Just a reminder that the burden is on the alarmists to prove that: climate change is occurring AND that it is anthropogenic AND that the change is economically significant AND that it's harmful AND that it can be altered through human behaviour AND the socialist plan they're pushing would be effective AND that their plan will do more good than harm AND that their plan is the best of all alternatives, including the free market / property rights based ideas on how to attribute liability for externalities like pollution. They can't even prove their first point without a massive amount of government bullying and deceit!
Virtually all of the data used in the global warming debate were either gathered, revised, or summarised by government institutions. A very large fraction of the data came from the former Eastern Block countries, where data fudging and other corruption were completely routine. Much of the data was gathered using different instruments with different levels of accuracy, and with the margin of error often being greater than the temperature rise being claimed. Things like increasing urbanisation surrounding weather stations were never accounted for. Methods of obtaining ancient temperature readings (ice core samples, tree rings, etc) are also limited in their precision, especially when you consider that arguments are being made on matters of a fraction of one degree. Temperature effects of not-yet-understood natural cycles (terrestrial as well as cosmic) were completely written out of the realm of possibility. Etc, etc, etc...
History is filled with examples of the "best minds" of every society being waaay off on very important things, and using state / church violence to enforce their folly on others. Scientists are not immune to groupthink - especially when their institutions are funded and regulated by a single self-serving power monopoly, and especially when the difference between being labelled a "genius" / "hero" or a "quack" / "killer" depends on following the party line. Being a climatologist and not pushing global warming means voting against your own job security and your self-esteem, as well as those of your colleagues, who would ostracise you, knowing that if the sky wasn't falling they'd be stuck teaching 7th grade science instead!
The parents / guardians should have the privilege and the responsibility of deciding whether their dependents are allowed to use the Internet and who they are allowed to communicate with. The free market can easily provide a mesh of products and services for monitoring a child's online activity and alerting the parents if certain criterias are breached. Trusting the unaccountable and violent power monopoly known as "government" with this responsibility will only help further consolidate its power!
The plaintiffs in GPL violation cases are usually the authors of similar / downstream code and/or organizations like FSF, just like the plaintiffs in other "intellectual property" cases may be the copyright / patent holders and/or organizations like RIAA or MPAA, but their ability to use legal force against the defendants comes from the government.
There is no such thing as a "natural right" to initiate aggression against someone because they allegedly violated the terms of a license.txt file on their computer!
Because, just like Microsoft, they rely on government force and the unnatural legal construct called "intellectual property" to get their way. Stallman (RMS) speaking out against the Pirate Party was the last straw. Like socialism / communism, GPL relies on an irrational philosophy of trying to force others to "do the right thing", and the license is getting ever-more restrictive with each version. The road to tyranny is always paved with benevolent rationalizations to use force for good!
RMS clearly believes either that all programmers should work for free (which isn't an option for anyone who isn't independently wealthy and/or wants to have a family, etc) or, more likely, that all software development should be subsidized by the governments, as is already the case in many publicly-funded universities. From my radical Anarcho-Capitalist point of view virtually all taxation constitutes theft, but this is an issue on which the more mainstream libertarians / fiscal conservatives would agree with me.
I don't have a problem with people releasing and using restrictively-licensed software, but I do have a problem with them calling it "free". That term should only apply to public domain software, as well as permissive "just cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD.
Like Microsoft and other for-profit software companies, the GPL gang uses government-based aggression in order to enforce its so-called "intellectual property rights", but what makes it worse is that using the latest crack from The Pirate Bay nor any amount of money would fix your GPL-related legal problem. Microsoft is able to invest billions into R&D to protect its market share by actually delivering value and innovation to its customers (not all of whom are software geeks), which is why it has been able to retain its market position for all this time. Restrictive licenses like GPL discourage free market competition! The software authors, acting in the context of the competitive environment, should get to decide what they can do with their source code, like include it in a proprietary project some time in the future.
Just look at how much good the small amount of permissively licensed software (ex. BSD, X, Apache, Xiph codecs, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Lua, etc) have done - pieces of that code are included in feature-competitive commercial products used by millions (or maybe already billions) of people all over the world! GPL, on the other hand, continues to be a black hole that companies like IBM and Oracle (both, interestingly enough, a part of the Military-Industrial Complex) continue to pour billions into, presumably in an ill-devised effort to hurt Microsoft, but in reality having a crummy-but-free desktop competitor only solidifies Microsoft's market dominance by crippling any serious proprietary competitors before they get a chance to get off the ground.
BSD is free software, GPL isn't!
(I know saying this will further push my karma toward negative infinity, but it is nonetheless true.)
Falling prices and eventual open-sourcing of software should come as the result of free market competition, not government force!
... at least not unless version 3 is a complete rewrite - a permissive license!
It's very important to people who don't want to cut off their freedom to later market their products for profit, or simply people who don't swallow Stallman's communist philosophy of using government force to enforce their so-called "intellectual property" (i.e. gpl-violations.org). BSD is free software, Linux isn't.
(I know saying this will further push my karma toward negative infinity, but it is nonetheless true.)
In order for a culture to be sustainable across many generations, it absolutely must maintain a rate of population growth that is competitive with other cultures. Since, try as they might, men still just don't seem to be able to birth as many children as women birth, some specialization of labor is unavoidable. Women are also hormonally predisposed for superhuman patience, kindness, multitasking abilities, and other faculties necessary for raising children, while men have evolved to have, on average, a greater spirit of materialistic achievement, beer consumption, upper body strength, and other skills essential to "bring home the bacon".
The juries are hand-picked and thoroughly screened to reject intelligence. Anyone who understands Jury Nullification or has as much as a twinkle in his eye about understanding what the actual role of the Jury is supposed to be (a counterbalance to the government, when necessary) is all but guaranteed to be excluded!
Since when does government care about justice? That would result in many people who run the government losing their cushy jobs, not to mention the basis of their irrational self-esteem. (Read Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden.) Government is incentivized to lie, cheat, steal, kill, imprison, torture, genocide, and do whatever else may be necessary to maintain and expand its power. It's as simple as that - centralized power corrupts!
Only an Anarcho-Capitalist society with polycentric jurisprudence can ever maintain stability and justice in the long-term, because there's no need for an all-powerful watcher to watch the watchers, the competing legal authorities as well as the public all watch each-other! (Read Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Bruce Benson, David Friedman, etc.) Given enough eyeballs, or all tyranny is shallow!
Only a handful of independent countries (ex. Singapore) score higher than USA on the Economic Freedom scale, which should be the most fundamental measure of one's freedom, but they are far more restrictive of civil liberties than USA is.
One's best hope for liberty still rests in staying in the U.S. and moving to one of its freer states, most notably New Hampshire. (Google the "Free State Project" for more info on that.) And, yes, secession IS a long-term possibility!
The mindless "kiddy porn" hysteria is out of control, and it's a canary in the coal-mine for further suppression of free speech, because all tyrannies wean themselves on suppressing the most unpopular freedoms first. Any dissident can now have doubleplusungood.png or crimethink.avi uploaded to his computer and deprived of his liberty for the rest of his life! (Being released from prison under the current "former sex offender" programs isn't much better than still being in prison!)
In most cases "kiddy porn" doesn't even depict an actual crime (the "market" is over-saturated with millions, someday an accumulation of billions of high school idiots posting pictures of themselves, as I once did), but even if it does - viewing an image of a crime is not same as committing it! In a rational world, the alleged victim and/or her parents / guardians should decide whether rape has taken place, with "bad parents" being subject to social ostracism and the child's Natural Right to sue for emancipation (jury-granted full sovereignty or transfer of custody). When government force is put in charge of regulating family life, the former grows beyond all bounds and the latter collapses! All those victimless restrictions on human sexuality only encourage violent rape, or the psychological projection of violence into other aspects of one's life!
No possible combination of 1's and 0's should EVER be illegal!
How many lives will the socialist propaganda like "global warming" will end up costing the human civilization? The answer can never be known, but it is clear that strengthening and centralizing government power disempowers all individuals and decelerates the rate of economic and technological growth, which has a negative effect on the quality of life as well as life expectancy of everyone alive today!
You need to re-read my post - I suggested that it might NOT have been forced.
Parents do have the Natural Right to brainwash their children into bizarre and irrational religions. And those children do have the right to stay in those religions when they grow up if they so choose.
The only limits to one's rights should be the rights of other human beings, and the one common limitation for freedom of speech is property rights. It is the property owner(s) who should decide who can come on his property, whether standing on a soapbox with a megaphone is allowed or not, and whether one is allowed to yell "fire". There is no such thing as a "positive right" to force someone to pay for your lunch, to prevent someone from talking about you on their property, and so on. It is your responsibility to register your property, put up warning signs if you don't want trespassers, and so on. You, not "mommy government", is responsible for configuring your servers to behave how you want them to behave!
If he started working there with the permission of his parents, and if his "right to emancipation" was not violated, and if he stayed there of his own free will - then there is a chance that the Church of Scientology has done nothing wrong, at least according to a rational approach to what law ought to be.
Government interventionism in private contracts (i.e. minimum wage) and family life (i.e. child labor laws) are socialist bullshit imposed by demagogues in order to legitimize their power!
Marxism is only a subset communism, and, furthermore, communism can be used as a relativistic term - Castro is more communist than Obama, Obama is more communist than Ron Paul, Ron Paul is more communist than Alex Libman, and so on. Similarly, BSD is more free than GPL.
The GPL *alone* and as *the only license in the universe-verse-verse-verse* would be vaguely communistic... maybe. (Let's not use the argument "if RMS had his way it would be the only license" because he won't have his way because freedom isn't about forcing your way on everyone else.)
Yes, and I'm making the argument why more people should choose permissive licenses like BSD, or, better yet, public domain.
RMS actually supports intellectual property laws, because copyleft software is unenforceable without them. He has probably done more to hurt the Pirate Party movement than the corporations have!
BUT - as I just hinted at - in the free market there is choice. The choice to sell. The choice to give away. The choice to do everything in between.
RMS & friends believe the government should do more to finance copyleft software - and when it comes to government an individual simply has no choice!
And as netcraft confirms - despite the OpenBSD box in my basement - BSD is dying.
It's about to get a second wind. Plus no one has heard my permissive software song yet:
Join us now and permissive-ize FLOSS software, You'll be free to closed-fork, hackers, you'll be freeeeeee-e! GPL'ers get more corporate funding, That is true, hackers, that is true-ue-u, But you can't static-link their libraries, That's not good, hackers, that's not goo-u-ood!
Adam Smith does not represent the latest word on Free Market Capitalism, the "Austrian school" economists and their intellectual descendants do. Capitalist philosophy is an empirically-derived system, like science, and our understanding of economics has improved over time, though it has unfortunately become corrupted by self-serving influence from a power-hungry government elite.
An economy is not truly free if there is a centralized government involved, because the government represents the very opposite of capitalist epistemology: it provides products / services through violent force! If Murray Rothbard is too difficult for you to read, you can find plenty of lighter materials to get you started (ex. Google: "market for liberty audiobook").
Now, let's get back to the ethical superiority of *BSD and how that will attract more developers in the future.
You clearly don't understand what a contract is and isn't. A contract is a meeting of minds, stated in written form, and insured to be enforceable by a neutral arbitration agency (not necessarily a centralized monopoly like government). A text file written in legalese in the same tar file as the code you're copying is not a contract!
But I'm not encouraging people to pirate software or violate GPL. My presence on this thread is intended to communicate that BSD is not dead, and there are good reasons why it may be resurrected in the future.
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
Put down the lynching rope, I'm not a Microsoft apologist! I'm a free market apologist, and my software paradigm of choice is permissively-licensed FLOSS. You're free to use GPL, and I'm free not to.
Old BSD shall rise again! Yee ha!
((Gallops into the sunset.)))
Re:Only copyleft is "commie", BSD isn't.
on
OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Raising the bar for competition" is exactly what BSD does, and just look at how much it helped Apple and Google to finally start offering some serious challenges to Microsoft. GPL actually helps the biggest commercial player (i.e. Microsoft) retain their position, because they can afford to put huge amounts of money into R&D while their would-be competitors cannot. Sure, GPL will eventually squeeze them out of some over-saturated fields, but Microsoft will always be able to invest in other things where it can make a profit: business services, hardware, and so on.
Calling me a "Microsoft apologist" does not change the basic economic facts. And, in reality, the only type of "monopoly" that has ever existed in human history was the regional hegemony of government force - everything else is subject to perpetual change.
Slashdot Mirror
That's 1 new story every 1.07 hours since September 1997.
Just a reminder that the burden is on the alarmists to prove that: climate change is occurring AND that it is anthropogenic AND that the change is economically significant AND that it's harmful AND that it can be altered through human behaviour AND the socialist plan they're pushing would be effective AND that their plan will do more good than harm AND that their plan is the best of all alternatives, including the free market / property rights based ideas on how to attribute liability for externalities like pollution. They can't even prove their first point without a massive amount of government bullying and deceit!
Virtually all of the data used in the global warming debate were either gathered, revised, or summarised by government institutions. A very large fraction of the data came from the former Eastern Block countries, where data fudging and other corruption were completely routine. Much of the data was gathered using different instruments with different levels of accuracy, and with the margin of error often being greater than the temperature rise being claimed. Things like increasing urbanisation surrounding weather stations were never accounted for. Methods of obtaining ancient temperature readings (ice core samples, tree rings, etc) are also limited in their precision, especially when you consider that arguments are being made on matters of a fraction of one degree. Temperature effects of not-yet-understood natural cycles (terrestrial as well as cosmic) were completely written out of the realm of possibility. Etc, etc, etc...
History is filled with examples of the "best minds" of every society being waaay off on very important things, and using state / church violence to enforce their folly on others. Scientists are not immune to groupthink - especially when their institutions are funded and regulated by a single self-serving power monopoly, and especially when the difference between being labelled a "genius" / "hero" or a "quack" / "killer" depends on following the party line. Being a climatologist and not pushing global warming means voting against your own job security and your self-esteem, as well as those of your colleagues, who would ostracise you, knowing that if the sky wasn't falling they'd be stuck teaching 7th grade science instead!
... I guess American Communism didn't reach their level of efficiency just yet.
The parents / guardians should have the privilege and the responsibility of deciding whether their dependents are allowed to use the Internet and who they are allowed to communicate with. The free market can easily provide a mesh of products and services for monitoring a child's online activity and alerting the parents if certain criterias are breached. Trusting the unaccountable and violent power monopoly known as "government" with this responsibility will only help further consolidate its power!
The plaintiffs in GPL violation cases are usually the authors of similar / downstream code and/or organizations like FSF, just like the plaintiffs in other "intellectual property" cases may be the copyright / patent holders and/or organizations like RIAA or MPAA, but their ability to use legal force against the defendants comes from the government.
There is no such thing as a "natural right" to initiate aggression against someone because they allegedly violated the terms of a license.txt file on their computer!
Because, just like Microsoft, they rely on government force and the unnatural legal construct called "intellectual property" to get their way. Stallman (RMS) speaking out against the Pirate Party was the last straw. Like socialism / communism, GPL relies on an irrational philosophy of trying to force others to "do the right thing", and the license is getting ever-more restrictive with each version. The road to tyranny is always paved with benevolent rationalizations to use force for good!
RMS clearly believes either that all programmers should work for free (which isn't an option for anyone who isn't independently wealthy and/or wants to have a family, etc) or, more likely, that all software development should be subsidized by the governments, as is already the case in many publicly-funded universities. From my radical Anarcho-Capitalist point of view virtually all taxation constitutes theft, but this is an issue on which the more mainstream libertarians / fiscal conservatives would agree with me.
I don't have a problem with people releasing and using restrictively-licensed software, but I do have a problem with them calling it "free". That term should only apply to public domain software, as well as permissive "just cover our legal butts" licenses like BSD.
Me being 5 IQ points smarter than I already am would crack the bell curve!
Now go to the kitchen and make me some popcorn.
Like Microsoft and other for-profit software companies, the GPL gang uses government-based aggression in order to enforce its so-called "intellectual property rights", but what makes it worse is that using the latest crack from The Pirate Bay nor any amount of money would fix your GPL-related legal problem. Microsoft is able to invest billions into R&D to protect its market share by actually delivering value and innovation to its customers (not all of whom are software geeks), which is why it has been able to retain its market position for all this time. Restrictive licenses like GPL discourage free market competition! The software authors, acting in the context of the competitive environment, should get to decide what they can do with their source code, like include it in a proprietary project some time in the future.
Just look at how much good the small amount of permissively licensed software (ex. BSD, X, Apache, Xiph codecs, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Lua, etc) have done - pieces of that code are included in feature-competitive commercial products used by millions (or maybe already billions) of people all over the world! GPL, on the other hand, continues to be a black hole that companies like IBM and Oracle (both, interestingly enough, a part of the Military-Industrial Complex) continue to pour billions into, presumably in an ill-devised effort to hurt Microsoft, but in reality having a crummy-but-free desktop competitor only solidifies Microsoft's market dominance by crippling any serious proprietary competitors before they get a chance to get off the ground.
BSD is free software, GPL isn't!
(I know saying this will further push my karma toward negative infinity, but it is nonetheless true.)
Falling prices and eventual open-sourcing of software should come as the result of free market competition, not government force!
... at least not unless version 3 is a complete rewrite - a permissive license!
It's very important to people who don't want to cut off their freedom to later market their products for profit, or simply people who don't swallow Stallman's communist philosophy of using government force to enforce their so-called "intellectual property" (i.e. gpl-violations.org). BSD is free software, Linux isn't.
(I know saying this will further push my karma toward negative infinity, but it is nonetheless true.)
In order for a culture to be sustainable across many generations, it absolutely must maintain a rate of population growth that is competitive with other cultures. Since, try as they might, men still just don't seem to be able to birth as many children as women birth, some specialization of labor is unavoidable. Women are also hormonally predisposed for superhuman patience, kindness, multitasking abilities, and other faculties necessary for raising children, while men have evolved to have, on average, a greater spirit of materialistic achievement, beer consumption, upper body strength, and other skills essential to "bring home the bacon".
The juries are hand-picked and thoroughly screened to reject intelligence. Anyone who understands Jury Nullification or has as much as a twinkle in his eye about understanding what the actual role of the Jury is supposed to be (a counterbalance to the government, when necessary) is all but guaranteed to be excluded!
Since when does government care about justice? That would result in many people who run the government losing their cushy jobs, not to mention the basis of their irrational self-esteem. (Read Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden.) Government is incentivized to lie, cheat, steal, kill, imprison, torture, genocide, and do whatever else may be necessary to maintain and expand its power. It's as simple as that - centralized power corrupts!
Only an Anarcho-Capitalist society with polycentric jurisprudence can ever maintain stability and justice in the long-term, because there's no need for an all-powerful watcher to watch the watchers, the competing legal authorities as well as the public all watch each-other! (Read Murray Rothbard, Friedrich Hayek, Bruce Benson, David Friedman, etc.) Given enough eyeballs, or all tyranny is shallow!
Only a handful of independent countries (ex. Singapore) score higher than USA on the Economic Freedom scale, which should be the most fundamental measure of one's freedom, but they are far more restrictive of civil liberties than USA is.
One's best hope for liberty still rests in staying in the U.S. and moving to one of its freer states, most notably New Hampshire. (Google the "Free State Project" for more info on that.) And, yes, secession IS a long-term possibility!
The mindless "kiddy porn" hysteria is out of control, and it's a canary in the coal-mine for further suppression of free speech, because all tyrannies wean themselves on suppressing the most unpopular freedoms first. Any dissident can now have doubleplusungood.png or crimethink.avi uploaded to his computer and deprived of his liberty for the rest of his life! (Being released from prison under the current "former sex offender" programs isn't much better than still being in prison!)
In most cases "kiddy porn" doesn't even depict an actual crime (the "market" is over-saturated with millions, someday an accumulation of billions of high school idiots posting pictures of themselves, as I once did), but even if it does - viewing an image of a crime is not same as committing it! In a rational world, the alleged victim and/or her parents / guardians should decide whether rape has taken place, with "bad parents" being subject to social ostracism and the child's Natural Right to sue for emancipation (jury-granted full sovereignty or transfer of custody). When government force is put in charge of regulating family life, the former grows beyond all bounds and the latter collapses! All those victimless restrictions on human sexuality only encourage violent rape, or the psychological projection of violence into other aspects of one's life!
No possible combination of 1's and 0's should EVER be illegal!
How many lives will the socialist propaganda like "global warming" will end up costing the human civilization? The answer can never be known, but it is clear that strengthening and centralizing government power disempowers all individuals and decelerates the rate of economic and technological growth, which has a negative effect on the quality of life as well as life expectancy of everyone alive today!
You need to re-read my post - I suggested that it might NOT have been forced.
Parents do have the Natural Right to brainwash their children into bizarre and irrational religions. And those children do have the right to stay in those religions when they grow up if they so choose.
The only limits to one's rights should be the rights of other human beings, and the one common limitation for freedom of speech is property rights. It is the property owner(s) who should decide who can come on his property, whether standing on a soapbox with a megaphone is allowed or not, and whether one is allowed to yell "fire". There is no such thing as a "positive right" to force someone to pay for your lunch, to prevent someone from talking about you on their property, and so on. It is your responsibility to register your property, put up warning signs if you don't want trespassers, and so on. You, not "mommy government", is responsible for configuring your servers to behave how you want them to behave!
The problem of spam had a number of very simple technological solutions. Instead the government had to get involved...
Whenever a problem is solved through the initiation of force, the collective mob grows stronger and the individual grows weaker...
Unsolicited e-mails today, doubleplusungoodthinkmails tomorrow!
If he started working there with the permission of his parents, and if his "right to emancipation" was not violated, and if he stayed there of his own free will - then there is a chance that the Church of Scientology has done nothing wrong, at least according to a rational approach to what law ought to be.
Government interventionism in private contracts (i.e. minimum wage) and family life (i.e. child labor laws) are socialist bullshit imposed by demagogues in order to legitimize their power!
Marxism is only a subset communism, and, furthermore, communism can be used as a relativistic term - Castro is more communist than Obama, Obama is more communist than Ron Paul, Ron Paul is more communist than Alex Libman, and so on. Similarly, BSD is more free than GPL.
The GPL *alone* and as *the only license in the universe-verse-verse-verse* would be vaguely communistic... maybe. (Let's not use the argument "if RMS had his way it would be the only license" because he won't have his way because freedom isn't about forcing your way on everyone else.)
Yes, and I'm making the argument why more people should choose permissive licenses like BSD, or, better yet, public domain.
RMS actually supports intellectual property laws, because copyleft software is unenforceable without them. He has probably done more to hurt the Pirate Party movement than the corporations have!
BUT - as I just hinted at - in the free market there is choice. The choice to sell. The choice to give away. The choice to do everything in between.
RMS & friends believe the government should do more to finance copyleft software - and when it comes to government an individual simply has no choice!
And as netcraft confirms - despite the OpenBSD box in my basement - BSD is dying.
It's about to get a second wind. Plus no one has heard my permissive software song yet:
Join us now and permissive-ize FLOSS software,
You'll be free to closed-fork, hackers, you'll be freeeeeee-e!
GPL'ers get more corporate funding,
That is true, hackers, that is true-ue-u,
But you can't static-link their libraries,
That's not good, hackers, that's not goo-u-ood!
Adam Smith does not represent the latest word on Free Market Capitalism, the "Austrian school" economists and their intellectual descendants do. Capitalist philosophy is an empirically-derived system, like science, and our understanding of economics has improved over time, though it has unfortunately become corrupted by self-serving influence from a power-hungry government elite.
An economy is not truly free if there is a centralized government involved, because the government represents the very opposite of capitalist epistemology: it provides products / services through violent force! If Murray Rothbard is too difficult for you to read, you can find plenty of lighter materials to get you started (ex. Google: "market for liberty audiobook").
Now, let's get back to the ethical superiority of *BSD and how that will attract more developers in the future.
You clearly don't understand what a contract is and isn't. A contract is a meeting of minds, stated in written form, and insured to be enforceable by a neutral arbitration agency (not necessarily a centralized monopoly like government). A text file written in legalese in the same tar file as the code you're copying is not a contract!
But I'm not encouraging people to pirate software or violate GPL. My presence on this thread is intended to communicate that BSD is not dead, and there are good reasons why it may be resurrected in the future.
Put down the lynching rope, I'm not a Microsoft apologist! I'm a free market apologist, and my software paradigm of choice is permissively-licensed FLOSS. You're free to use GPL, and I'm free not to.
Old BSD shall rise again! Yee ha!
((Gallops into the sunset.)))
"Raising the bar for competition" is exactly what BSD does, and just look at how much it helped Apple and Google to finally start offering some serious challenges to Microsoft. GPL actually helps the biggest commercial player (i.e. Microsoft) retain their position, because they can afford to put huge amounts of money into R&D while their would-be competitors cannot. Sure, GPL will eventually squeeze them out of some over-saturated fields, but Microsoft will always be able to invest in other things where it can make a profit: business services, hardware, and so on.
Calling me a "Microsoft apologist" does not change the basic economic facts. And, in reality, the only type of "monopoly" that has ever existed in human history was the regional hegemony of government force - everything else is subject to perpetual change.