Oh do they? So now this guy is selling off things that don't belong to him, and should be thrown in jail.
He is a scammer and yes, I do not argue against his being charged with fraud or similar. What I am arguing against is the type of the crime he commited, as in "fraud" vs "theft".
Trouble with all your analogies is this: none of the players own anything at all. NCsoft does retain all rights and the non-existant, virtual, make-believe "property" resides in their database to be expunged at will. Furthermore, even if the player did have rights, the virtual puffs of electrons which you say have value because some idiots believe they can be traded for good money are effortlessly duplicated ad infinitum.
As per capitalist theory, trade can only apply to private property and labour. Private property can only be physical (but sometimes can be represented by an abstraction, such as your bank account balance which corresponds to physical cash the bank owes you). This whole new world of "virtual" "intellectual property" is a scam for the gullible and an excuse to ship manufacturing overseas.
You know, you have to have forest fires every so many years, right? It's how forests work.
It rather sucks that I have to be in a middle of one.
(b) you have no control over.
We do have a certain degree of control. Individually our input is miniscule but in large numbers we can effect significant changes. I now see that your philosophy is not only to selectively ignore the surroundings in favour of internal state of bliss but also to do so out of a form of defeatism: "Why should I worry my pretty mind over things? I cant do anything about anything anyhow. Lets party!". I think you are trying to help but this sort of approach is not suitable for many people. Many of us do not have the luxury of turning off our intelects at will. I think the other part of the problem is that some people care for the fate of society on a personal level, while some do not have that sort of attachment. Were I a Libertarian, I would instead, probably, be busy trying to figure how big a yacht to buy with the proceeds of my latest investment scam involving orphans and widows. Or something of the sort.
(a) price will have no effect on demand,
Most peak oil estimates take the price/supply relationships into account.
(b) oil companies, instead of pretending that oil is more scarce than it really is in order to drive up prices, are actually pretending that oil is more plentiful than it really is to drive down prices
This simplistic idea does not take into account the fact that most of oil reserves are in Saudi Arabian fields whose condition is kept secret (but sordid state of which can be indirectly inferred by compiling leaked data as experts have done) and that discovery of new fields has steadily declined since 1960s. Saudi Arabia and other oil producers are faced with this problem: oil too cheap = little profit, oil too expensive = economic slowdown and possible military action should panic over remaining reserves insue. It is not in the producer's interest to have galloping oil prices, a stable, or slow increase is their desired state. The oil producers are already in the crisis mode as we speak as they are unable to halt the rise in prices.
Add to this the lopsided nature of oil use. Factor in the spare capacity not keeping up with price this time around and you will hopefully start to see the picture.
(c) we won't just shrug and move to a better power source.
I would like to point out to you the fact that there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels available presently. All the technological solutions are at this point pipe dreams, not available even on a fraction of the required scale should oil supplies faulter by even 10-20% from present levels. I dont think you realise that most of the components of most technological products are made of plastic which is made of... oil. Not to mention that for over 40 years some reckless idiots bamboozled the public into total dependency on cars for everything, including delivery of daily food and 2-hour urban sprawl commutes. I truly do not think you see the scope of the problem and the social impact of restricting the primary source of energy and plastics. We are talking total economic pandemonium here.
And that is on top of record levels of personal and national debt.
Combine this with the autocratic cultural trends of late and things are starting to look decidedly grim.
What are you going to do if there is *no* disaster? Have you done much planning for that contingency? Working towards a better job, saving money for retirement, enjoying new the wonderful things right there in the world around you? It never hurts to be prepared!
I never claimed not to be planning ahead and not proceeding with my life just
The most obvious examples are the neighborhood hospitals, fire-fighting associations and the community schools that existed before the States took them over.
All of which existed as far back as Ancient Classical culture. You must be seriously mis-interpreting what de Tocqueville said or he had issues.
Seriously, if things seem that bad now, you need a better understanding of how much worse things have been before - even quite recently.
We have a mis-understanding here. I am not claiming that all things are now at the point where they were in Middle Ages or during WWII in Europe or some such nonsense. But the vector of change in areas about which I care about is downhill. The fact that we have not yet reached the abyss is not a good agrument against being worried about the direction of changes.
You're projecting changes over less than 10 years indefintely into the future, and that's just nuts!
The problem looks very serious to me because it appears that fundamental equations of society are changing. That is, the values of enlightenment are being replaced on a large scale by those of theocracy/authoritarianism. This might not look like a gigiantic problem to you but it is. Historically, human civilization goes through cyclical changes where various factions fighting for dominance get upper hand. The so called Dark Ages were a result of culture being dominated by a particular world-view. So was Reneissance. I simply see all the indicators aligned to point to the decline of post-WWII era of modernity and a new, powerful, force of Theocratic Narcissism arising. These changes, historically, last generations. That is why I am "projecting" the changes of last 10 years far into the future. I believe that this trend will last for a very long time, and cause untold suffering, before it is reversed.
To take a random example: is the USA-PATRIOT act the beginnnnig of the end for civil liberties?
The act is but an element in an array of things occuring recently that diminish greatly your (and mine) personal liberties. Combined they represent a great setback already. One of the most worrying elements of this, is the failure (and outright takeover by corporate interests) of the mass media and decline of journalism to be replaced by shilling punditry. News replaced by "infotainment". This leads to a failure of the democratic institutions as a whole, a process which is well advanced both in the USA and here in Canada. Internet does not appear to offer a respite in this, and only servers to further polarize the populace.
Not to judge by every previous war.
Every war is different and has different effects.
This is the least reduction in civil liberties we've ever had during a war, and civil liberties have been on an upward trend since the founding of this country, despite far worse swings in all prior wars.
I disagree. The previous wars had different setbacks. This time the people in the USA (and most of the West) lost ability to communicate without secret surveilance, to travel freely without being subjected to intrusive searches and outright, secret bans, they lost the right to fair trial, and are on the brink of ubiquitous surveilance (in urban areas), etc. Some of these things were simply not technologically possible in the past. Myself (as a Canadian), I am also in danger of wanton, secret, extra-judicial and extra-ordinary rendition (even though I am not a Muslim) just because I am not a citizen of USA, as soon as some idiot makes an error on a "no-fly" or some other list of "undesirables".
Did we round up all the Muslims and stick em in concentration camps?
You are very close to doing that and so is Britain. Michelle Malkin (one of your cherished by the "right-wing" pundits) wrote a well-received book on the virtues of internment and racial profiling. The liberal forces in your country are at this point on the defensive and I dont think they will regain their former power even if they were to win the next elections. The forces of Theocratic Stupidity had worked decades (35 years or so) to achieve their penetration into the society and even here in Canada they are becoming a frightening feature.
If you're emotionally upset over two or three Americans being imprisoned without trial (as opp
I recall having heard that Linus chose the GPL as a tribute to gcc (not the GNU philosophy)
This is one of those muddled stances I was referring to. It is like claiming that you set up a democratic, free-market system in your country, complete with balance of power provisions in its constitution and all the related bells and whistles in a tribute to... USA's space program only, but do not actually subscribe to any of that democratic/free-market ideology. The other possibility is of course that you did at one point in time think that ideology great but then for "pragmatic" reasons found it more convenient to deny it and were subsequently forced to produce strange excuses.
I've never read any convincing argument that Linux is more successful than BSD because of its licence.
One only has to look both at the number of developers and users of GPL vs that of BSD. If BSD was indeed superior, or even equal, the natural process would be to equalize the two. The number of GPLed projects on sourceforge/freshmeat is something like 90% even though one can use BSDL software on Linux. The percentage of GPL packages in all of Linux distros is similiarly high. There are some major non-GPL projects such as Apache or X but their licenses are the result of their academic origins. I know from personal experience that if it were not for GPL many of the developers would not touch linux or its applications with a ten-foot pole. BSD is in the minds of many simply an invitation to give and get nothing in return and maybe even watch your own code being sold back to you.
A lot of early Linux users undoubtedly used Linux instead of BSD for the same reason (the USL lawsuit prevented them using BSD), and after that it was largely a matter of network economics.
If it were true, there would be wide-spread efforts by vast hordes of "viral-GPL-hatin'" developers to "restore order" and go back to pure BSD environment. After all, the lawsuits are already safely settled. In case you did not notice, no such movement (of any meaningful size) exists except of a few trolls (who curiously write no code) on Slashdot harping about how GPL offends their Libertarian/Capitalist sensibilities.
Given the broad success of OpenSSH, the X Window System, Mach, BSD sockets, Apache, et al, it's abundantly clear that the BSDL (or similar) doesn't prevent open source software being successful, or prevent corporate use of it. I think licensing ideologues on both sides (GPL and BSDL) tend to overestimate rather severely the importance of the licence. Things like meeting the needs of users and network economics matter a lot more than BSDL v GPL.
While it is true that BSDL does not prevent wide community acceptance, in projects where the code is clearly dominant, you should note that GPL people will contribute to them, if they must, on an exception basis, because they see them as critical to their operation and at the same time they see these projects as being in no danger of being commercially sold or in some other way hijacked by some corporation. I personally belive that it is a rather gullible stance but so far any major disasters have yet to befall these projects. Perhaps their high profile is what makes their safety possible. At the same time however most developers are very upset at any GPL violations by embedded hardware makers who sneakily attempt to use Linux kernel in their products which leads me to believe that GPL/BSDL are not "all the same" and pragmatically interchangeable to most people.
The "progressive" left really. needs to get a sense of humor.
My sense of humour took a serious beating once people started dying in large numbers over stupidity of some assholes who disdain reason and who "make their own reality".
And there's no escape - like the fundie right, you see everything through filters which prevent contradictory information from bothering you.
Its the exact oposite, this crap bothers me too much, I admit.
Choose to be happy and successful.
Its hard to be happy when you see everything you cherish being damaged so badly that many generations will likely pass before any of it returns to its former glory.
Actually, I think that there *should* be a priviledged chamber. A nation has to be a (real) democracy to have a seat at the grownup's table. Representation based on population/GDP/how much they fund the UN.
This would be a recipe for disaster. Who would decide who is "grown up"? The faith in the US democracy is razor thin these days for most people in the planet, for example.
It also reaks of the "old good days" of colonialism where white Caucasians get to lecture and admonish all those brown skinned "undemocratic" nations and boss them around in the finest of "daddy knows best" traditions of arrogance and hubris. A guaranteed way to create massive tension on global scale. Imagine for example over a billion or so impoverished Muslims in "un-priviledged" nations against the "priviledged" West. A situation which would breed terror and bloody wars where the said whites invade the "backwards" countries to "liberate" them because they are not "grownups"...
You reply with a rant about US brutlity and oppression as if that makes the corruption in the UN OK? I'm sorry you hate America so much, but what does that have to do with the UN's complete ineffectiveness in recent years?
Perhaps it has something to do with fact that the US doing everything in its power to make the UN ineffective? Following which various right-wing pundits honk their horns about how ineffective the UN is...
Responding to a tsunami with a fact-finding committee (while the US military delivered aid immediately and sustained that effort for weeks until asked to leave) didn't exactly redeem them.
Vast majority of UN members delivered some aid directly, in the beginning days, but unfortunately did it only so that the politicians in all those countries could do all sorts of photo ops posturing how great they are and thus UN was in the way and was sidelined. A lot of phony pledges were made at that time. UN is now slowly picking up the pieces, doing slow unglamorous work in still affected areas, long after the photo opportunities have passed and most of the loudly promised aid money did not materialize.
Moving the UN to, say, Fargo, North Dakota would probably cut down the UN workforce to people that are actually trying to accomplish something.
Actually, not a bad idea. Or better yet some place really unhospitable, Northern Canada for example. This would also have a bonus of preventing easy access to terrorists and should they somehow succeed, the place would be isolated anyhow.
There's no shortage of countries that could be on the commission that aren't, say, Libya.
The commission appointments are political and the result of behind-the-scenes power struggles. I for one am of a long-standing view that many reforms are required at the UN to ensure far greater transparency and democratization of the place. Security Council and all sorts of other priviledged chambers have to go. The appointments have to be based on demonstrable merit etc. But that is another and very long discussion.
Yugoslavia was thorougly fucked up by all sides, US also ending up with a sizable chunk of dung of its own. The very breakup of the country was instigated by various foreign interests.
Rwanda?
Rwanda was a (botched) UN mission.
And you know how the UN peacekeepers thing works, right? The countries that provide peacekeepers get so much money per day per soldier. Plenty of third world countries fund their militaries by renting out some of their soldiers to the UN. Most peacekeepers don't have lofty motives like the Danes, Swedes, or, yes, even the lowly America
And in many cases it is the Americans and others who have ulterior motives. And in many places one has to use local troops due to their much better handle on local tribal and ethnic problems. It is not a clear cut issue.
It's just messed up - don't make excuses for them.
Who is making excuses for them? They've been busted and prosecuted and rightfully so. But the parent poster is trying to insinuate that rape is somehow part of UN mandate or policy instead of being an abberation resulting from under-funding and other recent structural problems.
If you are with NYPD and would like to discuss thousands of dollars of unpaid parking tickets or hit and run homicides involving drunken drivers with diplomatic immunity, press 6 now
This is a problem with all diplomats everywhere. Recently in Canada a drunk Russian diplomat run over a woman on a sidewalk. Unlike (what appears to be totally incompetent) US authorities, Canadians reacted with skill and the Russian was tried and is doing jail time... in Russia. Such is the matter of diplomatic immunity, lest you will have right-wing fanatics prosecuting the Venezuelan ambassador in the US for "theft" or "hate crimes" since Chavez refuses to give away his country's oil fields to US companies.
If you would like to nominate North Korea or Cuba to lead the Human Rights Commission
And things like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib make the US look qualified?
What is that "emergency" you speak of? Vietnam? Panama? Grenada? Nicaragua? Venezuela? Iraq?
Oil-for-food was the result of US insistence on punishing sanctions and it was supervised by the US among others. US firms are part of the scandal.
The brutal opression is most likely US-sponsored or tacitly approved and the US who will veto any attempts at its correction, unless your dictator happens to have become "uppity" and refuses to follow US foreign policy dictates. In which case the US will replace him with another or prehaps an Islamic republic if things go haywire.
"Anti-semitic" resolutions? You mean any resolution criticising Israel? Yes of course, we know that anyone who dares to make a beep about what Israel does is immediately a terrorist-loving, anti-semitic jihadi.
UN peacekeepers are deployed to many former combat zones all over the world for many decades now and their performance was in most cases impeccable. While there are instances of failures (such as some recent African genocides) they are far and few in between. The recent failures are of course the result of the rich countries' (US in the lead) refusal to participate in most of these missions or US-specific condition that it has to lead and control any UN mission, resulting in the inevietable failure of the mission.
As to rape, you should stop barking lest I will link to some exploits of one Lynndie England and company who, unlike the errant UN soldiers, had authorization to do what she did all the way to the top of the command chain.
"The RTG will destroy the world."
"Even a tiny amount of that Plutonium could kill MILLIONS!"
"Plutonium is the most toxic substance in existance!" (Hi Nader!)
I am sure you can find some wackos who would go "All those ex-inhabitants if Chernobyl are wimps, I would raise children and grow tomatoes there!", "I eat plutonium for breakfast, it adds a zing to my toast!", "Look Ma, them gamma rays are harmless, and warm and tingly too!", "I would like to glow in the dark, it would be cool!" etc.
"We're all going to die!"
Quite true, unfortunately.
Just to be clear, I was referring to the LEO -> Mars or Luna -> Mars boost. i.e. CEV Mars Spiral.
I have no problem with that as long as the fuel can be delivered to orbit safely instead of ending up in my strawberries or tuna.
Unfortunate for the left-wing nut jobs, they're just going to have to deal with it.
Unfortunately, some of those "left-wing nut jobs" have quite valid points. Reasonable people try to follow logic and common sense wherever they might lead, inacurate political labels intended to simplify things for small minds not withstanding. So even though I find myself in agreement with many of those calling themselves "liberal" or "progressive", I also find many of the so called "conservative" notions valid and I do not dismiss them out of hand merely based on their source.
Coming back to your favourite claim, something we already discussed, the problem is not some hysterical nuclear-fuel fobia on the part of some nebulous "vast left-wing conspiracy" but some rather common sense technical problems with fission based technologies and their nuclear fuel. So while safely encased thermal nuclear batteries launched in vehicles which are safely directed over unpopulated areas are quite acceptable to me, any more powerful but also less controllable and subsequently far more dangerous ideas such as nuclear engines used for liftoff are basically out of the question until someone comes up with a way of guaranteeing their integrity in the critical period of their operation.
As to "dealing with it" it is the technocrats which will have to deal with the fact that technology by itself is not the goal of society but merely a tool meant for the betterment of life and therefore subservient to the needs of society, no matter how "cool" some ideas are.
It only falls apart if Tridgell was observing the BitKeeper traffic without the permission of one of the licensees.
After some investigating, I found out that Tridgell was actually exploiting a licensing loophole. He connected to a public server using telnet on the client protocol port. The protocol apparently was decipherable that way and the anonymous, public server did not display any license. Thus he did not need anyone's permission, Larry simply screwed up by not anticipating that someone can bypass the client and access the server directly, a server which was publicly accessible (as it had to be for Linux kernel development) and run by Larry himself out of his office. Thus Larry had tied all his extensive efforts in licensing to the client software and neglected to make the server prompt for any sort of license confirmation. This oversight is what prevented Larry from pursuing Tridgell through courts, which as far as I can tell about Larry, he would have loved to do. Thus none of the analogies proposed so far is really fitting the situation.
The only point is that Larry was not asking Linus or anyone else using his software to pay him, or to otherwise buy 'Larry gas' or anything else from him.
No but he was putting onerous demands and restrictions on the use of the BK client while he benefited from the publicity and while he caused other practical grief for many developers.
This is the practical use for which Linus wanted it. If its use led to ideological conflicts between GNU ideologues (like Tridgell) and Linux pragmatists (like Linus), this was an ideological problem, and not related at all to the suitability of BitKeeper for tracking revisions to the Linux kernel.
It was far more serious then simply the already serious ideological problem. I will bypass for the moment the fact that many kernel developers develop because of the GPL nature of the kernel and just focus on these practical aspects: the BK license prevented many developers from using BK. Alan Cox who is a major figure in the kernel development crowd was for example prevented from using it because the overly onerous license demanded that anyone whose employer (RedHat in this case) as much as distributes another source control system (all the SC systems in RedHat distro) is forbidden from using BK. Same goes for all Debian developers etc etc. Add to this the fact that many developers are using GPL software so that they can modify their tools. Combine this with the fact that a large portion is also here so that they can escape vendor lock-in and yet look at how Larry was treating them, etc and so on.
Larry was simply greedy and paranoid in the extreme and it is that overzealous paranoia which brought the BK use for Linux kernel down in the end as it made a lot of people very crossed by the practical (in addition to ideological) problems it caused.
The facts are: (a) BitKeeper was technically suitable for revision control of the Linux kernel; (b) it is no longer used because of ideological, not technical or economic, reasons; (c) the development of git has imposed an opportunity cost, in that the time Linus and others have used to develop it could otherwise have been used to improve Linux itself.
(a1) While it was technically suitable for some it was legally not available for many top developers causing them additional conversion steps and impeding their efforts, it caused technical problems for those who had customized their revision control system previously and, most importantly, it alienated a significant portion (a vast majority in my opinion) of developers who consider the ideological aspect of Linux to be the primary reason they are developing for it in the first place.
Noone has run a poll but from reading the LKML for a long time, I am quite certain that the GPL folks outnumber the "pragmatists" 2:1 at least.
To make a long story short, Linus used BK because it was conveni
Wasn't Tridgell quoted as saying he did? I don't have the source article so I could be wrong.
I did provide you with a quote from him claiming that he did not use BK, just a few posts back.
What's with getting personal all the time? In the schools of my country it is called "playing the man and not the ball" and is greatly disparaged.
I did not intend that to be read as a personal attack on you (although Larry is a different matter -- he deserves it), the word "fantasize" was meant to humorously express my finding of your claims being rather hard to believe. It appears it was not as funny as I thought.
That is incorrect - he logged into bitkeeper with a username and password supplied with telnet to the port and typed "help". I suggest you actually reread the bit you quoted a couple of posts above!
That user name and password was "anonymous", "anonymous". Also even if someone would have provided Tridgell with the uid/password, the license terms neglected to forbid such a situation due to Larry's oversight as the license was (extensively) concerned with various uses of the client software but failed to mention any uid/password restrictions.
The method was using the bitkeeper software without permission, which really makes it the core of the discussion.
The public client protocol login did not display the license and did not request for confirmation of acceptance since Larry assumed the client software was the only useful way to access the server and it was the client which had the license restrictions on it. And that is why Tridgell did not use the client. Larry simply did not think anyone could be clever enough to figure out the protocol by interacting directly with the public server to circumvent the license.
Larry did not tell Tridgell the username and password to use.
He did not have to. The anonymous BK server access was a part of the basic requirement for community access.
It is very simple - person gives out password they are not supposed to, employer of person loses right to use software when vendoir gets annoyed at this breach of trust. Can it really be stated any simpler than that?
No such person existed. And even if it did, which it did not, the transfer of uid/password was not restricted in the license. The transfer/use of the client software was.
Look, it is really simple. If any of what you fantasize about was true, knowing Larry's rather well documented personality, Tridgell and the password/username provider would be by now dragged through the courts on "breach of contract" charges. But even Larry could see he screwed up and his legal options were nil.
As I was tempted after the "packet sniffing" assumption - even if you examine the above quoted text you will see a reference to "telnet" and a "help function".
Consider the obvious: from the discussion long ago, full of flame wars, I recalled that Tridgell was not using BK when he did his bit of subtrefuge. I did not investigate at the time the particular method he was using (or I forgot by now, which has the same effect). A method which is irrelevant to the discussion, as it would not have mattered if he was using divination and chicken entrails. I assumed (incorrectly) that he was packet sniffing until you made me go out and find quotes for you. Which of course took nothing away from my original argument: Tridgell was not using the BK client and thus was not bound by its license terms.
As to the server, it appears that Larry screwed up by not displaying the licence agreement on login (available to all) into the server on the client protocol level which was explicitely provided for use by the community at large... and run by Larry himself out of BitMover's office. Larry simply assumed that the client is the choke point for his licence which Tridgell skillfully circumnavigated. Such is the fate of self-centered megalomaniacs who place all sorts of demands on people and are so absorbed by defending those demands that they end up overlooking some obvious loophole.
Which clauses are utterly attrocious and unreasonable?
I dunno, maybe something like this:
(d) Notwithstanding any other terms in this License, this License is not available to You if You and/or your employer develop, produce, sell, and/or resell a product which contains substantially similar capabil- ities of the BitKeeper Software, or, in the reason- able opinion of BitMover, competes with the BitKeeper Software.
One of the two parties gave access to a third, breaking one of the terms of the licence. Tridgell didn't break the licence, but the person who gave him access did, so the vendor decided this breach of trust warranted taking away the right to use the software.
You mean Larry himself was breaching his own trust by allowing Tridgell to telnet into BitMover? You should write comedy.
It's very, very simple - the person who gave the third party access broke the terms of the licence by giving Tridgell access, a bit was written about it at the time among all the noise.An agreement was made and was broken.
Quoth Tridgell:
As I have stated previously, my code was written without using bk. Some people expressed some skepticism over that, perhaps because they haven't noticed that bk servers have online protocol help (just type 'help' into a telnet session). I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that this help was intended for people like myself who wished to implement new clients.
I can very safely assume from this comment that the previous poster managed to avoid reading anything about the incident.
In light of the previous I should really cease to take you seriously.
assumed someone who would reply to my comment would know what happened with Bitkeeper.
See above.
This "for us or against us" attitude is just silly, Larry is not automaticly evil becuase his licence is not the GPL.
It is not question of being "evil" just because the license was not GPL. Larry is well within his rights to make any license he wants and try to foist in on whomever is silly enough to go along. But in this case it was not only an issue of the licence being utterly attrocious and unreasonable but on top of that the use of BitKeeper caused all sorts of practical problems for people, the same people who went to Linux in order to escape proprietary lock-in by vendors and from a desire for their tools to customizable by themselves, both of which BitKeeper was not. Not to mention that some of them were outright prohibited from using BitKeeper due to their involvement in other projects which Larry disliked.
I do not wish to get involved in a tit-for-tat, "my analogy is better then yours" type of thing, but please note that yours falls apart at this point:
Someone lent one of the cars to another friend
It is my understanding that Tridgell was not using BitKeeper in any way but was observing the on-line protocol by tapping traffic between end-points. Which negates your whole premise. Noone has "lent" him a car. In your analogy, Tridgell was standing on a street and took photos of the cars as they went by following which he proceeded to make his own compatible one.
I'm sure there are problems with this analogy too, but the basic point is the agreement between Linus and Larry was mutually beneficial (in practical terms, not GNU/FSF ideological terms) until some people who disagreed with it for ideological reasons spoilt things.
Actually no. It was anything but practical (although it was beneficial to Linus personally). Linus dropped the ball on this one, his personal friendship with Larry and subsequent infatuation with BitKeeper went against the grain of the whole Linux development process and was causing major disruptions and upheavals in the mailing lists and amongst the developers. Linus tried to enforce his personal preference upon everyone else, disregarding a significant portion of the kernel developer's opinions. Add to this the fact that BitKeeper license was one of most attrocious, outrageous and megalomaniac pieces of self-ego-stroking crap masquarading as a license to ever hit the FSF world. Including provisions like demands that noone who uses BitKeeper is allowed to work on any competing product even if they are not using BitKeeper for that purpose.
Linus made an error and he paid for it by losing a significant portion of his stature and respect people had for him. After the fiasco blew up in his face he managed to recover somewhat by quickly moving to disprove his own earlier claims of insurmountable difficulties of automating kernel source management by creating the "git" system which is by now superior to BitKeeper in most respects. But a lot of people will remember this massive screwup which exposed Linus for his lack of principles and will no longer trust him to make the right call as they did before.
To put it another way, against the terms of the licence someone gave a person who had not agreed to the licence access and they used this access to start to reverse engineer the software.
Licences between two parties are not binding on 3rd, unrelated parties. I have no idea how Tridgell accessed the protocol but he at the time claimed to have been doing so without the need for him to run the client nor the server. I assume packet sniffing was involved.
We can't play games and say there is no licence that is valid other than the one we personally like - SCO is playing that game and will most likely face consequeces for it someday.
This is not a question of choosing to abide by one license and ignoring another, it is simply about unwillingness of unrelated people to abide by some arbitrary license rules created by others to which they did not agree. By your logic, Larry could have demanded that you transfer a payment to his bank account as soon as you hear the words "Bit Keeper", even though you never used his product and never agreed to anything.
I would have at least respected the fact that Linus prefers BitKeeper unless I could put together a system to replace it.
But Linus was wrong in this also. It turned out that BitKeeper could be replaced within weeks of Larry's going crazy. The "git" revision control system was constructed by Linus with a lot of willing help by others, because, unlike BitKeeper, git is GPL software. So not only was Linus wrong as to his short-sighted reliance on closed source from assholes like Larry, but the whole "unique" quality of BitKeeper was proven to be utter hogwash within weeks. The end result is quite positive in my books, Larry was put in his place and Linux (and the whole FS community) now have a superior and truly free system. The only regret is that this should have happened without imtermissions and detours instigated by the likes of Larry and the "pragmatic" members of Linux community who do not subscribe to its phillosophy and instead are here just to get something working for themselves now, without any care as to consequences of their actions for others or even long-term repercussions for themselves.
Because of those FS advocates. It's no different if a friend (and I use the term loosely) tells you not to buy a new Ford Mustang, and then steals it when you do. That's what we call fucked up.
Your analogy and attribution of blame are both nonsensical. The FS advocates claimed that granting a single individual whole and absolute control over revision control system was foolish. The individual in question, Larry, did prove them right by going off and demanding that 3rd parties cease and desist doing what was not only perfectly within their rights but what is the cornerstone of the whole FS movement: providing compatibility based on reverse-engineering of protocols.
To come back to your "analogy", it would be as if a friend advised you not to use a Larry's Specially Converted Ford Mustang which runs only on Larry Gas (tm). Following which some unrelated party attempted to produce a compatible version of Larry Gas to which Larry reacted by coming over and smashing the Mustang to pieces.
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He is a scammer and yes, I do not argue against his being charged with fraud or similar. What I am arguing against is the type of the crime he commited, as in "fraud" vs "theft".
Trouble with all your analogies is this: none of the players own anything at all. NCsoft does retain all rights and the non-existant, virtual, make-believe "property" resides in their database to be expunged at will. Furthermore, even if the player did have rights, the virtual puffs of electrons which you say have value because some idiots believe they can be traded for good money are effortlessly duplicated ad infinitum.
As per capitalist theory, trade can only apply to private property and labour. Private property can only be physical (but sometimes can be represented by an abstraction, such as your bank account balance which corresponds to physical cash the bank owes you). This whole new world of "virtual" "intellectual property" is a scam for the gullible and an excuse to ship manufacturing overseas.
It rather sucks that I have to be in a middle of one.
(b) you have no control over.
We do have a certain degree of control. Individually our input is miniscule but in large numbers we can effect significant changes. I now see that your philosophy is not only to selectively ignore the surroundings in favour of internal state of bliss but also to do so out of a form of defeatism: "Why should I worry my pretty mind over things? I cant do anything about anything anyhow. Lets party!". I think you are trying to help but this sort of approach is not suitable for many people. Many of us do not have the luxury of turning off our intelects at will. I think the other part of the problem is that some people care for the fate of society on a personal level, while some do not have that sort of attachment. Were I a Libertarian, I would instead, probably, be busy trying to figure how big a yacht to buy with the proceeds of my latest investment scam involving orphans and widows. Or something of the sort.
(a) price will have no effect on demand,
Most peak oil estimates take the price/supply relationships into account.
(b) oil companies, instead of pretending that oil is more scarce than it really is in order to drive up prices, are actually pretending that oil is more plentiful than it really is to drive down prices
This simplistic idea does not take into account the fact that most of oil reserves are in Saudi Arabian fields whose condition is kept secret (but sordid state of which can be indirectly inferred by compiling leaked data as experts have done) and that discovery of new fields has steadily declined since 1960s. Saudi Arabia and other oil producers are faced with this problem: oil too cheap = little profit, oil too expensive = economic slowdown and possible military action should panic over remaining reserves insue. It is not in the producer's interest to have galloping oil prices, a stable, or slow increase is their desired state. The oil producers are already in the crisis mode as we speak as they are unable to halt the rise in prices.
Add to this the lopsided nature of oil use. Factor in the spare capacity not keeping up with price this time around and you will hopefully start to see the picture.
(c) we won't just shrug and move to a better power source.
I would like to point out to you the fact that there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels available presently. All the technological solutions are at this point pipe dreams, not available even on a fraction of the required scale should oil supplies faulter by even 10-20% from present levels. I dont think you realise that most of the components of most technological products are made of plastic which is made of ... oil. Not to mention that for over 40 years some reckless idiots bamboozled the public into total dependency on cars for everything, including delivery of daily food and 2-hour urban sprawl commutes. I truly do not think you see the scope of the problem and the social impact of restricting the primary source of energy and plastics. We are talking total economic pandemonium here.
And that is on top of record levels of personal and national debt.
Combine this with the autocratic cultural trends of late and things are starting to look decidedly grim.
What are you going to do if there is *no* disaster? Have you done much planning for that contingency? Working towards a better job, saving money for retirement, enjoying new the wonderful things right there in the world around you? It never hurts to be prepared!
I never claimed not to be planning ahead and not proceeding with my life just
All of which existed as far back as Ancient Classical culture. You must be seriously mis-interpreting what de Tocqueville said or he had issues.
We have a mis-understanding here. I am not claiming that all things are now at the point where they were in Middle Ages or during WWII in Europe or some such nonsense. But the vector of change in areas about which I care about is downhill. The fact that we have not yet reached the abyss is not a good agrument against being worried about the direction of changes.
You're projecting changes over less than 10 years indefintely into the future, and that's just nuts!
The problem looks very serious to me because it appears that fundamental equations of society are changing. That is, the values of enlightenment are being replaced on a large scale by those of theocracy/authoritarianism. This might not look like a gigiantic problem to you but it is. Historically, human civilization goes through cyclical changes where various factions fighting for dominance get upper hand. The so called Dark Ages were a result of culture being dominated by a particular world-view. So was Reneissance. I simply see all the indicators aligned to point to the decline of post-WWII era of modernity and a new, powerful, force of Theocratic Narcissism arising. These changes, historically, last generations. That is why I am "projecting" the changes of last 10 years far into the future. I believe that this trend will last for a very long time, and cause untold suffering, before it is reversed.
To take a random example: is the USA-PATRIOT act the beginnnnig of the end for civil liberties?
The act is but an element in an array of things occuring recently that diminish greatly your (and mine) personal liberties. Combined they represent a great setback already. One of the most worrying elements of this, is the failure (and outright takeover by corporate interests) of the mass media and decline of journalism to be replaced by shilling punditry. News replaced by "infotainment". This leads to a failure of the democratic institutions as a whole, a process which is well advanced both in the USA and here in Canada. Internet does not appear to offer a respite in this, and only servers to further polarize the populace.
Not to judge by every previous war.
Every war is different and has different effects.
This is the least reduction in civil liberties we've ever had during a war, and civil liberties have been on an upward trend since the founding of this country, despite far worse swings in all prior wars.
I disagree. The previous wars had different setbacks. This time the people in the USA (and most of the West) lost ability to communicate without secret surveilance, to travel freely without being subjected to intrusive searches and outright, secret bans, they lost the right to fair trial, and are on the brink of ubiquitous surveilance (in urban areas), etc. Some of these things were simply not technologically possible in the past. Myself (as a Canadian), I am also in danger of wanton, secret, extra-judicial and extra-ordinary rendition (even though I am not a Muslim) just because I am not a citizen of USA, as soon as some idiot makes an error on a "no-fly" or some other list of "undesirables".
Did we round up all the Muslims and stick em in concentration camps?
You are very close to doing that and so is Britain. Michelle Malkin (one of your cherished by the "right-wing" pundits) wrote a well-received book on the virtues of internment and racial profiling. The liberal forces in your country are at this point on the defensive and I dont think they will regain their former power even if they were to win the next elections. The forces of Theocratic Stupidity had worked decades (35 years or so) to achieve their penetration into the society and even here in Canada they are becoming a frightening feature.
If you're emotionally upset over two or three Americans being imprisoned without trial (as opp
This is one of those muddled stances I was referring to. It is like claiming that you set up a democratic, free-market system in your country, complete with balance of power provisions in its constitution and all the related bells and whistles in a tribute to ... USA's space program only, but do not actually subscribe to any of that democratic/free-market ideology. The other possibility is of course that you did at one point in time think that ideology great but then for "pragmatic" reasons found it more convenient to deny it and were subsequently forced to produce strange excuses.
I've never read any convincing argument that Linux is more successful than BSD because of its licence.
One only has to look both at the number of developers and users of GPL vs that of BSD. If BSD was indeed superior, or even equal, the natural process would be to equalize the two. The number of GPLed projects on sourceforge/freshmeat is something like 90% even though one can use BSDL software on Linux. The percentage of GPL packages in all of Linux distros is similiarly high. There are some major non-GPL projects such as Apache or X but their licenses are the result of their academic origins. I know from personal experience that if it were not for GPL many of the developers would not touch linux or its applications with a ten-foot pole. BSD is in the minds of many simply an invitation to give and get nothing in return and maybe even watch your own code being sold back to you.
A lot of early Linux users undoubtedly used Linux instead of BSD for the same reason (the USL lawsuit prevented them using BSD), and after that it was largely a matter of network economics.
If it were true, there would be wide-spread efforts by vast hordes of "viral-GPL-hatin'" developers to "restore order" and go back to pure BSD environment. After all, the lawsuits are already safely settled. In case you did not notice, no such movement (of any meaningful size) exists except of a few trolls (who curiously write no code) on Slashdot harping about how GPL offends their Libertarian/Capitalist sensibilities.
Given the broad success of OpenSSH, the X Window System, Mach, BSD sockets, Apache, et al, it's abundantly clear that the BSDL (or similar) doesn't prevent open source software being successful, or prevent corporate use of it. I think licensing ideologues on both sides (GPL and BSDL) tend to overestimate rather severely the importance of the licence. Things like meeting the needs of users and network economics matter a lot more than BSDL v GPL.
While it is true that BSDL does not prevent wide community acceptance, in projects where the code is clearly dominant, you should note that GPL people will contribute to them, if they must, on an exception basis, because they see them as critical to their operation and at the same time they see these projects as being in no danger of being commercially sold or in some other way hijacked by some corporation. I personally belive that it is a rather gullible stance but so far any major disasters have yet to befall these projects. Perhaps their high profile is what makes their safety possible. At the same time however most developers are very upset at any GPL violations by embedded hardware makers who sneakily attempt to use Linux kernel in their products which leads me to believe that GPL/BSDL are not "all the same" and pragmatically interchangeable to most people.
My sense of humour took a serious beating once people started dying in large numbers over stupidity of some assholes who disdain reason and who "make their own reality".
And there's no escape - like the fundie right, you see everything through filters which prevent contradictory information from bothering you.
Its the exact oposite, this crap bothers me too much, I admit.
Choose to be happy and successful.
Its hard to be happy when you see everything you cherish being damaged so badly that many generations will likely pass before any of it returns to its former glory.
This would be a recipe for disaster. Who would decide who is "grown up"? The faith in the US democracy is razor thin these days for most people in the planet, for example.
It also reaks of the "old good days" of colonialism where white Caucasians get to lecture and admonish all those brown skinned "undemocratic" nations and boss them around in the finest of "daddy knows best" traditions of arrogance and hubris. A guaranteed way to create massive tension on global scale. Imagine for example over a billion or so impoverished Muslims in "un-priviledged" nations against the "priviledged" West. A situation which would breed terror and bloody wars where the said whites invade the "backwards" countries to "liberate" them because they are not "grownups" ...
Oh, wait.
Ah, I see, you are one of those.
You reply with a rant about US brutlity and oppression as if that makes the corruption in the UN OK? I'm sorry you hate America so much, but what does that have to do with the UN's complete ineffectiveness in recent years?
Perhaps it has something to do with fact that the US doing everything in its power to make the UN ineffective? Following which various right-wing pundits honk their horns about how ineffective the UN is...
Responding to a tsunami with a fact-finding committee (while the US military delivered aid immediately and sustained that effort for weeks until asked to leave) didn't exactly redeem them.
Vast majority of UN members delivered some aid directly, in the beginning days, but unfortunately did it only so that the politicians in all those countries could do all sorts of photo ops posturing how great they are and thus UN was in the way and was sidelined. A lot of phony pledges were made at that time. UN is now slowly picking up the pieces, doing slow unglamorous work in still affected areas, long after the photo opportunities have passed and most of the loudly promised aid money did not materialize.
Actually, not a bad idea. Or better yet some place really unhospitable, Northern Canada for example. This would also have a bonus of preventing easy access to terrorists and should they somehow succeed, the place would be isolated anyhow.
There's no shortage of countries that could be on the commission that aren't, say, Libya.
The commission appointments are political and the result of behind-the-scenes power struggles. I for one am of a long-standing view that many reforms are required at the UN to ensure far greater transparency and democratization of the place. Security Council and all sorts of other priviledged chambers have to go. The appointments have to be based on demonstrable merit etc. But that is another and very long discussion.
Yugoslavia was thorougly fucked up by all sides, US also ending up with a sizable chunk of dung of its own. The very breakup of the country was instigated by various foreign interests.
Rwanda?
Rwanda was a (botched) UN mission.
And you know how the UN peacekeepers thing works, right? The countries that provide peacekeepers get so much money per day per soldier. Plenty of third world countries fund their militaries by renting out some of their soldiers to the UN. Most peacekeepers don't have lofty motives like the Danes, Swedes, or, yes, even the lowly America
And in many cases it is the Americans and others who have ulterior motives. And in many places one has to use local troops due to their much better handle on local tribal and ethnic problems. It is not a clear cut issue.
Who is making excuses for them? They've been busted and prosecuted and rightfully so. But the parent poster is trying to insinuate that rape is somehow part of UN mandate or policy instead of being an abberation resulting from under-funding and other recent structural problems.
This is a problem with all diplomats everywhere. Recently in Canada a drunk Russian diplomat run over a woman on a sidewalk. Unlike (what appears to be totally incompetent) US authorities, Canadians reacted with skill and the Russian was tried and is doing jail time ... in Russia. Such is the matter of diplomatic immunity, lest you will have right-wing fanatics prosecuting the Venezuelan ambassador in the US for "theft" or "hate crimes" since Chavez refuses to give away his country's oil fields to US companies.
If you would like to nominate North Korea or Cuba to lead the Human Rights Commission
And things like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib make the US look qualified?
You are making it up:
What is that "emergency" you speak of? Vietnam? Panama? Grenada? Nicaragua? Venezuela? Iraq?
Oil-for-food was the result of US insistence on punishing sanctions and it was supervised by the US among others. US firms are part of the scandal.
The brutal opression is most likely US-sponsored or tacitly approved and the US who will veto any attempts at its correction, unless your dictator happens to have become "uppity" and refuses to follow US foreign policy dictates. In which case the US will replace him with another or prehaps an Islamic republic if things go haywire.
"Anti-semitic" resolutions? You mean any resolution criticising Israel? Yes of course, we know that anyone who dares to make a beep about what Israel does is immediately a terrorist-loving, anti-semitic jihadi.
UN peacekeepers are deployed to many former combat zones all over the world for many decades now and their performance was in most cases impeccable. While there are instances of failures (such as some recent African genocides) they are far and few in between. The recent failures are of course the result of the rich countries' (US in the lead) refusal to participate in most of these missions or US-specific condition that it has to lead and control any UN mission, resulting in the inevietable failure of the mission.
As to rape, you should stop barking lest I will link to some exploits of one Lynndie England and company who, unlike the errant UN soldiers, had authorization to do what she did all the way to the top of the command chain.
I am sure you can find some wackos who would go "All those ex-inhabitants if Chernobyl are wimps, I would raise children and grow tomatoes there!", "I eat plutonium for breakfast, it adds a zing to my toast!", "Look Ma, them gamma rays are harmless, and warm and tingly too!", "I would like to glow in the dark, it would be cool!" etc.
"We're all going to die!"
Quite true, unfortunately.
Just to be clear, I was referring to the LEO -> Mars or Luna -> Mars boost. i.e. CEV Mars Spiral.
I have no problem with that as long as the fuel can be delivered to orbit safely instead of ending up in my strawberries or tuna.
Unfortunately, some of those "left-wing nut jobs" have quite valid points. Reasonable people try to follow logic and common sense wherever they might lead, inacurate political labels intended to simplify things for small minds not withstanding. So even though I find myself in agreement with many of those calling themselves "liberal" or "progressive", I also find many of the so called "conservative" notions valid and I do not dismiss them out of hand merely based on their source.
Coming back to your favourite claim, something we already discussed, the problem is not some hysterical nuclear-fuel fobia on the part of some nebulous "vast left-wing conspiracy" but some rather common sense technical problems with fission based technologies and their nuclear fuel. So while safely encased thermal nuclear batteries launched in vehicles which are safely directed over unpopulated areas are quite acceptable to me, any more powerful but also less controllable and subsequently far more dangerous ideas such as nuclear engines used for liftoff are basically out of the question until someone comes up with a way of guaranteeing their integrity in the critical period of their operation.
As to "dealing with it" it is the technocrats which will have to deal with the fact that technology by itself is not the goal of society but merely a tool meant for the betterment of life and therefore subservient to the needs of society, no matter how "cool" some ideas are.
After some investigating, I found out that Tridgell was actually exploiting a licensing loophole. He connected to a public server using telnet on the client protocol port. The protocol apparently was decipherable that way and the anonymous, public server did not display any license. Thus he did not need anyone's permission, Larry simply screwed up by not anticipating that someone can bypass the client and access the server directly, a server which was publicly accessible (as it had to be for Linux kernel development) and run by Larry himself out of his office. Thus Larry had tied all his extensive efforts in licensing to the client software and neglected to make the server prompt for any sort of license confirmation. This oversight is what prevented Larry from pursuing Tridgell through courts, which as far as I can tell about Larry, he would have loved to do. Thus none of the analogies proposed so far is really fitting the situation.
The only point is that Larry was not asking Linus or anyone else using his software to pay him, or to otherwise buy 'Larry gas' or anything else from him.
No but he was putting onerous demands and restrictions on the use of the BK client while he benefited from the publicity and while he caused other practical grief for many developers.
This is the practical use for which Linus wanted it. If its use led to ideological conflicts between GNU ideologues (like Tridgell) and Linux pragmatists (like Linus), this was an ideological problem, and not related at all to the suitability of BitKeeper for tracking revisions to the Linux kernel.
It was far more serious then simply the already serious ideological problem. I will bypass for the moment the fact that many kernel developers develop because of the GPL nature of the kernel and just focus on these practical aspects: the BK license prevented many developers from using BK. Alan Cox who is a major figure in the kernel development crowd was for example prevented from using it because the overly onerous license demanded that anyone whose employer (RedHat in this case) as much as distributes another source control system (all the SC systems in RedHat distro) is forbidden from using BK. Same goes for all Debian developers etc etc. Add to this the fact that many developers are using GPL software so that they can modify their tools. Combine this with the fact that a large portion is also here so that they can escape vendor lock-in and yet look at how Larry was treating them, etc and so on.
Larry was simply greedy and paranoid in the extreme and it is that overzealous paranoia which brought the BK use for Linux kernel down in the end as it made a lot of people very crossed by the practical (in addition to ideological) problems it caused.
The facts are: (a) BitKeeper was technically suitable for revision control of the Linux kernel; (b) it is no longer used because of ideological, not technical or economic, reasons; (c) the development of git has imposed an opportunity cost, in that the time Linus and others have used to develop it could otherwise have been used to improve Linux itself.
(a1) While it was technically suitable for some it was legally not available for many top developers causing them additional conversion steps and impeding their efforts, it caused technical problems for those who had customized their revision control system previously and, most importantly, it alienated a significant portion (a vast majority in my opinion) of developers who consider the ideological aspect of Linux to be the primary reason they are developing for it in the first place.
Noone has run a poll but from reading the LKML for a long time, I am quite certain that the GPL folks outnumber the "pragmatists" 2:1 at least.
To make a long story short, Linus used BK because it was conveni
I did provide you with a quote from him claiming that he did not use BK, just a few posts back.
What's with getting personal all the time? In the schools of my country it is called "playing the man and not the ball" and is greatly disparaged.
I did not intend that to be read as a personal attack on you (although Larry is a different matter -- he deserves it), the word "fantasize" was meant to humorously express my finding of your claims being rather hard to believe. It appears it was not as funny as I thought.
That user name and password was "anonymous", "anonymous". Also even if someone would have provided Tridgell with the uid/password, the license terms neglected to forbid such a situation due to Larry's oversight as the license was (extensively) concerned with various uses of the client software but failed to mention any uid/password restrictions.
The method was using the bitkeeper software without permission, which really makes it the core of the discussion.
The public client protocol login did not display the license and did not request for confirmation of acceptance since Larry assumed the client software was the only useful way to access the server and it was the client which had the license restrictions on it. And that is why Tridgell did not use the client. Larry simply did not think anyone could be clever enough to figure out the protocol by interacting directly with the public server to circumvent the license.
Larry did not tell Tridgell the username and password to use.
He did not have to. The anonymous BK server access was a part of the basic requirement for community access.
It is very simple - person gives out password they are not supposed to, employer of person loses right to use software when vendoir gets annoyed at this breach of trust. Can it really be stated any simpler than that?
No such person existed. And even if it did, which it did not, the transfer of uid/password was not restricted in the license. The transfer/use of the client software was.
Look, it is really simple. If any of what you fantasize about was true, knowing Larry's rather well documented personality, Tridgell and the password/username provider would be by now dragged through the courts on "breach of contract" charges. But even Larry could see he screwed up and his legal options were nil.
Consider the obvious: from the discussion long ago, full of flame wars, I recalled that Tridgell was not using BK when he did his bit of subtrefuge. I did not investigate at the time the particular method he was using (or I forgot by now, which has the same effect). A method which is irrelevant to the discussion, as it would not have mattered if he was using divination and chicken entrails. I assumed (incorrectly) that he was packet sniffing until you made me go out and find quotes for you. Which of course took nothing away from my original argument: Tridgell was not using the BK client and thus was not bound by its license terms.
As to the server, it appears that Larry screwed up by not displaying the licence agreement on login (available to all) into the server on the client protocol level which was explicitely provided for use by the community at large ... and run by Larry himself out of BitMover's office. Larry simply assumed that the client is the choke point for his licence which Tridgell skillfully circumnavigated. Such is the fate of self-centered megalomaniacs who place all sorts of demands on people and are so absorbed by defending those demands that they end up overlooking some obvious loophole.
Which clauses are utterly attrocious and unreasonable?
I dunno, maybe something like this:
One of the two parties gave access to a third, breaking one of the terms of the licence. Tridgell didn't break the licence, but the person who gave him access did, so the vendor decided this breach of trust warranted taking away the right to use the software.
You mean Larry himself was breaching his own trust by allowing Tridgell to telnet into BitMover? You should write comedy.
Quoth Tridgell:
I can very safely assume from this comment that the previous poster managed to avoid reading anything about the incident.
In light of the previous I should really cease to take you seriously.
assumed someone who would reply to my comment would know what happened with Bitkeeper.
See above.
This "for us or against us" attitude is just silly, Larry is not automaticly evil becuase his licence is not the GPL.
It is not question of being "evil" just because the license was not GPL. Larry is well within his rights to make any license he wants and try to foist in on whomever is silly enough to go along. But in this case it was not only an issue of the licence being utterly attrocious and unreasonable but on top of that the use of BitKeeper caused all sorts of practical problems for people, the same people who went to Linux in order to escape proprietary lock-in by vendors and from a desire for their tools to customizable by themselves, both of which BitKeeper was not. Not to mention that some of them were outright prohibited from using BitKeeper due to their involvement in other projects which Larry disliked.
Someone lent one of the cars to another friend
It is my understanding that Tridgell was not using BitKeeper in any way but was observing the on-line protocol by tapping traffic between end-points. Which negates your whole premise. Noone has "lent" him a car. In your analogy, Tridgell was standing on a street and took photos of the cars as they went by following which he proceeded to make his own compatible one.
I'm sure there are problems with this analogy too, but the basic point is the agreement between Linus and Larry was mutually beneficial (in practical terms, not GNU/FSF ideological terms) until some people who disagreed with it for ideological reasons spoilt things.
Actually no. It was anything but practical (although it was beneficial to Linus personally). Linus dropped the ball on this one, his personal friendship with Larry and subsequent infatuation with BitKeeper went against the grain of the whole Linux development process and was causing major disruptions and upheavals in the mailing lists and amongst the developers. Linus tried to enforce his personal preference upon everyone else, disregarding a significant portion of the kernel developer's opinions. Add to this the fact that BitKeeper license was one of most attrocious, outrageous and megalomaniac pieces of self-ego-stroking crap masquarading as a license to ever hit the FSF world. Including provisions like demands that noone who uses BitKeeper is allowed to work on any competing product even if they are not using BitKeeper for that purpose.
Linus made an error and he paid for it by losing a significant portion of his stature and respect people had for him. After the fiasco blew up in his face he managed to recover somewhat by quickly moving to disprove his own earlier claims of insurmountable difficulties of automating kernel source management by creating the "git" system which is by now superior to BitKeeper in most respects. But a lot of people will remember this massive screwup which exposed Linus for his lack of principles and will no longer trust him to make the right call as they did before.
Licences between two parties are not binding on 3rd, unrelated parties. I have no idea how Tridgell accessed the protocol but he at the time claimed to have been doing so without the need for him to run the client nor the server. I assume packet sniffing was involved.
We can't play games and say there is no licence that is valid other than the one we personally like - SCO is playing that game and will most likely face consequeces for it someday.
This is not a question of choosing to abide by one license and ignoring another, it is simply about unwillingness of unrelated people to abide by some arbitrary license rules created by others to which they did not agree. By your logic, Larry could have demanded that you transfer a payment to his bank account as soon as you hear the words "Bit Keeper", even though you never used his product and never agreed to anything.
But Linus was wrong in this also. It turned out that BitKeeper could be replaced within weeks of Larry's going crazy. The "git" revision control system was constructed by Linus with a lot of willing help by others, because, unlike BitKeeper, git is GPL software. So not only was Linus wrong as to his short-sighted reliance on closed source from assholes like Larry, but the whole "unique" quality of BitKeeper was proven to be utter hogwash within weeks. The end result is quite positive in my books, Larry was put in his place and Linux (and the whole FS community) now have a superior and truly free system. The only regret is that this should have happened without imtermissions and detours instigated by the likes of Larry and the "pragmatic" members of Linux community who do not subscribe to its phillosophy and instead are here just to get something working for themselves now, without any care as to consequences of their actions for others or even long-term repercussions for themselves.
Your analogy and attribution of blame are both nonsensical. The FS advocates claimed that granting a single individual whole and absolute control over revision control system was foolish. The individual in question, Larry, did prove them right by going off and demanding that 3rd parties cease and desist doing what was not only perfectly within their rights but what is the cornerstone of the whole FS movement: providing compatibility based on reverse-engineering of protocols.
To come back to your "analogy", it would be as if a friend advised you not to use a Larry's Specially Converted Ford Mustang which runs only on Larry Gas (tm). Following which some unrelated party attempted to produce a compatible version of Larry Gas to which Larry reacted by coming over and smashing the Mustang to pieces.