We should be glad we are a country which does not take the word of "authority" at face value. Surely the best scientists and innovators come from that tradition. If a person does not understand a proof, they should not blindly accept it.
This study needs to be looked at very skeptically, because there is a lot of money right now trying to discourage municipal wifi systems. Why? Because any new legislation being pushed by the telcom companies to ban municipal wifi as unfair competition would have to grandfather in any existing municipal wifi systems and allow them to continue to operate and even expand.
Many of the Wifi activists (Boston Area Wireles for example) are trying to convince local governments to at least establish a single note public Wifi system just so that they can continue to operate if the telecom industry manages to outlaw public networks.
It's pretty obvious which side of this battle has the money and motive to pay for "independent" research.
After you are done reading, go to e-bay and pick yourself up a cheap Plam Pilot.:)
1. Introduction 2. The problems 2.1 People lie 2.2 People are lazy 2.3 People are stupid 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral 2.6 Metrics influence results 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something 3. Reliable metadata
So, what does this funding source expect in return for their $2 million?
It would be a shame if after all these years Raskin finally is given the chance to implement a Humane Interface that we should all be using in exchange for making it unusable for twenty years by ANYONE as part of a holding company patent portfolio.
Then again, $2 million isn't much money in the scheme of things; maybe he worked something out.
-braddock
The GPL/LGPL worries me....
on
Revising the GPL
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
1) The FSF can create different versions in the future, and everything under the old licenses is effectively retroactively dual-licensed. The FSF consists of little more than Richard Stallman. What happens when Stallman gets hit by a bus? Who controls the FSF (and through it GPL) then? How many millions would even partial control of the GPL be worth these days? Maybe loosen those "troublesome restrictions"?
2) The LGPL is all based on object "linking". What the hell is the legal definition of "linking"? The idea of linking will become increasingly irrelevant in the future; it's like a 1980's OS-specific license.
3) What happens to the legal status of GPL'ed projects when some company manages to retroactively claim a patent on some double click feature? At that point, does it not become illegal to distribute the software under the terms of the GPL? Won't that invalidate the whole license for that software package?
Considering the billions and man-centuries now tied up in GPL'ed software, this all scares me.
Braddock Gaskill
Look to motive: Iraq Angle and Expert Warehousing
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
This seems to be a reaction to the power problem in Iraq, which we still haven't been able to resolve after a year. Even Baghdad still only has power for part of the day; there is widespread disbelief in Iraq that the most technological power in the world can't fix the power grid, and that we are neglicting it with malicious intent, or at best as an insult of disinterest. One more thing to make Iraqi's mad. Reconstruction is a hot funding buzzword these days.
Also, remember that projects like this serve an "Expert Warehousing" function, which government types take seriously (and for good reason). How much work is there today for nuclear reactor design engineers in the US? Not much. Remember, we haven't built a civilian or large scale nuclear plant for 30 years. Is the current aging brood of experienced nuclear engineers about to retire? You bet.
So we need projects like this if we want to provide a forum to pass on our national expertise in nuclear engineering to a new generation. Sure there are military reactors on subs and carriers, but they are tiny compared to civilian power plants we were building in the 60s.
PS - As for the Iraqi power grid, the fact is that it was not providing enough power BEFORE our invasion...Saddam just blacked out other parts of the country to keep Baghdad powered 24 hours a day.
I've written this breakthrough program which calculates the digits of the googolplex, but now I'm afraid of being prosecuted under the DMCA for copyright infringement. Please help!
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("1");
while (1)
printf(",000"); }
There are two fantastic well-researched books that anyone who wishes to truely understand Echelon needs to read:
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" by James Bamford is a fantastic history of the NSA from the end of WWII to the present. If you read this book you will see that the idea that the NSA is spying on UN delegations is really a given...in fact one of the primary reasons the US wanted the UN to locate in NYC is to allow easy interception of diplomatic communications. This author uncovered many amazing Cold War programs and anticdotes and presents them in fascinating form.
The second book is "Blind Mans Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage" by Sherry Sontag, another fantastic book of solid research and good story telling, a large amount of it revolving around underwater communication wiretap activities. The special mission nuclear submarine SSN-21 USS Jimmy Carter is out there specially equipped for undersea cable tapping operations and receiving commendations in the tradition of the Cold War era USS Halibut.
Whatever you think of the ethics of these issues, the technology and history is amazing, and the capabilities do exist and are fairly well documented. If you read these two books, and have the technological understanding to extrapolate a bit, you can get a pretty good picture of current capabilities and the culture of how these collection assets are being used. One thing you will find that they are not being used without limits and elements of responsibility, although there are cases (like the Boeing/Airbus bidding incident) where they have been abused.
I was working on a video conference system a few years ago, where latency is everything. We got a huge $15k plasma display (at the time), only to discover it had something like 90 ms of latency! Since we were already pushing our latency budget by sending signals across the country and loosing frames here and there through video processing equipment and codecs, that 90 ms was more than enough to push us over the edge and make the system very difficult to use for natural conversation, and throw the audio/vidio sync visibly out of whack. The plasma had to be replaced. Three frames may not seem like a lot, but it is quite noticable.
I've delt with a lot of high-priced high-quality plasma systems over the years, and the lesson is definitely "Buyer Beware". The high quality 56" plasma systems can be stunning, but remember that you're also investing thousands in a device with a fairly limited lifetime, and no real industry-wide quality standards and more marketing buzzwords and cheap tricks than you can shake a stick at.
If you using plasmas as a computer display you will see even more artifacts. I've seen widescreen plasmas that could not accept any resolution modes of a correct aspect ratio. Many displays use a great deal of image processing to apply tricks to make the display look good, but sometimes the processing can seriously disturb things like computer text. I've seen apparent color segmentation problems on a lot of displays, and just a lot of artifacts in general.
The article didn't mention the drive's capacity. Apparently Toshiba claims the initial drive version will be 2-4GB, to be released in 2005. Whether their prototype is already functional at that capacity I don't know.
Braddock Gaskill
no adverse affect on the release of AmigaOS 4.0
on
Amiga Sells AmigaOS
·
· Score: 1
"It will have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer release of AmigaOS 4.0"...nothing to worry about, AOS4 will STILL not be released.
So that the administration can turn NASA into a more pure multi-billion dollar yearly aerospace industry subsidy without a realistic programme or a significantly increased budget. NASA has always been an aerospace subsidy to some degree, but the Mars plan would probably double the portion of NASA's budget going directly into large aerospace companies for big ticket items, at the cost of stripping the science budgets clean.
Several extra billion dollars a year makes for a happy Boing and Lockheed, the real winners.
Instant messaging was a vital communication method during the Iraq war. I was recently involved in a privately-funded study and interview series on the Iraq war.
Ground-based voice communications were poor during the war because forces moved too fast and were too spread out for the out-dated ground-based voice network to catch up. One of the most vital communication links then became the satellite based instant messaging feature of the vehicle-mounted Blue Force Tracking system, which tracked force locations with a GPS and satellite uplink, and provided unit location mapping.
There were many stories of guys in tanks who's only communication link with command at times were their Blue Force Tracking instant messaging system. IM isn't just for 16 year old girls anymore.
Blue Force Tracking, though not widely enough deployed, was one of the biggest technological successes of the war, and was directly responsible for the almost perfect friendly-fire record in the war. The instant messaging feature was practically an after-thought, but we were very lucky we had it, even in limited deployment, and it proved itself as a mature war-time tool.
Conversely, the 507th Maintenance Company incident, where Jessica Lynch was captured, could have been prevented if they had the Blue Force Tracking system. They were last in a convoy and fell behind their convoy a couple miles, at which point they lost radio contact, and didn't know the exact convoy route without the convoy realizing they had fell behind. Now the first and last vehicle in an Iraq convoy is almost always equipped with a Blue Force Tracking unit so that the convoy leader immediately knows of a straggler and is always in communication with them via instant messaging.
I like the THEORY, but this is a story from Disney's esteamed peer-reviewed Discovery channel about a theory from a man who has spent decades as a known UFO investigator.
Robert Wood's resume can be found here, at the site MajesticDocuments.com. Not that that necesarily discredits the theory, but it definitly gives some pause to the source.
IANAL, but a recipe book is protected as an arrangement of recipies, and as pointed out a non-trivial detailed text description (like, a paragraph) of how to make the item WOULD be copyrighted. The layout and presentation would also be covered under copyright. The procedure (a "recipe") itself is not.
To be kosher (no pun intended), your web-crawler needs to seperate out the ingrediants and the procedure into an objective form that doesn't steal the original description. "BAKE 20 minutes on 250 degrees" and "Add lemon" aren't copyrightable fragments. It's like extracting the physics from a physics textbook. The textbook is copyrighted, but the physics aren't.
This is why, as pointed out, there are "secret recipes"....recipes are typically covered under trade secret laws. If its a well kept secret, the "owner" can contract or license the secret to someone else in exchange for them not revealing the secret, like an NDA. The owner is afforded certain protections from that contract and trade secret laws. But a published recipe is not a trade secret.
Recipes can't be patented, and the data of a list of ingredients and a procedure can't be copyrighted.
That means that if someone wrote a proper web-crawling recipe snarfer that stored the recipes in a database (without stealing the formatting or stealing a particular collection), it should be intellectual property free and fully public domain!
Wow, so if you're a multi-billion dollar corporation in a half-billion dollar lawsuit, then after a few million dollars in lawyer fees and several years and god knows what type of political influence you can actually get a patent seriously reviewed and invalidated by the USPTO?!?! So there's hope!
For only about the vested interest of the entire GNP we should be able to get the other four million patents since '88 reviewed. One down, four million to go...
Correction: I just looked it up and was impressed to find that France is now producing _77%_ of it's electricity with nuclear power! And almost all of the rest (14%) with hydro.
Compared to the US which is 71% fossil fuel, 20% nuclear.
So the environmental advantages of electric cars depends entirely on where you live.
France is strongly committed to nuclear power, produces about 50% of its electricity with nuclear power, and has just about the most developed (and EXPENSIVE) nuclear fuel recycling system in the world. At least air pollution would be lower.
So this would be a half-nuclear powered car in France. As oppossed to the US, where it would be half coal-powered...not a big improvement in air pollution or any other environmental way.
Frankly, many times more people have probably died from coal mining and smog inhalation than have ever died in nuclear accidents. Not that that couldn't change with a couple big ones....
This is a good thing that OSes like Solaris have had available for years. OpenBSD has recently changed their default memory page allocation permissions on architectures where it's possible for a similar effect. Patches exist under Linux to do it. However, I believe in all these cases that you can still REQUEST memory allocations that do NOT have the restriction if you are doing JIT compilation or whatnot.
Microsoft isn't stupid. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to allow old apps to run with the old allocation behavior. Their entire business relies on legacy compatability. At worst you'll need to set some flag on the application launch.
The other thing to note is that crackers have also had ways to defeat execution-protected memory for years as well. It makes a buffer overflow exploit a bit more difficult, but where there is a will there is a way.
For example, even if the protection prevents you from writing executable code directly into memory, you can still typically do things like overwrite the stack and hijack the program's execution to a system call with malicious parameters (in Unix, the classic call to hit is system()...no custom code execution required, just a 'rm -rf/' string somewhere in memory).
It should be noted though that those "open source" advocates were the ones who got Netscape to open their source code. In fact the term "Open Source" had been decided upon by ESR and the rest the day after their meeting with Netscape executives convincing them to "open" the Netscape source code in 1998, as I recall. Obviously they saw a real perception problem with "Free" with the Netscape executives. Those were my old Free Software Union and Open Source Journal days...*sigh*
There should be an inspiring spokesman like this at every Open Source convention. The community needs it.
Stallman has done a great service to the community by keeping this aspect of the movement alive. I have had direct correspondance with him multiple times and he has NEVER failed to personally write back with elaboration on a point or a rebuff to an argument. He must have spent the majority of every day for the past 25 years spreading the case for Free Software one person at a time like that without compromise, which is how he has achieved what he has achieved and deserves respect in the community regardless of personal wranglings.
However, Stallman is so marred with 25 years of personal politics that it is difficult for him to inspire. It never seems like he can quite decouple the ideals of freedom of expression from a certain "I _AM_ THE IDEALS, RECOGNIZE ME, the GPL is the ONLY way to go" attitude.
If the entire community can be inspired to the real ideals of Free Expression, than the GPL itself would almost be irrelevant. Stallman has used the GPL as the glue to keep the community together regardless of it's beliefs on the issue of free expression, but this needs to be seen as an entirely secondary issue.
I hope to at least see Eben Moglen and similar speakers invited to more software conferences.
Slashdot Mirror
We should be glad we are a country which does not take the word of "authority" at face value. Surely the best scientists and innovators come from that tradition. If a person does not understand a proof, they should not blindly accept it.
Sounds exactly like IPython Notebook, which is awesome in power and ease of use.
This is pretty much what Meraki was designed to do.
This study needs to be looked at very skeptically, because there is a lot of money right now trying to discourage municipal wifi systems. Why? Because any new legislation being pushed by the telcom companies to ban municipal wifi as unfair competition would have to grandfather in any existing municipal wifi systems and allow them to continue to operate and even expand.
Many of the Wifi activists (Boston Area Wireles for example) are trying to convince local governments to at least establish a single note public Wifi system just so that they can continue to operate if the telecom industry manages to outlaw public networks.
It's pretty obvious which side of this battle has the money and motive to pay for "independent" research.
-braddock
Maybe the Sematic Web can work someday, maybe not.
:)
However, anyone who thinks this is a utopia in the making should the infamous MetaCrap essay by Cory Doctorow:
Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.
After you are done reading, go to e-bay and pick yourself up a cheap Plam Pilot.
1. Introduction
2. The problems
2.1 People lie
2.2 People are lazy
2.3 People are stupid
2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
2.6 Metrics influence results
2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
3. Reliable metadata
-braddock gaskill
So, what does this funding source expect in return for their $2 million?
It would be a shame if after all these years Raskin finally is given the chance to implement a Humane Interface that we should all be using in exchange for making it unusable for twenty years by ANYONE as part of a holding company patent portfolio.
Then again, $2 million isn't much money in the scheme of things; maybe he worked something out.
-braddock
1) The FSF can create different versions in the future, and everything under the old licenses is effectively retroactively dual-licensed. The FSF consists of little more than Richard Stallman. What happens when Stallman gets hit by a bus? Who controls the FSF (and through it GPL) then? How many millions would even partial control of the GPL be worth these days? Maybe loosen those "troublesome restrictions"?
2) The LGPL is all based on object "linking". What the hell is the legal definition of "linking"? The idea of linking will become increasingly irrelevant in the future; it's like a 1980's OS-specific license.
3) What happens to the legal status of GPL'ed projects when some company manages to retroactively claim a patent on some double click feature? At that point, does it not become illegal to distribute the software under the terms of the GPL? Won't that invalidate the whole license for that software package?
Considering the billions and man-centuries now tied up in GPL'ed software, this all scares me.
Braddock Gaskill
This seems to be a reaction to the power problem in Iraq, which we still haven't been able to resolve after a year. Even Baghdad still only has power for part of the day; there is widespread disbelief in Iraq that the most technological power in the world can't fix the power grid, and that we are neglicting it with malicious intent, or at best as an insult of disinterest. One more thing to make Iraqi's mad. Reconstruction is a hot funding buzzword these days.
Also, remember that projects like this serve an "Expert Warehousing" function, which government types take seriously (and for good reason). How much work is there today for nuclear reactor design engineers in the US? Not much. Remember, we haven't built a civilian or large scale nuclear plant for 30 years. Is the current aging brood of experienced nuclear engineers about to retire? You bet.
So we need projects like this if we want to provide a forum to pass on our national expertise in nuclear engineering to a new generation. Sure there are military reactors on subs and carriers, but they are tiny compared to civilian power plants we were building in the 60s.
PS - As for the Iraqi power grid, the fact is that it was not providing enough power BEFORE our invasion...Saddam just blacked out other parts of the country to keep Baghdad powered 24 hours a day.
Braddock Gaskill
the googleplex is finite, but the idea is the universe will end before the program completes. :)
-braddock gaskill
I've written this breakthrough program which calculates the digits of the googolplex, but now I'm afraid of being prosecuted under the DMCA for copyright infringement. Please help!
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
printf("1");
while (1)
printf(",000");
}
-braddock gaskill
There are two fantastic well-researched books that anyone who wishes to truely understand Echelon needs to read:
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" by James Bamford is a fantastic history of the NSA from the end of WWII to the present. If you read this book you will see that the idea that the NSA is spying on UN delegations is really a given...in fact one of the primary reasons the US wanted the UN to locate in NYC is to allow easy interception of diplomatic communications. This author uncovered many amazing Cold War programs and anticdotes and presents them in fascinating form.
The second book is "Blind Mans Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage"
by Sherry Sontag, another fantastic book of solid research and good story telling, a large amount of it revolving around underwater communication wiretap activities. The special mission nuclear submarine SSN-21 USS Jimmy Carter is out there specially equipped for undersea cable tapping operations and receiving commendations in the tradition of the Cold War era USS Halibut.
Whatever you think of the ethics of these issues, the technology and history is amazing, and the capabilities do exist and are fairly well documented. If you read these two books, and have the technological understanding to extrapolate a bit, you can get a pretty good picture of current capabilities and the culture of how these collection assets are being used. One thing you will find that they are not being used without limits and elements of responsibility, although there are cases (like the Boeing/Airbus bidding incident) where they have been abused.
-braddock gaskill
I was working on a video conference system a few years ago, where latency is everything. We got a huge $15k plasma display (at the time), only to discover it had something like 90 ms of latency! Since we were already pushing our latency budget by sending signals across the country and loosing frames here and there through video processing equipment and codecs, that 90 ms was more than enough to push us over the edge and make the system very difficult to use for natural conversation, and throw the audio/vidio sync visibly out of whack. The plasma had to be replaced. Three frames may not seem like a lot, but it is quite noticable.
I've delt with a lot of high-priced high-quality plasma systems over the years, and the lesson is definitely "Buyer Beware". The high quality 56" plasma systems can be stunning, but remember that you're also investing thousands in a device with a fairly limited lifetime, and no real industry-wide quality standards and more marketing buzzwords and cheap tricks than you can shake a stick at.
If you using plasmas as a computer display you will see even more artifacts. I've seen widescreen plasmas that could not accept any resolution modes of a correct aspect ratio. Many displays use a great deal of image processing to apply tricks to make the display look good, but sometimes the processing can seriously disturb things like computer text. I've seen apparent color segmentation problems on a lot of displays, and just a lot of artifacts in general.
-braddock
The article didn't mention the drive's capacity. Apparently Toshiba claims the initial drive version will be 2-4GB, to be released in 2005. Whether their prototype is already functional at that capacity I don't know.
Braddock Gaskill
"It will have no adverse affect on the release of a consumer release of AmigaOS 4.0"...nothing to worry about, AOS4 will STILL not be released.
Most anticipated vaporware ever.
Braddock Gaskill
So that the administration can turn NASA into a more pure multi-billion dollar yearly aerospace industry subsidy without a realistic programme or a significantly increased budget. NASA has always been an aerospace subsidy to some degree, but the Mars plan would probably double the portion of NASA's budget going directly into large aerospace companies for big ticket items, at the cost of stripping the science budgets clean.
Several extra billion dollars a year makes for a happy Boing and Lockheed, the real winners.
Braddock Gaskill
Instant messaging was a vital communication method during the Iraq war. I was recently involved in a privately-funded study and interview series on the Iraq war.
Ground-based voice communications were poor during the war because forces moved too fast and were too spread out for the out-dated ground-based voice network to catch up. One of the most vital communication links then became the satellite based instant messaging feature of the vehicle-mounted Blue Force Tracking system, which tracked force locations with a GPS and satellite uplink, and provided unit location mapping.
There were many stories of guys in tanks who's only communication link with command at times were their Blue Force Tracking instant messaging system. IM isn't just for 16 year old girls anymore.
Blue Force Tracking, though not widely enough deployed, was one of the biggest technological successes of the war, and was directly responsible for the almost perfect friendly-fire record in the war. The instant messaging feature was practically an after-thought, but we were very lucky we had it, even in limited deployment, and it proved itself as a mature war-time tool.
Conversely, the 507th Maintenance Company incident, where Jessica Lynch was captured, could have been prevented if they had the Blue Force Tracking system. They were last in a convoy and fell behind their convoy a couple miles, at which point they lost radio contact, and didn't know the exact convoy route without the convoy realizing they had fell behind. Now the first and last vehicle in an Iraq convoy is almost always equipped with a Blue Force Tracking unit so that the convoy leader immediately knows of a straggler and is always in communication with them via instant messaging.
Braddock Gaskill
I like the THEORY, but this is a story from Disney's esteamed peer-reviewed Discovery channel about a theory from a man who has spent decades as a known UFO investigator.
Robert Wood's resume can be found here, at the site MajesticDocuments.com. Not that that necesarily discredits the theory, but it definitly gives some pause to the source.
Braddock Gaskill
IANAL, but a recipe book is protected as an arrangement of recipies, and as pointed out a non-trivial detailed text description (like, a paragraph) of how to make the item WOULD be copyrighted. The layout and presentation would also be covered under copyright. The procedure (a "recipe") itself is not.
To be kosher (no pun intended), your web-crawler needs to seperate out the ingrediants and the procedure into an objective form that doesn't steal the original description. "BAKE 20 minutes on 250 degrees" and "Add lemon" aren't copyrightable fragments. It's like extracting the physics from a physics textbook. The textbook is copyrighted, but the physics aren't.
This is why, as pointed out, there are "secret recipes"....recipes are typically covered under trade secret laws. If its a well kept secret, the "owner" can contract or license the secret to someone else in exchange for them not revealing the secret, like an NDA. The owner is afforded certain protections from that contract and trade secret laws. But a published recipe is not a trade secret.
Braddock Gaskill
Recipes can't be patented, and the data of a list of ingredients and a procedure can't be copyrighted.
That means that if someone wrote a proper web-crawling recipe snarfer that stored the recipes in a database (without stealing the formatting or stealing a particular collection), it should be intellectual property free and fully public domain!
Definitely a good weekend hacker challenge....
Braddock Gaskill
Wow, so if you're a multi-billion dollar corporation in a half-billion dollar lawsuit, then after a few million dollars in lawyer fees and several years and god knows what type of political influence you can actually get a patent seriously reviewed and invalidated by the USPTO?!?! So there's hope!
For only about the vested interest of the entire GNP we should be able to get the other four million patents since '88 reviewed. One down, four million to go...
braddock gaskill
Correction: I just looked it up and was impressed to find that France is now producing _77%_ of it's electricity with nuclear power! And almost all of the rest (14%) with hydro.
Compared to the US which is 71% fossil fuel, 20% nuclear.
So the environmental advantages of electric cars depends entirely on where you live.
braddock gaskill
France is strongly committed to nuclear power, produces about 50% of its electricity with nuclear power, and has just about the most developed (and EXPENSIVE) nuclear fuel recycling system in the world. At least air pollution would be lower.
So this would be a half-nuclear powered car in France. As oppossed to the US, where it would be half coal-powered...not a big improvement in air pollution or any other environmental way.
Frankly, many times more people have probably died from coal mining and smog inhalation than have ever died in nuclear accidents. Not that that couldn't change with a couple big ones....
braddock gaskill
This is a good thing that OSes like Solaris have had available for years. OpenBSD has recently changed their default memory page allocation permissions on architectures where it's possible for a similar effect. Patches exist under Linux to do it. However, I believe in all these cases that you can still REQUEST memory allocations that do NOT have the restriction if you are doing JIT compilation or whatnot.
/' string somewhere in memory).
Microsoft isn't stupid. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to allow old apps to run with the old allocation behavior. Their entire business relies on legacy compatability. At worst you'll need to set some flag on the application launch.
The other thing to note is that crackers have also had ways to defeat execution-protected memory for years as well. It makes a buffer overflow exploit a bit more difficult, but where there is a will there is a way.
For example, even if the protection prevents you from writing executable code directly into memory, you can still typically do things like overwrite the stack and hijack the program's execution to a system call with malicious parameters (in Unix, the classic call to hit is system()...no custom code execution required, just a 'rm -rf
Braddock Gaskill
It should be noted though that those "open source" advocates were the ones who got Netscape to open their source code. In fact the term "Open Source" had been decided upon by ESR and the rest the day after their meeting with Netscape executives convincing them to "open" the Netscape source code in 1998, as I recall. Obviously they saw a real perception problem with "Free" with the Netscape executives. Those were my old Free Software Union and Open Source Journal days...*sigh*
Braddock Gaskill
There should be an inspiring spokesman like this at every Open Source convention. The community needs it.
Stallman has done a great service to the community by keeping this aspect of the movement alive. I have had direct correspondance with him multiple times and he has NEVER failed to personally write back with elaboration on a point or a rebuff to an argument. He must have spent the majority of every day for the past 25 years spreading the case for Free Software one person at a time like that without compromise, which is how he has achieved what he has achieved and deserves respect in the community regardless of personal wranglings.
However, Stallman is so marred with 25 years of personal politics that it is difficult for him to inspire. It never seems like he can quite decouple the ideals of freedom of expression from a certain "I _AM_ THE IDEALS, RECOGNIZE ME, the GPL is the ONLY way to go" attitude.
If the entire community can be inspired to the real ideals of Free Expression, than the GPL itself would almost be irrelevant. Stallman has used the GPL as the glue to keep the community together regardless of it's beliefs on the issue of free expression, but this needs to be seen as an entirely secondary issue.
I hope to at least see Eben Moglen and similar speakers invited to more software conferences.
Braddock Gaskill