etc.). He said his product was big in China.
The Hardware vendors seemed less bad -- at least they're selling a THING, not IP. Of particular note was the Sharp Linux PDA -- much better than I imagined, more like a little laptop than a PDA.
Best, though, was the small "ORG" section of the convention. The enthusiasm and lack of bullshit was palpable, and it put the salesmen to shame. It made the whole thing seem like two events, one of salesmen, and one of artists. In particular, the Linux Terminal Server guys were cool as shit. (http://www.ltsp.org/) The KDE guys (especially Ian) were also amazing. I was pleased that they all had fresh ideas, but were dedicated to the old-fashioned, core hacker concepts (client/server, language neutrality, extensibility). These guys had a VISION and were advocating, teaching, and arguing for it with great gusto and humor. The sales people, on the other hand, seemed insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb.
I wasn't following politics too much at the time Bork was put forward for the supreme court, but years later I saw him on a William Buckley show where "Free Speech" was debated. (Mark Green, who just lost the NYC mayorality to Bloomberg was on this show too.) Bork argued what seemed to me to be an anti-free speech position (arguing the original intent of the Bill of Rights). He thought it obvious that a lot of sexually-related expression had no place in a civilized society. The example he kept giving of expression going too far was (I kid you not) "Michael Jackson gyrating his hips..."
Off topic? Maybe. But for me this clinched my impression of Bork as someone I not only disagreed with, but who seemed damned-right retarded.
Re:They're wrong
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Taliban forces used mines extensively. Al Qaida used remote-controlled vans to blow up US embassies.
Human players were there, just not US
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The US strategy relied on the Northern Alliance (and later, other local Afghans). It became clear early on that air power alone could not do enough.
And the same thing happened in Kosovo. It wasn't until local Albanian rebels forced Serbian troops out that NATO air power won the war.
Large scale nulclear wars, though, would in a way be the most "humanless" wars. The US and USSR both planned for a war whose objective was to knock out the other side's missles: there's would make bigger explosions, ours were more accurate. Both sides put their nukes in hard to blow-up places. Some nukes required a direct hit, within a few meters, by another nuke to be destroyed. Of course, lots of people would die in the process, but only as collateral damage...
Any software system with a large enough user base can rely on the accumulated experience of its users to add features, and also picking ideas from smaller systems now and then (at a very low incremental effort).
Corollary. The onus is on the smaller players to come up with new features to distinguish themselves from the masses -- but ultimately it's no-win for them because their *really useful* ideas will be subsumed into more popular systems anyway... only a matter of time.
This also reminds me of what Judge Jackson described in the section of his findings of fact against Microsoft: "Barrier to Entry"
Slashdot Mirror
() Only allow access to this document to people who I give an electronic copy to ("classic" default)
() Allow everyone to access this document (turn on IIS filesharing)
() Only allow access to people who I give a phisical copy (print)
(*) Only allow fully registered and subscription-up-to-date MS products to open this document (default)
* Check for warez/serialz -- disable them and alert the vendors. Vendors can subscribe to "MS Auto Alert" program.
* Check for downloaded MP3s (from a database of known MD5s) -- disable them and alert the record distributors. RIAA can subscribe to "MS Locked Tunes" for service.
* Check for P2P programs -- disable them and alert local gov't authorities. Gov'ts can give big grants to MS for this as part of their "Anti-Terror-and-Pro-Business-Computers" bill.
* Check for web/ftp/irc servers -- disable them and alert ISP as to uploading violations. ISPs can join the "MSN One-Stream" network.
* Check for NAT -- diable and notify ISP... part of the push towards "MS-IPv6-PLUS!"
* Check for competitors' products (DRDOS, Java, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc) -- disable them and alert user that their software was incompatable with the latest service pack. This one is free for end-users!
When I write code and give it to you under the terms of the GPL, I am giving you permission to modify and redistribute my code (with certain restrictions) in ways my copyright wouldn't allow you to do. A court saying that I'm not allowed to do that is sort of like a court saying I'm not allowed to let you use my frying pan -- sure, you have no God-given right to use the pan, it's MINE after all, but it would be difficult for a court to forbid me from giving you that permission.
And more: if a court orders that Novel, for example, can use MY code in ways that I expressly forbid (and I hold the copyright), then it stands that I can use their code, or yours, in ways that you don't want me to (and which your copyright gives you the exclusive rights to).
The GPL simply formalizes the permissions that I give you for my intellectual property that, by default, you wouldn't otherwise have.
* Could a court revolk my GPL-given right to modify GNUCash?
* Could a court grant the right to Novel to sell a modified, binary-only version of Reiser v 4?
How, exactly, could the GPL be ruled against? There may be small, fringe issues, but overall, the GPL rests on the exclusive rights to modify and copy given to IP owners of their works. When a copyrighted work is GPL'ed, the owner gives me extra rights. It is difficult to see how a court could forbid me from allowing you to sell or give away some PHP code that I wrote.
August 11, 2003
AP Wire
In a surprise 6-3 decision today, the US Supreme Court has ruled that the GNU Public Lisense is not enforcable and that programmers, users, and sellers do not need copyright holders' permission in order to modify, copy, or redistribute any machine- or human- readable code.
With IP law thus crippled, Free Software advocates expressed shock and confusion about how to proceed. "Now that I can just legally use a copy of NT with a cracked serial," Linux creator Linux Torvalds moaned in Washington, DC, "There doesn't seem much point..."
I have RCN in Manhattan, and I've found the cable internet to be great. I get 250kb/s download and over 100kb/s up. They never publicly fret about IP, etc. It just works.
http://streamripperx.sourceforge.net/
Stream Ripper is GPL and good enough (records streaming web broadcasts to MP3).
What would happen if someone anonymously violated the NDA (say on slashdot)?
My wife and I each are forced to have several dozen usernames and passwords for various websites, programs, email accounts, accounts at work's computer systems, etc. It seems that each sys admin/org has a different policy for creating these accounts, so that we are unable to memorize a few possibilities and choose from among those. (sometimes usernames/passwords are assigned, sometimes they insist on having #s, sometimes capital letters, etc.)
My wife has several files and pieces of paper with all of her passwords written down. She has to keep these on 3 or 4 computers, in her wallet, in her hotmail account, etc.
How problematic is this? Can this ever be solved? How?
1) Make song exactly like current hit
2) PROFIT!!!
2600 and others (even you) often say that it is true that you did some things that were wrong, but nothing anywhere near as bad as what you were accused of and nothing warranting the treatmeant you got. But from a self-critical point of view: what was it that you did that was "wrong" and what punishment would have been fair?
Free Software has again helpped a proprietary company. But maybe this will be good for Freedom, ultimately, as more companies realize that they can benefit when "their" software is Free.
The fact that KHTML is Free software let Apple quickly and easily break free from a hold that MS had them in. They tried bundling the OmniWeb browser, but that was clearly inferior to MS IE...
Right now Apple is tripping over themselves to get AppleWorks good enough to replace the need for MS Office. Maybe Open Office will soon help here (Apple has focused on making X11 apps more seemlessly integrated with OSX).
If Apple, Dell, HP, etc, collaborated with Free Software projects more, they could remove the need for users to get certain software from MS. That, in turn, would allow them to chart their own paths in terms of their wares and give them the opportunity to team up with others who are threatened by MS.
Soon, Apple will turn to FreeSoftware for Ogg code.
Apple's costs for distributing their free (beer) value-add-software packages are making them consider (and actually) charge for their "i" crap. (see http://www.thinksecret.com/news/freeiapps.html) FreeNet would go a long way to help them spread out their bandwidth. If only they gave us the right to redistribute their code. And hell, why not let us improve the code too, and give it away for free.
...My impression of the Service Pack's "Set Program Access and Defaults" was that it offered an easy, centralized way for users to make MS products their defaults. Your choices for each item (Browser, email, ect) are something like
... A single place to change to ALL MS. The "Non MS" button would only work if you have 3rd party programs already installed, right? So if you choose it and things get fucked-up, you'd probably want to revert to "MS." The "Custom" option is the Advanced one, and it includes a check box "Enable Access to this Program " which seems to mean that even though you're disabling IE, you have to take an additional, criptic step to really disable it.
Use Internet Explorer
or
Use Your Current 3rd Party browser
The easy, inviting option is the MS ones. The use of "Your Current 3rd Party Brower" instead of "Mozilla" or "Opera" or whatever is detected, lends an air of complexity. The 3rd Party choices aren't laid out, but the MS choice always is.
But before you can choose your specific programs, you need to first choose whether you want to use "MS Windows" "Non MS" or "Custom"
Compared to the process of, say, the "File Types" config, where you choose a program for any file-type, this interface privilages the MS products. But of course, setting a File Type no longer means that a certain program becomes the default...
Give away free MP3s of all your songs on your site, and allow them to be redistributed -- make sure your running Gnutella with your songs too. Allow the audience to record your concerts and distribute them.
Then tour a lot, sell t-shirts, sell CDs of the best stuff that you're giving away for free with value-adds (like good artwork, autographs, lyrics sheets, etc.), solicit donations/payback (be specific & upfront about your costs and needs).
Right, I got "insightful" more for an early MS-bashing post than anything else ;)
...maybe because of AOL...?
But the default install of Windows is not clean, it is cluttered with CRUFT dictated by MS and OEM interests, not users needs.
Some of the stuff is just MS trying to make things easy for dummies. But a LOT of stuff is dictated by their politics. Red Hat doesn't install chkconfig because they figure "dummies" will have no need for it. MS cripples XP and tries to make you sign up for this and that and use their apps over competitors.
I Recently got a VAIO laptop with XP, and it was a nightmare getting it to let me rip a CD to good quality MP3s. Many of the 3rd party apps I downloaded complained about Windows missing some thing or other... Why would MS want to make this so difficult? Maybe to make us use MS-only ASF...?
I found it very difficult to turn off MS Messenger -- You can't just exit it and it's not in the startup menu -- you have to start it, go to preferences, flip through all the tabs, and uncheck "start automatically". Why should this program bypass the normal way that apps auto-start on bootup?
The sign-on to Passport was done in such a way as to make me think that it was part of the registration process -- and XP warned me that if I didn't register, my computer would stop working.
Etc.
In sum: Windows bad. Windows very very bad.
But these things are CRUFT! And there's MORE in a "virgin" Windows box:
It takes a LONG time to get things cleaned up and usable. You used to be able to just wipe the disk and install Windows from scratch, but more and more OEMs are not allowing thins, only giving you some crappy RESTORE disks...
I think the crux of the article comes with the claim that in order to be serious and get many users, KDE needs to attract commercial developers -- hence a stable, backwards compatable API is needed.
But "commercial" and "proprietary" don't need to be synonymous. Proprietary software companies can't afford to recompile and tweak their source because of potential support and debugging issues that may come up. But Free software, whether it's commericially made or the result of a hobby, CAN afford to have things break a lot -- there is a wide pool of potential tweakers who can fix things, should there be a demand.
This puts proprietary developers at a disadvantage. On Windows, they can write and compile once, and be (somewhat) sure that their program will run on MS's OS for the next 2 or 3 or 5 years. On Linux, if they don't Free their code, they're fucked by Sunday.
But as Linus Torvalds always says, breaking compatability is a FEATURE of Free software: improvements and security cascade, and the system isn't bogged down with millions of compatability work-arounds.
Their xTunes software looks like a feature-for-feature clone of iTunes. I read somewhere that apple asked MediaFour no to name their software "xpod" ...
In other words, I can see Apple attacking this company, Tex9, for tradmark infringment, as is their way...
I see that xTunes is GPLed, and that xPod is a pluggin...it doesn't seem to be GPLed currently...Tex9 may end up making it proprietary or something...
Here's their website
http://www.das.com.tw/
Good luck looking into it!
This was the first computer conference I've ever attended. Most of it was what I expected it would be -- a bunch of bullshit: the big companies and the little companies were hawking their wares, acting slick and SELLING SELLING SELLING.
There were a ton of proprietary software vendors, wholely clueless that Linux users may prefer Linux because of the Freedom. NuSphere, for example, was showing off their Linux port of the Windows PHP IDE product...acting like Linux was just another platform, like a port to a Mac. (The port was incomplete.) Compaq held an expensive-looking gameshow contest with questions like "Why is Compaq considered a leading expert in Linux?" and where all the answers were "all of the above." Ximian came accross as a slick, funded, bullshit corporation, selling their MS Exchange connector. I fear the future of GNOME in their hands. Best propritary software was the guy from Taiwan, selling a program that grabs all relevent Windows config files and translates them to the correct Linux equivs (Sendmail, Appache, SAMBA, etc.). He said his product was big in China.
The Hardware vendors seemed less bad -- at least they're selling a THING, not IP. Of particular note was the Sharp Linux PDA -- much better than I imagined, more like a little laptop than a PDA.
Best, though, was the small "ORG" section of the convention. The enthusiasm and lack of bullshit was palpable, and it put the salesmen to shame. It made the whole thing seem like two events, one of salesmen, and one of artists. In particular, the Linux Terminal Server guys were cool as shit. (http://www.ltsp.org/) The KDE guys (especially Ian) were also amazing. I was pleased that they all had fresh ideas, but were dedicated to the old-fashioned, core hacker concepts (client/server, language neutrality, extensibility). These guys had a VISION and were advocating, teaching, and arguing for it with great gusto and humor. The sales people, on the other hand, seemed insincere, ass-kissing, and downright dumb.
All-in-all, just what you'd expect...
I wasn't following politics too much at the time Bork was put forward for the supreme court, but years later I saw him on a William Buckley show where "Free Speech" was debated. (Mark Green, who just lost the NYC mayorality to Bloomberg was on this show too.) Bork argued what seemed to me to be an anti-free speech position (arguing the original intent of the Bill of Rights). He thought it obvious that a lot of sexually-related expression had no place in a civilized society. The example he kept giving of expression going too far was (I kid you not) "Michael Jackson gyrating his hips..."
Off topic? Maybe. But for me this clinched my impression of Bork as someone I not only disagreed with, but who seemed damned-right retarded.
Taliban forces used mines extensively. Al Qaida used remote-controlled vans to blow up US embassies.
The US strategy relied on the Northern Alliance (and later, other local Afghans). It became clear early on that air power alone could not do enough.
And the same thing happened in Kosovo. It wasn't until local Albanian rebels forced Serbian troops out that NATO air power won the war.
Large scale nulclear wars, though, would in a way be the most "humanless" wars. The US and USSR both planned for a war whose objective was to knock out the other side's missles: there's would make bigger explosions, ours were more accurate. Both sides put their nukes in hard to blow-up places. Some nukes required a direct hit, within a few meters, by another nuke to be destroyed. Of course, lots of people would die in the process, but only as collateral damage...
Any software system with a large enough user base can rely on the accumulated experience of its users to add features, and also picking ideas from smaller systems now and then (at a very low incremental effort).
Corollary. The onus is on the smaller players to come up with new features to distinguish themselves from the masses -- but ultimately it's no-win for them because their *really useful* ideas will be subsumed into more popular systems anyway ... only a matter of time.
This also reminds me of what Judge Jackson described in the section of his findings of fact against Microsoft: "Barrier to Entry"