The licenses appear to be DFSG compliant, but the OSL is so deeply flawed that you might not be able to put an OSL program on the same CD-ROM as a GPL program, because the OSL is so viral that it claims to infect the whole CD-ROM (a CD-ROM is a derivative work of every program on it; the GPL has a "mere aggregation" clause that explicitly permits the GPL program to be in the same distribution as non-GPL programs), and the OSL conflicts with the GPL.
The GPL "infects" only code linked into the same executable program. This one infects any derivative work, and has no "mere aggregation" clause like the GPL does. It may not be OK to put any other software on the same CD-ROM as code licensed under the OSL, as the CD-ROM as a whole could be considered a derivative work. An OSL program will need to be kept rigidly isolated from other software to a far greater extent than a GPL program.
While you may think that GCC should not expect anything from Intel, Intel disagrees; Intel has provided documentation as well as money for Red Hat (and Cygnus before them) to get free software to run decently on their hardware. AMD has done the same, it is simply good business.
GCC is a portable compiler; ia64 is a radically new architecture that needs special treatment from compilers. It will take time to get things working well, and problems with compilers may be the factor that makes AMD win in the long run over Intel. If the ia64 is theoretically faster, but compilers generate better code for the less radical AMD 64-bit processor, AMD wins the performance battle. If you have to buy a compiler from Intel to get the same performance you get with AMD with the free compiler, same deal. For that reason, Intel will have a strong financial motivation to help GCC do better, even if this cuts into their compiler business.
This is a personal perspective, others' opinions will probably differ. The lawsuit mattered, but it wasn't the only factor.
The explosive growth of Linux in the early days had more to do with personal dynamics than with much else. In the early days, Linus welcomed contributors and worked well with them, but no one could work with the Jolitzes, and the other early BSD projects were similarly elite, with a lot of backbiting going on between the various groups even in the early days. I am a UC Berkeley alum (EECS PhD) and certainly take a great deal of pride in all the contributions that came out of Berkeley, but I was also present at a number of Usenix BOFs where members of one or another of the BSD factions would bitterly denounce someone from another faction, all the while with the AT&T/UCB/BSDI lawsuit hanging over everyone's heads. In addition to the legal cloud, there were the personal relationship clouds, and in the end, free software is a highly social activity, one that the BSD people were never as good at as the Linux people.
When I saw the early Linux kernels I thought that the quality was way inferior to what the BSD folks had at the time, and I was probably right, but the Linux folks had an attractive spirit, they were getting better by leaps and bounds, and the BSD folks thought they knew better than anyone else and those outside the club weren't welcome.
Linux had drivers for just about every cheap card around, and many of them were buggy but at least
they were usable, and in many cases people reporting bugs got a usable patch within days. BSD had well-written drivers, but for far fewer devices, and usually only the kinds of expensive devices that sysadmins at universities (but not home users) had access to.
Now I'm talking about the 1992-1995 time period here; since then things have shifted around considerably and all the competitors have drivers for just about everything. But it was the initial momentum that set the stage for what followed.
One place where the non-copylefted nature of BSD did seem to have an effect was in the suspicion that a lot of the Berkeley CS grad students had about the schemes (their version) of the BSDI folk, and the FUD that got spread around about what was being given back and what wasn't, especially given that a couple of folks were working for CSRG and BSDI at the same time. Between this rather unattractive clique-ridden gang of exclusive gurus, and the bunch of wild and wooly Linux folks who were just whacking away and learning as they went, the Linux folks just looked much more attractive to a lot of people.
Many co-op preschools in my area, in order to be able to charge less tuition money, permit parents to agree to engage in a certain amount of fundraising. Among the options available is to sign up for
Schoolpop, at which point the school gets a quite generous cut of commissions for purchases on Amazon and similar sites.
However, if the KaZaa folks steal the commissions, the parent is liable, since the parent must raise some minimum amount (yes, Schoolpop provides the data to the school so the school knows who's raised the money for them). In cases like this, which are quite common, the KaZaa folks and their hitchhikers are directly stealing from their users, as well as from schools and charities.
If source code is speech (as several courts have ruled), then it's difficult to see how the distribution of the code could be banned. Operation of the code on hardware capable of RF input or output could be banned, as there's no constitutional right to do that.
If you run a system that uses the Linux kernel, then almost certainly the tar that you run is GNU tar, developed mostly by John Gilmore, who at the time was so dedicated to the GNU project that he used
"gnu" as his login.
Your last line is completely wrong: a user does not have to get familiar with vim to avoid being completely lost when they have to edit a text file on Linux. The fact that you believe otherwise means that I ask you to stay away from potential Linux converts.
No person coming from the Windows or Mac world has ever seen a moded editor in the style of vi. Every other editor in the world, from Notepad to Emacs, lets the user just start typing and the text gets
entered correctly. Like everyone who's been in the Unix world a long time, I can use vi if I must, but I'd rather not. Emacs has many flaws as well; its choice of keybindings is rather antique, but at least they are changeable. Better still to give new users a decent text-editing widget.
If the user you inflict vim on thinks that she'll have to put up with such things on Linux, you're not going to get a convert.
vi/vim should be available for those who explicitly want it, but we don't need any new converts to the cult.
Mandrake mainly applies polish to software developed elsewhere, while Red Hat produces the software that all distros use (right down to the basics: they do the lion's share of the work on glibc, GCC, a lot of the work on the kernel, etc). If Red Hat died, Mandrake would soon follow and we'd all have to switch to the BSDs.
They aren't slashdotted (meaning that the reason that they are slow isn't that slashdot has linked to them). Their site is overloaded because they put out a new release, and everyone is downloading it. Slashdot picked up the story from other sites, who had it first, and I'm sure that their site was overloaded before slashdot ran the story.
First, neither Red Hat nor Debian default to KDE,
so you're wrong about that one. Sun's about to put out a distro, which will run Gnome.
You only get three desktops (KDE, GNOME, and Red Hat's mixture) if the KDE and GNOME maintainers reject all input from Red Hat. What should happen,
and what could happen if people can get their egos out of the way, is for KDE and GNOME people to look at what Red Hat has done, get feedback from users, and determine which changes are improvements, and accept them, and determine which changes are not improvements, and reject them, explaining why.
For example, the only good argument I've seen against Red Hat's changes is the issue over double-click vs single-click. It seems that the change is in the wrong direction and decreases usability. If that is in fact the case, it should
be possible to demonstrate that fact to both the GNOME and the KDE folks, so that everyone uses single click consistently. If not, then the issues that people fight over most should be configurable.
Why is it considered "insightful" to compare Red Hat's effort to unify Gnome and KDE to calling someone's fiancee a mongrel whore on her wedding day?
Just to be safe: consider your wedding invitation from me to be cancelled:-).
If you insist on KDE's moral right to have an About box on the desktop, then every other author of everything on your system has the same right.
This was the problem with the old BSD advertising clause (which required that blurbs of the author's choice had to be displayed by the system and appear in all documentation); the GPL folks have always rejected this concept.
Free software is a bazaar. If folks don't like the GUI changes, Red Hat will come under pressure to change them; if people do like the GUI changes, KDE will come under pressure to accept them.
If the KDE folks act too much like control freaks, they risk losing control of their own project.
This happened to RMS a couple of times, with the
emacs/xemacs split and the egcs split, although
the latter split was healed when RMS surrendered
control of GCC to the egcs team. Some aspects of
what Red Hat did to KDE are arguably broken, others are arguably improvements. If the KDE folks have a good attitude, the result could be a better KDE. Otherwise, I predict that other distributors will emulate Red Hat's approach, and KDE will lose control of what KDE looks like on other distros as well.
If Linus had never existed, we'd be running systems consisting of the GNU tools on top of a BSD kernel.
There would be NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and GnuBSD.
Linus's contribution is important, but it is overrated.
You were asking RMS to sign a statement that wasn't true: he was a major contributor to bison, but not its sole author. The FSF quite openly states that
the origin of bison was with the research work of
Bob Corbett; RMS's principal contribution was to
take Corbett's stuff and make it yacc-compatible.
Whoever at the FSF who told you that RMS was the sole author was misinformed; RMS himself has never given anything other than a straight answer on this matter.
The FSF gets legal assignment papers from his contributors (and, I'm told, has papers from Bob Corbett), but you were asking him to warrant that he had dotted every i and crossed every t, and he couldn't be certain of that. For you to claim that this implies that he's some kind of thief is rude.
Evidently you wanted to buy such a warranty with cash, but why should the FSF bet their whole organization against the contingency that they messed up? Why should a tiny outfit provide a huge outfit like IBM with an insurance policy?
For RMS to turn around and ask you for a no-strings contribution shouldn't surprise you; the FSF is a nonprofit, and that's what nonprofits do, ask for contributions. Your mistake was to treat the FSF as if they were a company operating on the basis of economic interest. They aren't.
As for the rest, RMS really believes what he states quite openly: he wants all software to be free, and the purpose of the GPL is to leverage more free software, that is, to be viral. Anyone who thinks that the quid pro quo involved in the GPL is "militaristic" has never had an IBM lawyer on their case.
There's still an issue with dynamic range, for cameras that only record eight bits of red, green, and blue per pixel. 35mm film has more dynamic range than that, which makes a difference in trying to recover a decent picture from a very high-contrast scene. With a digital camera it's easy to get areas of your image that completely saturate: 255,255,255 or 0,0,0 -- where in an equivalent situation burning and dodging of a film image will recover detail.
Going to 16 bits/pixel would exceed the dynamic range of film, and then 35 mm would truly be beat.
You write: " And why is that? Could it be the fact that with less fat to make them feel full, and they eat more carbs, which leads to them eating even more carbs?"
Guess what? Americans aren't eating less fat, they are eating more fat, more carbs, more everything.
Supersize it!
We don't know whether any actual violation has taken place. However...
No Linux distribution can do anything without the C library, which is owned by the FSF; they would have grounds to shut down UnitedLinux totally if, in fact, UL has violated the LGPL. All they have to do is invoke the clause saying that a violator permanantly forfeits rights to distribute the work in question.
Without the right to distribute glibc, you can't ship a Linux distribution (unless you want to write your own C library from scratch or try to port one of the BSD C libraries).
Most other European languages had a spelling reform some time in the past 200 years, to update the spelling of words to match the phonetics. To do this it helps to have a monarch who can just declare it. The monarchs did the equivalent of
declaring "thru" and "lite" to be the official
spellings of what were "through" and "light", but
no one did that to English because no one had the
power. The "gh" used to be pronounced like the German "ch" and "light" evolved from the German
"licht", which is why it is spelled that way; it
used to sound that way as well.
For English, up through the 18th century, people spelled English however they wanted, and by the time English spelling was standardized, the US was already on the way to being an independent country, so Webster did it differently from Johnson.
English achieved its simple grammar (dropping all of the cases, declensions, and gender of German)
because for several hundred years, the educated
people spoke French or Latin and only the common
folks spoke old English. By the time the elites
spoke English again it was middle English, a much simpler language. Given this, I believe that it's false to claim that it is teachers and academics that keep a language clean; the reverse can be the case. Academics like to show off by their knowledge of language esoterica; some distinctions in language are best forgotten.
Amusing, but in many ways modern American English
(especially the English spoken by backward folks in rural areas, like Appalachia) is closer to the English Shakespeare spoke than modern British English is. For many words that Americans and Brits pronounce differently (e.g. "schedule"), the American version is the older one, the one formerly used in both countries.
The story is similar in France vs Quebec: it is the French who have changed the language more.
Code to implement this stuff would logically be made available as a library, but if it's released under a GPL-incompatible license, it will complicate the job of using it to add support for Redezvous to Linux desktop programs, other libaries, or the kernel. This problem can be avoided if a
dual-licensing approach is used, that is, terms are either GPL or whatever terms Apple prefers.
Re:Upcoming messages on this thread...
on
eSuds
·
· Score: 2
... and it won't be long before some 1337 #a>0r 0wnz your underwear...
It's not just the US that has the problem of poor-quality mass-market beers and much better lesser-known beers. All the wonderful beers that come out of Belgium, and the one that gets the most advertising push seems to be Stella Artois, which is almost as crappy as Miller. Worse, Stella's owner is trying to push Stella in the US as a super-premium beer and charge high prices, when they also own Leffe, which puts out some great brew. I guess they figured that what worked for the very mediocre Heineken could work for them.
Some US craft brews are now getting wider distribution. The very decent Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is available in most parts of the country, for example. Of the nationals, Sam Adams is best, though I like many of the west coast microbrews better.
There's a very good Quebec-based craft brewer,
Unibroue, that makes wonderful Belgian-style beers that I wouldn't be embarrassed to serve a Belgian
(and yes, I've made several trips to Belgium and sampled many beers),
and you can actually get them in Europe, it seems.
Maudite and La Fin du Monde are both great and are easist to find.
Slashdot Mirror
The licenses appear to be DFSG compliant, but the OSL is so deeply flawed that you might not be able to put an OSL program on the same CD-ROM as a GPL program, because the OSL is so viral that it claims to infect the whole CD-ROM (a CD-ROM is a derivative work of every program on it; the GPL has a "mere aggregation" clause that explicitly permits the GPL program to be in the same distribution as non-GPL programs), and the OSL conflicts with the GPL.
The GPL "infects" only code linked into the same executable program. This one infects any derivative work, and has no "mere aggregation" clause like the GPL does. It may not be OK to put any other software on the same CD-ROM as code licensed under the OSL, as the CD-ROM as a whole could be considered a derivative work. An OSL program will need to be kept rigidly isolated from other software to a far greater extent than a GPL program.
While you may think that GCC should not expect anything from Intel, Intel disagrees; Intel has provided documentation as well as money for Red Hat (and Cygnus before them) to get free software to run decently on their hardware. AMD has done the same, it is simply good business.
GCC is a portable compiler; ia64 is a radically new architecture that needs special treatment from compilers. It will take time to get things working well, and problems with compilers may be the factor that makes AMD win in the long run over Intel. If the ia64 is theoretically faster, but compilers generate better code for the less radical AMD 64-bit processor, AMD wins the performance battle. If you have to buy a compiler from Intel to get the same performance you get with AMD with the free compiler, same deal. For that reason, Intel will have a strong financial motivation to help GCC do better, even if this cuts into their compiler business.
This is a personal perspective, others' opinions will probably differ. The lawsuit mattered, but it wasn't the only factor.
The explosive growth of Linux in the early days had more to do with personal dynamics than with much else. In the early days, Linus welcomed contributors and worked well with them, but no one could work with the Jolitzes, and the other early BSD projects were similarly elite, with a lot of backbiting going on between the various groups even in the early days. I am a UC Berkeley alum (EECS PhD) and certainly take a great deal of pride in all the contributions that came out of Berkeley, but I was also present at a number of Usenix BOFs where members of one or another of the BSD factions would bitterly denounce someone from another faction, all the while with the AT&T/UCB/BSDI lawsuit hanging over everyone's heads. In addition to the legal cloud, there were the personal relationship clouds, and in the end, free software is a highly social activity, one that the BSD people were never as good at as the Linux people.
When I saw the early Linux kernels I thought that the quality was way inferior to what the BSD folks had at the time, and I was probably right, but the Linux folks had an attractive spirit, they were getting better by leaps and bounds, and the BSD folks thought they knew better than anyone else and those outside the club weren't welcome. Linux had drivers for just about every cheap card around, and many of them were buggy but at least they were usable, and in many cases people reporting bugs got a usable patch within days. BSD had well-written drivers, but for far fewer devices, and usually only the kinds of expensive devices that sysadmins at universities (but not home users) had access to. Now I'm talking about the 1992-1995 time period here; since then things have shifted around considerably and all the competitors have drivers for just about everything. But it was the initial momentum that set the stage for what followed.
One place where the non-copylefted nature of BSD did seem to have an effect was in the suspicion that a lot of the Berkeley CS grad students had about the schemes (their version) of the BSDI folk, and the FUD that got spread around about what was being given back and what wasn't, especially given that a couple of folks were working for CSRG and BSDI at the same time. Between this rather unattractive clique-ridden gang of exclusive gurus, and the bunch of wild and wooly Linux folks who were just whacking away and learning as they went, the Linux folks just looked much more attractive to a lot of people.
Their diversion of cash does hurt the customer.
Many co-op preschools in my area, in order to be able to charge less tuition money, permit parents to agree to engage in a certain amount of fundraising. Among the options available is to sign up for Schoolpop, at which point the school gets a quite generous cut of commissions for purchases on Amazon and similar sites.
However, if the KaZaa folks steal the commissions, the parent is liable, since the parent must raise some minimum amount (yes, Schoolpop provides the data to the school so the school knows who's raised the money for them). In cases like this, which are quite common, the KaZaa folks and their hitchhikers are directly stealing from their users, as well as from schools and charities.
If source code is speech (as several courts have ruled), then it's difficult to see how the distribution of the code could be banned. Operation of the code on hardware capable of RF input or output could be banned, as there's no constitutional right to do that.
If you run a system that uses the Linux kernel, then almost certainly the tar that you run is GNU tar, developed mostly by John Gilmore, who at the time was so dedicated to the GNU project that he used "gnu" as his login.
And Marconi did not invent radio waves, you dork.
It's a state university, they are bound by the 1st amendment. And no, they don't restrict content of student flyers on campus. Who told you that?
Your last line is completely wrong: a user does not have to get familiar with vim to avoid being completely lost when they have to edit a text file on Linux. The fact that you believe otherwise means that I ask you to stay away from potential Linux converts.
No person coming from the Windows or Mac world has ever seen a moded editor in the style of vi. Every other editor in the world, from Notepad to Emacs, lets the user just start typing and the text gets entered correctly. Like everyone who's been in the Unix world a long time, I can use vi if I must, but I'd rather not. Emacs has many flaws as well; its choice of keybindings is rather antique, but at least they are changeable. Better still to give new users a decent text-editing widget.
If the user you inflict vim on thinks that she'll have to put up with such things on Linux, you're not going to get a convert.
vi/vim should be available for those who explicitly want it, but we don't need any new converts to the cult.
Mandrake mainly applies polish to software developed elsewhere, while Red Hat produces the software that all distros use (right down to the basics: they do the lion's share of the work on glibc, GCC, a lot of the work on the kernel, etc). If Red Hat died, Mandrake would soon follow and we'd all have to switch to the BSDs.
They aren't slashdotted (meaning that the reason that they are slow isn't that slashdot has linked to them). Their site is overloaded because they put out a new release, and everyone is downloading it. Slashdot picked up the story from other sites, who had it first, and I'm sure that their site was overloaded before slashdot ran the story.
First, neither Red Hat nor Debian default to KDE, so you're wrong about that one. Sun's about to put out a distro, which will run Gnome.
You only get three desktops (KDE, GNOME, and Red Hat's mixture) if the KDE and GNOME maintainers reject all input from Red Hat. What should happen, and what could happen if people can get their egos out of the way, is for KDE and GNOME people to look at what Red Hat has done, get feedback from users, and determine which changes are improvements, and accept them, and determine which changes are not improvements, and reject them, explaining why.
For example, the only good argument I've seen against Red Hat's changes is the issue over double-click vs single-click. It seems that the change is in the wrong direction and decreases usability. If that is in fact the case, it should be possible to demonstrate that fact to both the GNOME and the KDE folks, so that everyone uses single click consistently. If not, then the issues that people fight over most should be configurable.
Why is it considered "insightful" to compare Red Hat's effort to unify Gnome and KDE to calling someone's fiancee a mongrel whore on her wedding day?
Just to be safe: consider your wedding invitation from me to be cancelled :-).
If you insist on KDE's moral right to have an About box on the desktop, then every other author of everything on your system has the same right. This was the problem with the old BSD advertising clause (which required that blurbs of the author's choice had to be displayed by the system and appear in all documentation); the GPL folks have always rejected this concept.
Free software is a bazaar. If folks don't like the GUI changes, Red Hat will come under pressure to change them; if people do like the GUI changes, KDE will come under pressure to accept them.
If the KDE folks act too much like control freaks, they risk losing control of their own project. This happened to RMS a couple of times, with the emacs/xemacs split and the egcs split, although the latter split was healed when RMS surrendered control of GCC to the egcs team. Some aspects of what Red Hat did to KDE are arguably broken, others are arguably improvements. If the KDE folks have a good attitude, the result could be a better KDE. Otherwise, I predict that other distributors will emulate Red Hat's approach, and KDE will lose control of what KDE looks like on other distros as well.
If community is important to you, then Debian is the flavor you want.
If Linus had never existed, we'd be running systems consisting of the GNU tools on top of a BSD kernel. There would be NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and GnuBSD.
Linus's contribution is important, but it is overrated.
You were asking RMS to sign a statement that wasn't true: he was a major contributor to bison, but not its sole author. The FSF quite openly states that the origin of bison was with the research work of Bob Corbett; RMS's principal contribution was to take Corbett's stuff and make it yacc-compatible. Whoever at the FSF who told you that RMS was the sole author was misinformed; RMS himself has never given anything other than a straight answer on this matter.
The FSF gets legal assignment papers from his contributors (and, I'm told, has papers from Bob Corbett), but you were asking him to warrant that he had dotted every i and crossed every t, and he couldn't be certain of that. For you to claim that this implies that he's some kind of thief is rude. Evidently you wanted to buy such a warranty with cash, but why should the FSF bet their whole organization against the contingency that they messed up? Why should a tiny outfit provide a huge outfit like IBM with an insurance policy? For RMS to turn around and ask you for a no-strings contribution shouldn't surprise you; the FSF is a nonprofit, and that's what nonprofits do, ask for contributions. Your mistake was to treat the FSF as if they were a company operating on the basis of economic interest. They aren't.
As for the rest, RMS really believes what he states quite openly: he wants all software to be free, and the purpose of the GPL is to leverage more free software, that is, to be viral. Anyone who thinks that the quid pro quo involved in the GPL is "militaristic" has never had an IBM lawyer on their case.
There's still an issue with dynamic range, for cameras that only record eight bits of red, green, and blue per pixel. 35mm film has more dynamic range than that, which makes a difference in trying to recover a decent picture from a very high-contrast scene. With a digital camera it's easy to get areas of your image that completely saturate: 255,255,255 or 0,0,0 -- where in an equivalent situation burning and dodging of a film image will recover detail.
Going to 16 bits/pixel would exceed the dynamic range of film, and then 35 mm would truly be beat.
You write: " And why is that? Could it be the fact that with less fat to make them feel full, and they eat more carbs, which leads to them eating even more carbs?"
Guess what? Americans aren't eating less fat, they are eating more fat, more carbs, more everything. Supersize it!
We don't know whether any actual violation has taken place. However ...
No Linux distribution can do anything without the C library, which is owned by the FSF; they would have grounds to shut down UnitedLinux totally if, in fact, UL has violated the LGPL. All they have to do is invoke the clause saying that a violator permanantly forfeits rights to distribute the work in question. Without the right to distribute glibc, you can't ship a Linux distribution (unless you want to write your own C library from scratch or try to port one of the BSD C libraries).
Most other European languages had a spelling reform some time in the past 200 years, to update the spelling of words to match the phonetics. To do this it helps to have a monarch who can just declare it. The monarchs did the equivalent of declaring "thru" and "lite" to be the official spellings of what were "through" and "light", but no one did that to English because no one had the power. The "gh" used to be pronounced like the German "ch" and "light" evolved from the German "licht", which is why it is spelled that way; it used to sound that way as well.
For English, up through the 18th century, people spelled English however they wanted, and by the time English spelling was standardized, the US was already on the way to being an independent country, so Webster did it differently from Johnson.
English achieved its simple grammar (dropping all of the cases, declensions, and gender of German) because for several hundred years, the educated people spoke French or Latin and only the common folks spoke old English. By the time the elites spoke English again it was middle English, a much simpler language. Given this, I believe that it's false to claim that it is teachers and academics that keep a language clean; the reverse can be the case. Academics like to show off by their knowledge of language esoterica; some distinctions in language are best forgotten.
Amusing, but in many ways modern American English (especially the English spoken by backward folks in rural areas, like Appalachia) is closer to the English Shakespeare spoke than modern British English is. For many words that Americans and Brits pronounce differently (e.g. "schedule"), the American version is the older one, the one formerly used in both countries.
The story is similar in France vs Quebec: it is the French who have changed the language more.
Mozilla is a single application suite; it is small compared to either KDE or Gnome.
Code to implement this stuff would logically be made available as a library, but if it's released under a GPL-incompatible license, it will complicate the job of using it to add support for Redezvous to Linux desktop programs, other libaries, or the kernel. This problem can be avoided if a dual-licensing approach is used, that is, terms are either GPL or whatever terms Apple prefers.
It's not just the US that has the problem of poor-quality mass-market beers and much better lesser-known beers. All the wonderful beers that come out of Belgium, and the one that gets the most advertising push seems to be Stella Artois, which is almost as crappy as Miller. Worse, Stella's owner is trying to push Stella in the US as a super-premium beer and charge high prices, when they also own Leffe, which puts out some great brew. I guess they figured that what worked for the very mediocre Heineken could work for them.
Some US craft brews are now getting wider distribution. The very decent Sierra Nevada Pale Ale is available in most parts of the country, for example. Of the nationals, Sam Adams is best, though I like many of the west coast microbrews better.
There's a very good Quebec-based craft brewer, Unibroue, that makes wonderful Belgian-style beers that I wouldn't be embarrassed to serve a Belgian (and yes, I've made several trips to Belgium and sampled many beers), and you can actually get them in Europe, it seems. Maudite and La Fin du Monde are both great and are easist to find.