Heh. I spent a few years as a right-and-proper randbot myself, so I don't think that an inability to appreciate the reasoning behind your perspective is the issue at hand. Put it down to irreconcilable differences for now, why don't you? We can come back to it in a decade or so; I don't think fighting it out sooner would be productive.
Switching gears, I don't think taxation is unimportant at all, and I don't see how you think I indicated anything to the contrary -- I was acknowledging that it was discussed; claiming that the whole debate period was spent scaremongering (while such would strengthen the point I'm trying to make) would be untrue and unfair. I'd love to see the income tax replaced with a consumption tax; seeing the FairTax proposal implemented would make my day. It's the war-between-cultures scaremongering that irked me; seeing real momentum behind tax reform was in my eyes the highlight of the debate by far.
Ayup. Because it couldn't possibly be that you backed an administration that's been strengthening the executive branch of government at the expense of everyone's rights -- must be that they're all that bad, so you didn't do anything wrong. Uh-huh.
Funny thing is, though, that I don't happen to recall torture being an issue under the preceding administration. Not that it hasn't happened before, but it certainly doesn't happen all the time. I also don't recall the Justice Department being widely considered to lack authority independent of the executive, or POTUS making a concerted effort to demonize the media as unpatriotic, or... well, you follow the trend.
I'll be considerably more comfortable with a constitutional law professor (Obama) holding the veto, or a strict constitutionalist such as Ron Paul (as if that would happen... *sigh*). Deny it all you want, but some administrations are indeed better or worse than others; it's a shame we whitewash history so much, or folks would be able to recognize patterns from the worst of them in our past. (Woodrow Wilson is one of those -- see his resegregation of the executive branch of government and the direct assault on freedom of speech under the name of the Espionage Act for just a few examples -- but I've yet to see a high school textbook which does anything but praise him for founding the League of Nations, discuss his economic policies and document his (wavering) position on involvement in World War 1).
To be sure, those widely recognized as "great" presidents have taken actions contrary to freedoms as well -- FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court and saw the creation of Japanese internment camps, while Lincoln wielded all manner of emergency powers during the Civil War. History, however, has come to recognize the majority of these actions of ill-thought-out mistakes (the still-controversial exceptions being in the context of civil war); if we would learn from them, perhaps their like would be repeated less often, and certainly not in circumstances less dire.
In any event -- no administration is perfect, but any claim that they're all identical is broken in the extreme. We didn't have torture under Clinton 1 (and I do hope we won't have Clinton 2), and we wouldn't have it under Obama. If you listened to last week's Iowa debate, the difference in mindsets should have been obvious; one group was talking up a war between cultures (and taxation, immigration, and the like), while another was universally focused on domestic betterment -- education, healthcare and such. Now, both of those groups (excluding Ron Paul) may be in complete agreement that the US Constitution somehow provides authorization to meddle in states' educational systems, and both may vote the corporate agenda on copyright term extensions and all matter of other policy issues... but that's certainly not to say that they govern from the same perspective, or that preferring one over the other is valueless. US history is rife with presidents who redefined their nations through their personal agendas -- Lincoln, FDR, JFK and more -- and mine is a country which right now could use a reimagining for the better.
Some would call that justified, but the skeptic would realize that any viewpoint that is overly dominant is dangerous when other viewpoints don't get a fair shake or are openly ridiculed.
Just so! The cabal which would have you believe that the Earth is spherical has such widespread and overt control of the media -- not to mention the liberal and "scientific" communities -- that the truth of the Flat Earth has been suppressed for centuries. Their representatives staff every school, and it's impossible to get representation in the media; any opposition has been unable to get a fair shake for centuries.
*snerk*.
Showing "both sides" of every issue may be "fair and balanced" -- but if one of those sides is arguing that the atomic weight of helium is 5 or 3+3=17, it does nothing to promote popular knowledge of objective truths.
The RIAA may, as an organization, may technically be losing money, but that says little about much money the RIAA's member companies are making from the RIAA's activities.
Other way 'round: The RIAA's employees are making money, but only because the RIAA's member companies are paying their expenses. The member companies are having the RIAA conduct this program on their behalves in an attempt to defend their traditional business model, not because it's a sensible proposition -- indeed, one label dropped out of the program not long ago because of the expense. (I'm trying to find a link on that, and having some trouble; my google-fu is flagging -- but see the testimony of Jennifer Pariser in Capitol Records v. Jammie Thomas re general unprofitability of the program in and of itself).
As for why any business would do this if it is in fact unprofitable, the answer is the same reason any rational entity makes any unprofitable decision: Imperfect information. In the case of your linked article, the band doesn't know how the label they sign with does the accounting -- otherwise, they would have made the rational decision and opted to find some other way to produce and distribute their music. The labels are good at their scam, but they don't have perfect information either -- and if they think they can staunch illegal file sharing by paying the RIAA to file John Doe suits and redirect them against whomever happened to hold an IP address at a given time... well, that's where they'll put their money. Doesn't mean that it's actually a profitable decision to make, though -- and indeed, the trends on illegal file sharing over the time they've been running the program aren't supportive of its effectiveness at making copyrighted content harder to come by illegitimately.
It's worth their while because the labels pay for it, and it's fine employment for lots of people in the meantime. Doesn't make it any less of a money-losing operation.
The RIAA provides services to various music publishers. It certainly doesn't receive money from copyright infringement suits.
Yes, it does. Money from copyright infringement suits run by the RIAA are used, by agreement of the labels, entirely to fund the RIAA's copyright enforcement efforts. That said, those efforts -- even the legal ones standing alone -- cost much, much more than they raise.
I rather suspect that if a hyper child spoiled more than one hunt with uncontrollable noise, running about, and blathering, that said child would become dinner. Or a lone nomad at an early age. Like three.[...]Be grateful for modern society.
On what grounds should I-the-reader take the means of child rearing you suspect was once prevalent to be a Bad Thing? If this is a moral judgement call, it's one couched in the assumptions and environment of modern society, not that in which these practices may have occurred.
If killing or abandoning an uncontrollable child enhanced the survivability of the community, that would be exactly the right and moral thing to do.
There's a fundamental incompatibility between the two cultures, one who believes in freedom, and the other that believes many of those freedoms are sinful. On both sides, there are people prepared to kill the other over this.
That's ridiculous. The US is hardly a pillar of social (as opposed to political or religious) freedoms -- witness the war on drugs, the widespread prohibition on gay marriage, the general ascendancy of the religious right. Anyone wanting to wage war on social liberalism has much better targets than the United States. On the other hand, none of those better targets have been involved in toppling their governments and installing puppets, providing weapons and training to insurgents to fight the Soviet Union, and all the rest.
In any event, this is hardly a topic up for debate; the background and motivations of ObL, for instance, are extensively documented -- as are his public directives that US forces be killed until the US ceases support for Israel and withdraws all troops from Islamic countries; nothing in there about freedoms or demanding a mass conversion. Certainly, there's plenty of propaganda regarding Western decadence -- but that's about as relevant to them planning attacks on us as the status of women's rights under Hussein was to us attacking them.
To be sure, religion is involved -- but as a motivational tool used by the powerful on both sides more than a first-level factor itself. If "they hate our freedoms" were in fact such a motivating factor to the Islamic world, Dubai would not be the destination for expatriates from all over the world that it is today.
The kind of folks who need to resort to this kind of approach are the same folks who can't afford a patent license -- so in the interest of research getting done, I certainly hope that it isn't.
They are doing this, you mean, with books, but without the EVDO-based electronic reader; personally, I think Kindle support would be a great feature. See Safari.
One can also get a roommate in a house one owns; that approach isn't specific to renting. (Indeed, my brother-in-law lives with us and handles some of the household bills). I also agree that being able to temporarily live rent-free with friends and the like is useful.
The difference in payoff between owning and renting very much depends on the local economics, and I'm not about to claim that owning a home is the right thing to do in all circumstances. On the other hand, it can in many cases be a very beneficial -- as it is in the community where I live; rents here are nearly indistinguishable from mortgage payments, making the equity stored 100% win. (Well, mostly; there are hidden costs involved -- maintenance, insurance deductibles and the like -- but they're manageable).
Certainly, getting into more debt when over your head is a recipe for disaster -- but having debt (particularly asset-backed, fixed-term debt) isn't necessarily a sign of being over one's head; it can simply be an indication of willingness to take calculated risks for calculated (and oft-times significant) returns.
Mortgage? Why the hell would I want to take out yet More loans when I am still paying off my current ones. Oh wait, that's right you're not a true red blooded American unless you make sure the next 10 generations of your family will have to pay off your loans.
Ya know, the point of a mortgage is to actually be able to acquire an otherwise-unaffordable, generally appreciating asset, which can then be passed down to your family's future generations. It's quite a different thing from general consumer debt -- and being for a fixed period, there's no question of any future generations being on the hook unless one is atypically short-lived. Moreover, most of the funds put into paying off a mortgage would typically be spent on rent, rather than saved, in the case where no mortgage existed.
Except for the folks who end up taking out a reverse mortgage on account of failure to plan for retirement; in that case, all bets are off.
(I have a [fixed-rate, generally sane] mortgage, and am right now paying for my wife to go back to school. Yup, it's more debt -- but I'm quite certain it's the right thing to do; the present value of the increase in her lifetime earning potential will far more than offset the increase in interest paid, even after taking compounding into account. And I don't carry consumer debt; spending is tightly maintained, and the credit cards are paid in full every month).
There are cases where having outstanding mortgage or school debt can be the sane and reasonable thing to do; painting with such a wide brush ("You have both a mortgage and outstanding school loans? Stupid financially irresponsible American!") is frankly inappropriate.
Now, should a Tunisia developer object when his code gets shifted to GPL3 and gets a court judgement in Tunisia, it is not just a problem in Tunisia, because in the absence of any noted jurisdiction the contract can be assumed to have been "signed" under Tunisian law!
I don't see how your example applies any more than mine. To be sure, in one there is an explicit license given whereas in the other (in which you successfully sue me for copying your text in my reply, but in a jurisdiction where there's no ability to collect) there's no license at all -- but in either case, it's a Tunisian court you're operating in, a Tunisian court which issues a judgement, and a Tunisian court whose decision I'm perfectly able to ignore so long as I comply with the laws of the countries where I live and do business. Civil judgements are rarely enforceable across borders -- I've even escaped a contract (for less than the current USD$75,000 minimum for federal jurisdiction) simply by moving between US states -- and a US court is under no obligation to consider precedent set elsewhere. (Further, the Tunisian developer wishing to stop the relicensing of his work in the US is at considerable disadvantage when operating in a US court at any level, even when simply asking that court to enforce a Tunisian court's prior decision; there's the expense of hiring a US lawyer, to start -- that itself will frequently be enough to put a halt to the potential proceedings you propose).
You can't sue in a US court and ask that they follow Tunisian law -- nobody in that court, including the judge, is trained in it! If you sign a contract specifying jurisdiction, it is necessary to bring suit in that locale; that's clearly impractical in cases where both the developer and the user will frequently be outside of US borders. And again, the clause in question is not, in its actual context (where the entity able to make unilateral changes is neither the copyright holder[*] or the licensee but a third-party public-interest nonprofit operating under a clearly known and published set of principals and with an open, accessible and well-published deliberative process) as unconscionable as you make it out to be -- and it's severable, so the rest of the license still operates even if that clause should be struck down in court.
No, I don't see any serious issue here -- and practice bears me out. After all, the GPL is quite widely used, and has been for quite some time, and no case such as you describe has yet to occur.
[*] - Of course, if the FSF is one party, that's a little different... but not very much; the other factors I mentioned still weigh in favor of the license's validity, and towards serious limits on the level of impact that contrary decisions on the part of any smaller countries might have.
Personality traits isn't a theoretical exercize in cryptography.
Outliers among the set of candidates can be chosen in cases where it's known that they'll go without scrutiny, or placed in those roles where avoiding scrutiny is critical. Any system can be gamed, particularly when it purports to sort through the mass of humanity; there are simply too many outliers. Who would have guessed that a group of doctors would be behind a bomb plot? As for your "white soccer mum", I have no doubt that there are recruitable malcontents amongst those whose externally visible behaviors place them in that set -- it's too large for there not to be, though they're undoubtedly percentage-wise few. (Further, "defensive" actions such as this have the potential to increase the set of malcontents; I certainly know that they decrease my faith in government).
Any system dependent on a set of rules can be gamed, once those rules are known.
Now, while I'm willing to accept that US law may allow for such an abberration, the FSF's licenses do not specify US jurisdiction, so any contributer could bring a copyright violation claim in their own contry. Thus, if there is one country in the world that doesn't see this change as valid, the whole system breaks.
Breaks for that country, you mean. To draw a parallel, if Tunisia considers quoting your post in my reply a violation of copyright, you might be able to get a judgement against me there -- but that judgement doesn't make a whit of difference while I'm living and doing business somewhere fair use applies.
I'm sorry, but I fail to believe that the "any future version" clause means anything legally. I'm pretty confident that it wouldn't hold up in the UK, as it inequitably allows one single party to change the contract arbitrarily.
The OSS development community as a whole trusts the FSF to act in a manner consistent with those principals, and it's in that context that folks frequently decide to provide blanket approval to any future version of an FSF license -- I've done so myself, and feel extremely comfortable in doing so. If the FSF were to suddenly act in a way not consistent with its principals, that's when arguments attacking its authority will start to carry weight -- but until then, they're only so much hot air.
Which actually means there's no such thing as a legal Linux distro.
Look up "severability". Even if one clause doesn't hold, the remainder of any contract claiming severability is still enforceable. Also, no judge would issue a finding so blatently against the author's wishes and the public interest as a whole.
if Microsoft included support for running OSX binaries, people would be crying "Anti-competition!" faster than it would take to load up Notepad.
Why would anyone cry that? If Microsoft started doing that folks would mostly be too busy being shocked, because it would primarily benefit Apple: Developers could write software natively for OSX using Objective C, Cocoa, and (otherwise) Apple's native toolkit, and be able to still target Microsoft's audience, rather than writing only for the lone larger-audience proprietary platform and leaving Apple's userbase unable to run their software.
After all, it's not the general consensus that Microsoft's platform is hurting for good software. (I'm pretty unhappy with software availability on Windows, but I'm not exactly your general audience -- and I recognize that; even then, it's not OSX-specific software that I miss when working on win32, but nifty, Freely licensed POSIX-centric toolage like pexpect).
As you say -- you'd need shims, and wrappers, and a whole lot more -- but none of those will work until you've got support in the loader.
So they've got support in the loader, and perhaps some future version of MacOS X will have WINE-alike code for the API and syscalls (or a.NET CLR interpreter, if that's what they're going for). It's groundwork. If Apple never included parts of a feature until the whole thing was production status, there wouldn't be read-only ZFS support in OS X right now.
Given that it was a joint announcement between the Wikimedia Foundation, the FSF and Creative Commons, it's safe to say that there's more than just the FSF involved. Granted, they have the final say -- but there are at least two other organizations working with them and, in doing so, pushing this process along.
I'm not sure that "didn't RTFA because it was a blog" approach is entirely fair; after all, why trust an ultra- (and often inaccurately-) summarized blog entry (ie. the slashdot summary) more than a complete one?
If you RTFM, it's not that they're moving Wikipedia from GFDL to CC-BY-SA; rather, the GFDL is becoming compatible with CC-BY-SA. If the GFDL license in use had the usual "or any future version" clause in use, then the content was initially given with permission for relicensing under this new version -- so no problem at all.
I disagree -- look at sqlite. It's a wildly successful project, and the authors offer consulting services for folks who want help making customizations (say, integrating it into their commercial projects).
As for me, I'm thrilled about DJB making this change, because it means I can actually use his software! (Something with no license to redistribute is effectively worthless to me -- if I can't even make copies within my own LAN, but need to download every copy separately from DJB, that's far too much hassle -- might as well be building on commercial dependencies).
Someone ripped you off pretty bad, there, yes. I don't see any evidence that that someone is Eidos, however.
In any event, Deus Ex and DX2 are available through GameTap, and (given that UbiSoft and GameTap have a good working relationship) I expect that DX3 will be as well not far from its release. Consequently, you can play the games without needing to trust any reseller to give you what believe that you're paying for.
Slashdot Mirror
Switching gears, I don't think taxation is unimportant at all, and I don't see how you think I indicated anything to the contrary -- I was acknowledging that it was discussed; claiming that the whole debate period was spent scaremongering (while such would strengthen the point I'm trying to make) would be untrue and unfair. I'd love to see the income tax replaced with a consumption tax; seeing the FairTax proposal implemented would make my day. It's the war-between-cultures scaremongering that irked me; seeing real momentum behind tax reform was in my eyes the highlight of the debate by far.
Ayup. Because it couldn't possibly be that you backed an administration that's been strengthening the executive branch of government at the expense of everyone's rights -- must be that they're all that bad, so you didn't do anything wrong. Uh-huh.
Funny thing is, though, that I don't happen to recall torture being an issue under the preceding administration. Not that it hasn't happened before, but it certainly doesn't happen all the time. I also don't recall the Justice Department being widely considered to lack authority independent of the executive, or POTUS making a concerted effort to demonize the media as unpatriotic, or... well, you follow the trend.
I'll be considerably more comfortable with a constitutional law professor (Obama) holding the veto, or a strict constitutionalist such as Ron Paul (as if that would happen... *sigh*). Deny it all you want, but some administrations are indeed better or worse than others; it's a shame we whitewash history so much, or folks would be able to recognize patterns from the worst of them in our past. (Woodrow Wilson is one of those -- see his resegregation of the executive branch of government and the direct assault on freedom of speech under the name of the Espionage Act for just a few examples -- but I've yet to see a high school textbook which does anything but praise him for founding the League of Nations, discuss his economic policies and document his (wavering) position on involvement in World War 1).
To be sure, those widely recognized as "great" presidents have taken actions contrary to freedoms as well -- FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court and saw the creation of Japanese internment camps, while Lincoln wielded all manner of emergency powers during the Civil War. History, however, has come to recognize the majority of these actions of ill-thought-out mistakes (the still-controversial exceptions being in the context of civil war); if we would learn from them, perhaps their like would be repeated less often, and certainly not in circumstances less dire.
In any event -- no administration is perfect, but any claim that they're all identical is broken in the extreme. We didn't have torture under Clinton 1 (and I do hope we won't have Clinton 2), and we wouldn't have it under Obama. If you listened to last week's Iowa debate, the difference in mindsets should have been obvious; one group was talking up a war between cultures (and taxation, immigration, and the like), while another was universally focused on domestic betterment -- education, healthcare and such. Now, both of those groups (excluding Ron Paul) may be in complete agreement that the US Constitution somehow provides authorization to meddle in states' educational systems, and both may vote the corporate agenda on copyright term extensions and all matter of other policy issues... but that's certainly not to say that they govern from the same perspective, or that preferring one over the other is valueless. US history is rife with presidents who redefined their nations through their personal agendas -- Lincoln, FDR, JFK and more -- and mine is a country which right now could use a reimagining for the better.
*snerk*.
Showing "both sides" of every issue may be "fair and balanced" -- but if one of those sides is arguing that the atomic weight of helium is 5 or 3+3=17, it does nothing to promote popular knowledge of objective truths.
As for why any business would do this if it is in fact unprofitable, the answer is the same reason any rational entity makes any unprofitable decision: Imperfect information. In the case of your linked article, the band doesn't know how the label they sign with does the accounting -- otherwise, they would have made the rational decision and opted to find some other way to produce and distribute their music. The labels are good at their scam, but they don't have perfect information either -- and if they think they can staunch illegal file sharing by paying the RIAA to file John Doe suits and redirect them against whomever happened to hold an IP address at a given time... well, that's where they'll put their money. Doesn't mean that it's actually a profitable decision to make, though -- and indeed, the trends on illegal file sharing over the time they've been running the program aren't supportive of its effectiveness at making copyrighted content harder to come by illegitimately.
It's worth their while because the labels pay for it, and it's fine employment for lots of people in the meantime. Doesn't make it any less of a money-losing operation.
If killing or abandoning an uncontrollable child enhanced the survivability of the community, that would be exactly the right and moral thing to do.
In any event, this is hardly a topic up for debate; the background and motivations of ObL, for instance, are extensively documented -- as are his public directives that US forces be killed until the US ceases support for Israel and withdraws all troops from Islamic countries; nothing in there about freedoms or demanding a mass conversion. Certainly, there's plenty of propaganda regarding Western decadence -- but that's about as relevant to them planning attacks on us as the status of women's rights under Hussein was to us attacking them.
To be sure, religion is involved -- but as a motivational tool used by the powerful on both sides more than a first-level factor itself. If "they hate our freedoms" were in fact such a motivating factor to the Islamic world, Dubai would not be the destination for expatriates from all over the world that it is today.
The kind of folks who need to resort to this kind of approach are the same folks who can't afford a patent license -- so in the interest of research getting done, I certainly hope that it isn't.
They are doing this, you mean, with books, but without the EVDO-based electronic reader; personally, I think Kindle support would be a great feature. See Safari.
One can also get a roommate in a house one owns; that approach isn't specific to renting. (Indeed, my brother-in-law lives with us and handles some of the household bills). I also agree that being able to temporarily live rent-free with friends and the like is useful.
The difference in payoff between owning and renting very much depends on the local economics, and I'm not about to claim that owning a home is the right thing to do in all circumstances. On the other hand, it can in many cases be a very beneficial -- as it is in the community where I live; rents here are nearly indistinguishable from mortgage payments, making the equity stored 100% win. (Well, mostly; there are hidden costs involved -- maintenance, insurance deductibles and the like -- but they're manageable).
Certainly, getting into more debt when over your head is a recipe for disaster -- but having debt (particularly asset-backed, fixed-term debt) isn't necessarily a sign of being over one's head; it can simply be an indication of willingness to take calculated risks for calculated (and oft-times significant) returns.
Except for the folks who end up taking out a reverse mortgage on account of failure to plan for retirement; in that case, all bets are off.
(I have a [fixed-rate, generally sane] mortgage, and am right now paying for my wife to go back to school. Yup, it's more debt -- but I'm quite certain it's the right thing to do; the present value of the increase in her lifetime earning potential will far more than offset the increase in interest paid, even after taking compounding into account. And I don't carry consumer debt; spending is tightly maintained, and the credit cards are paid in full every month).
There are cases where having outstanding mortgage or school debt can be the sane and reasonable thing to do; painting with such a wide brush ("You have both a mortgage and outstanding school loans? Stupid financially irresponsible American!") is frankly inappropriate.
The GPL is in extremely wide usage today. Where are the practical instances where users or developers acting in good faith are getting burned?
You can't sue in a US court and ask that they follow Tunisian law -- nobody in that court, including the judge, is trained in it! If you sign a contract specifying jurisdiction, it is necessary to bring suit in that locale; that's clearly impractical in cases where both the developer and the user will frequently be outside of US borders. And again, the clause in question is not, in its actual context (where the entity able to make unilateral changes is neither the copyright holder[*] or the licensee but a third-party public-interest nonprofit operating under a clearly known and published set of principals and with an open, accessible and well-published deliberative process) as unconscionable as you make it out to be -- and it's severable, so the rest of the license still operates even if that clause should be struck down in court.
No, I don't see any serious issue here -- and practice bears me out. After all, the GPL is quite widely used, and has been for quite some time, and no case such as you describe has yet to occur.
[*] - Of course, if the FSF is one party, that's a little different... but not very much; the other factors I mentioned still weigh in favor of the license's validity, and towards serious limits on the level of impact that contrary decisions on the part of any smaller countries might have.
Any system dependent on a set of rules can be gamed, once those rules are known.
Beyond that, see my other reply.
After all, it's not the general consensus that Microsoft's platform is hurting for good software. (I'm pretty unhappy with software availability on Windows, but I'm not exactly your general audience -- and I recognize that; even then, it's not OSX-specific software that I miss when working on win32, but nifty, Freely licensed POSIX-centric toolage like pexpect).
As you say -- you'd need shims, and wrappers, and a whole lot more -- but none of those will work until you've got support in the loader.
.NET CLR interpreter, if that's what they're going for). It's groundwork. If Apple never included parts of a feature until the whole thing was production status, there wouldn't be read-only ZFS support in OS X right now.
So they've got support in the loader, and perhaps some future version of MacOS X will have WINE-alike code for the API and syscalls (or a
Given that it was a joint announcement between the Wikimedia Foundation, the FSF and Creative Commons, it's safe to say that there's more than just the FSF involved. Granted, they have the final say -- but there are at least two other organizations working with them and, in doing so, pushing this process along.
I'm not sure that "didn't RTFA because it was a blog" approach is entirely fair; after all, why trust an ultra- (and often inaccurately-) summarized blog entry (ie. the slashdot summary) more than a complete one?
If you RTFM, it's not that they're moving Wikipedia from GFDL to CC-BY-SA; rather, the GFDL is becoming compatible with CC-BY-SA. If the GFDL license in use had the usual "or any future version" clause in use, then the content was initially given with permission for relicensing under this new version -- so no problem at all.
I disagree -- look at sqlite. It's a wildly successful project, and the authors offer consulting services for folks who want help making customizations (say, integrating it into their commercial projects).
As for me, I'm thrilled about DJB making this change, because it means I can actually use his software! (Something with no license to redistribute is effectively worthless to me -- if I can't even make copies within my own LAN, but need to download every copy separately from DJB, that's far too much hassle -- might as well be building on commercial dependencies).
Someone ripped you off pretty bad, there, yes. I don't see any evidence that that someone is Eidos, however.
In any event, Deus Ex and DX2 are available through GameTap, and (given that UbiSoft and GameTap have a good working relationship) I expect that DX3 will be as well not far from its release. Consequently, you can play the games without needing to trust any reseller to give you what believe that you're paying for.