Well, we're obviously not going to agree on this here then. Which is unfortunate, but ok. You place fault on the GPL, which isn't really the case. Any code licensed under most Non-BSD compatible licenses would illicit the same action. I'm not to keen on the idea of knocking the BSD license, but if you're going to lay fault on a license, its the actions of the BSD that cause all this mess. That is, people could mistakenly believe that the given code is BSD'ed when it isn't. "Correcting" the problem by GPL'ing the project, or not GPL'ing the entire project and removing the offending code and maintaining the BSD license, after it's already been in a publicly available BSD'ed project is irrelevant. I see it as inappropriate behavior on part of the the person that willingly copied someone else's code without permission. Innocence of intent here is irrelevant, as the consequences of his actions would take effect regardless of his intentions. Though, I think we do agree on one thing, and that things might have gone smoother if he had notified him in private. But full effectiveness would be contingent upon an eventual public announcement. It's not hard to imagine why one would want to point out their own mistakes themselves publicly, instead of having someone else pointing a finger at them in public. That point doesn't fail me in the slightest.
Still, You spoke of intent. While it is unfortunate that this may have been accidental (which I am failing at understanding how it could be), certain actions must take place in order to mitigate the damage, regardless of the intent. (I apologize that I am repeating myself (again), I am just trying to straighten my thoughts) I think the ball busting that Buesch has been taking for those actions is a bit of an overkill, given the situation that he was put in not of his own choice. People are justifying the ball busting by saying that Buesch overreacted in the first place, and I'm just trying to point out that he had few, if any, alternate courses of action. I'm pretty sure I've covered all the bases, and I'm even more sure that if I haven't someone will be kind enough to point it out.
the real sticking point is that you didn't offer the man an attempt to remedy the situation privately and in good faith.
How is that a sticking point? The _only_ sticking point is the copied code. (Why people keep calling this theft is beyond me; infringement != theft)
Furthermore, imagine a scenario where this wasn't taken public ASAP. Anyone that went to the code after the copied code was added but before it was corrected would be liable to think that the code in question was under a completely different license. In this scenario it is in the author's best interest to notify as many people as possible that his code has been hijacked. The more people that know, the better it is for the author, and for the people who would potentially have used the code. Sure, you'll be stepping on a few toes in making the issue public, but it has to be done in order to protect yourself and everyone else from misappropriating code. There is *no* other way to accomplish this as effectively, that I am aware of. Why take the man to task for protecting his assets, kindly and tactfully at that? I'm not sure that we're reading the same thing, because from my end, it looks like Michael was being kinder and more patient than I can reasonably expect from anybody that I've ever met. The only alternative would be to ask the developer to make a *public* statement about the entire thing, which would have the same effect. The only difference would be the name of the person delivering the message, which is _completely_ trivial.
Maybe you could argue that it might have saved the developer some face if he was the one delivering the message publicly. You know what would have saved him even more face? Not relicensing code that wasn't his in the first place.
Wrong, language is merely a mode of transporting meaning. You understood, thus my language was sufficient.
It may not have been perfectly accurate, but I admitted the mistake in my previous post, so your making a further fuss of it is rather unwarranted. Furthermore, if you didn't care what I meant, why did you bother to correct it? You certainly could have been more kind or civil about it, or at the very least been constructive and offered the correct terminology. You over-reacted, you got called - get over yourself.
Re: Pointless name calling - Evidence: "I'd certainly call that person a moron!" I didn't say that you meant _I_ was a moron, I just said that calling names is pointless, and asked if you were finished. It really isn't that difficult to understand what my question meant, but perhaps I have been misled regarding your intellectual capacity.
They didn't, at least not in this case. Spamhaus requested that the case be handled by this court. They chould have let it go to any court, then argued that whichever court it was had no jurisdiction, or let the court decide whenever it was handed the case that it didn't have jurisdiction. But that's not what happened. By requesting a specific court, it appeared that Spamhaus was going to actually fight the merits of the case, which would have waved jurisdiction arguements. So, to any court handling the case at this point, it would appear that Spamhaus was going to accept U.S. jurisdiction. But Spamhaus was just moving it to a court that they knew didn't have jurisdiction so that they wouldn't even have to show. I don't know why they didn't just let it go to any court, state or federal, and then claim grounds of no jurisdiction. Maybe their lawyers thought they might run into trouble in U.S. federal courts or something, and thought they had better chances of going this route. Nevertheless, the decision was Spamhaus', not any judge with a "god" complex.
Agreed, no one should be forced to travel to another country to say they don't work there. But, you seem to imply that Spamhaus was somehow forced to represent themselves in this case. They weren't, and they didn't even show up anyway. In the end of it all, they'll probably wind up counter-suing for legal costs incurred over the whole venture.
About your idea with court systems not processing litigation. I don't know about this. If a court thinks it doesn't have jurisdiction, it should just get bumped up to a higher court who could have jurisdiction, all the way until it reaches the supreme court. It's fairly trivial in this case, as it all worked out in the end, which you'd know if you read anything about what happened _after_ the default ruling.
The federal judge overseeing the e360insight v. Spamhaus case has ruled against a motion to yank Spamhaus' domain name out from under it.
After that, I can't really understand what the big deal is about. Sure, the $11 million fine is still up in the air, but Spamhaus won't pay it, and it seems it pretty much cannot be compelled to do so (at least not by trying to knock it off the internet). They just need to finish the appeal process and everything should be just fine.
Had Spamhaus made the "no jurisdiction" argument at the onset, it may very well have gotten the case dismissed. Instead, it finds itself in the undesirable and difficult position of having to appeal a summary judgment. Spamhaus is "working with lawyers to find a way to both appeal the ruling and stop further nonsense by the spammer," Linford told Ars Technica.
I hate spammers, I think Spamhaus is fantastic. But it doesn't change the situation at hand, which is that there is potentially or allegedly illegal activity going on in servers located within the U.S. Someone is liable for it, and most likely it's the individuals operating those server. The problem is (for e360 anyway) there are hundreds if not thousands of them, and they can't be bothered with that many individual lawsuits. So, they went straight for the company causing them problems, and fell flat on their faces while doing it. I guess you can get mad at the U.S. court for it "thinking" that it had jurisdiction over a foreign company, but that's just the way the system works. As I said before, at the face, it appears that some illegal activity is happening on servers located in the U.S. Someone in the U.S. is liable for that, and e360 alleged that it was Spamhaus. Be mad that Spamhaus acted like retards over the whole thing, not at the courts for doing their job. Otherwise you've just got your sights on the wrong target, just like e360 did.
I think a much bigger issue, one that's actually worth getting pissed off about anyway, is that the activity in question (blocking spammers) is actually possibly illegal in the U.S. The most fantastic part about all of it, is that it isn't in the U.K.
I meant to say defendant, I would think that it was rather obvious what I meant. It appears you understood my meaning anyway, so I am not wrong in thinking that it was obvious. Are you finished with the pointless name calling?
The fact that the judge was a total moron who was unable to see through a pathetic tissue of lies shows how dangerous it would have been to have allowed any person from Spamhaus to become a literal captive hostage in the US while this was being sorted out.
Look, don't call the judge a moron. He's not. I can't bring myself to call you a moron, though you are obviously ignorant of the facts here. The way the courts work here, and in most other countries, is that the courts assume that they have jurisdiction. I don't mean casually assume, but rather, bound by law to assume they have jurisdiction. It is up to the plaintiff to declare that the courts hold no jurisdiction over them. This is what happened, this is what is supposed to have happened. This is how the system works. So stop sullying the judges good name, will you? Not only is he just doing his job, but he's doing a good job of it too:
The judge, Charles Kocoras, is chief judge of the District Court in Northern Illinois and was last month awarded the Chicago Bar Association's highest honor, the Justice John Paul Stevens Award. This is not a guy who hands out his verdicts like candy.
Arguing the merits of the case would have been an admission of jurisdiction on Spamhaus' part. This is old anyway.
Also, they weren't forced to delist the company. That was part of the original ruling, and apparently it went to the the feds to appeal to ICANN to have them delisted, and ICANN responded that not only were they incapable of doing so, but it wasn't their responsibility either. It would be up to the domain registrars to delist them. To add further complexity to this issue, Spamhaus' registrar is based out of Canada. I'm pretty sure that's outside of U.S. jurisdiction, but who knows these days.
IANAL and I'm pretty sure that someone more knowledgeable in this subject than I will post a clarification of this. Still, it should be said that one of the ways the U.S. courts provides to contest jurisdiction is to just not show up, then after a default ruling, they can go ahead in continuing the process of contesting jurisdiction. I gather that another way of doing this is to actually show up in court and declare that there is no jurisdiction. The tricky part is that if you show up in court and first declare that you are not guilty or guilty or whatever, by default you have waved your right to claim that there is no jurisdiction. By claiming one way or the other you have imposed the jurisdiction upon yourself.
Furthermore, it seems that Spamhaus or it's lawyers were (unsurprisingly) at least superficially aware of the rules of how this works, as they had motioned to have the case moved to the Illinois court themselves, instead of a federal court or whatever. Then by not showing up, they set themselves up to appeal on grounds of lack of jurisdiction. The default ruling is merely a superficiality that will eventually work itself out through the (I suppose) the appeals process.
Regardless, the judge really had no choice in the matter, given Spamhaus' choice. He doesn't deserve being spammed any more than you or I, and from what I've read he seemed either reluctant to rule against Spamhaus, or perhaps he was just annoyed that Spamhaus didn't handle this in a more direct manner.
Depends on your taste really. If metal is your thing, check out Tourniquet.
I'm an atheist, and don't really listen to that much metal, but these guys did some pretty cool stuff in their day. I haven't listened to any of their newer stuff, so I can't really say anything about that.
I'm also sure there's a pretty good pun about stoning in there somewhere, but word fail me.
Not only is it doing fine, but that cycle is a vital part of the industry. Every time the hottest new style is stolen by the lesser companies, the big fancy companies use it as an opportunity to come out with the next style.
I tried to think of how this could be a plausible business model for the music industry, but either it's already happening, or it doesn't seem to fit. Unfortunately, I doubt there is a record exec that actually appreciates musical "style". If they did, they'd understand the derivative nature of music, and wouldn't be having DJ's arrested for copyright infringement. Hopefully one day they'll behave just like how the all-grown-up fashion industry behaves; you don't see Prada suing the pants off of high school girls who bought knockoff handbags. Hell, you don't even see them sue the makes of the knockoff's. They just ditch their old stuff, and make new stuff for the people to buy.
You're coming off awfully strong for someone who agrees with what the target of your post just stated. You can argue the finer points of monopolies all you want, but the point ( that you so adequately made ) is that the monopoly is thrust upon the telcos.
The post that started this thread was from someone arguing that market forces would straighten it out in the end. The reply that you are attacking was merely making the point that market forces _do_not_ properly act upon or affect the bells or any other monopoly. It is naive to believe that this problem would "work itself out" in the economic conditions that we have today. It's arguable whether it would actually work itself out even in a truly open market without regulation or monopolization, but that's pretty irrelevant.
I don't know if regulation is the answer. It could certainly help, but it could also horrifically backfire. But one thing is apparent to me: this problem will not fix itself.
If you look at any company's data retention policy, it's really just a "data loss" policy. Most are crafted with the thought, "When is the earliest that we can legally destroy this data, and be able to reasonably argue that we aren't liable." Keeping in mind that you could probably be held liable for destruction of data after any time period of retention. It really just comes down to who has the best lawyers.
You know, science has fucked enough of this stuff up.
We used to know that the earth was flat, and the universe revolved around it. Then scientists with their "theories" came along and screwed everything up. If only they had focused on the "known facts" at the time, instead of messing around with these scientific theories, we wouldn't be in this mess.
[blockquote]Either your comment is stupid or Apple customers are stupid.[/blockquote]
You seem to have negated the possibility that both statements are true.
I'm all for curiousity and discovering stuff, but this sounds really useless.
Obviously you don't have much of an imagination.
The responsible substance, dimethyl sulfide, in addition to smelling like the coast, also acts as a homing scent for birds looking to feast on plankton.
1. Find a large flat cement wall 2. Paint a mural of a lake on it 3. Coat with dimethyl sulfide 4. Watch birds smash into it
Now if that isn't reason enough why this research should considered useful, then there is something wrong with this world.
I have never, at any point, enjoyed the "music" "created by" Britney Spears.
FTFY
Also, to take your point a bit further, the traditional fantasy novel that appeals to it's typical niche audience is almost designed in a way to be unappealing to the general populace. Long drawn out histories that have no real meaning to the storyline, overdrawn over-dramatic characters, and just a lot of general nonsense.
In contrast, it's the simple, practically cardboard cutout characters, and basic hero/villain stories that seem to have an impact on the largest audience. The simplicity of the Monomyth still has great appeal.
I agree with you, but really, this is the sort of thing the article was complaining about. He's essentially complaining about not wanting to have to deal with the problem at his end, which is a perfectly reasonable complaint.
Also, I think there is one other reason why he's failed to utilize Linux in a corporate environment for over 10 years straight. It's him. He talks about wanting to support the Open Source community, which is great, I guess. Probably not the best reason to start a migration to Linux. Maybe a little research and planning before hand would have shown him the solution that he was looking at didn't meet the requirements of whatever project he was working on. In fact, admitting to doing this repeatedly over the course of 10 years pretty much shows a lack of understanding of how to plan and implement a migration. I'm not convinced that short-comings in Linux are to blame for this one.
Well, as you point out, this wouldn't work very well for the federal government in the United States. However, I think if you break it down into a more local level you could see better government representation at that level. This could be a good thing for something such as a large city, though I'd definitely be afraid of which petitions get the most submissions in areas such as the bible belt. Then again, how many rednecks know enough about those internets to actually make a difference?
Then there is the question of whether or not it's really necessary at the local level. I don't really have too many complaints about my views being represented at the local level. My views might not be the one that are legislated, but at least they seem to be taken into consideration at the local level.
So, as we have agreed, this probably wouldn't work so well at the federal level, and I'm challenged to think of a methodology that would work. At least they are trying something different to solve their problems. It's seems that we're just stewing in our own excrement right now.
(sorry for repeating myself so often, I just want to be clear and am too exhausted at the moment to refine my thoughts)
Slashdot Mirror
And gorillas aren't monkeys.
Well, we're obviously not going to agree on this here then. Which is unfortunate, but ok. You place fault on the GPL, which isn't really the case. Any code licensed under most Non-BSD compatible licenses would illicit the same action. I'm not to keen on the idea of knocking the BSD license, but if you're going to lay fault on a license, its the actions of the BSD that cause all this mess. That is, people could mistakenly believe that the given code is BSD'ed when it isn't. "Correcting" the problem by GPL'ing the project, or not GPL'ing the entire project and removing the offending code and maintaining the BSD license, after it's already been in a publicly available BSD'ed project is irrelevant. I see it as inappropriate behavior on part of the the person that willingly copied someone else's code without permission. Innocence of intent here is irrelevant, as the consequences of his actions would take effect regardless of his intentions. Though, I think we do agree on one thing, and that things might have gone smoother if he had notified him in private. But full effectiveness would be contingent upon an eventual public announcement. It's not hard to imagine why one would want to point out their own mistakes themselves publicly, instead of having someone else pointing a finger at them in public. That point doesn't fail me in the slightest. Still, You spoke of intent. While it is unfortunate that this may have been accidental (which I am failing at understanding how it could be), certain actions must take place in order to mitigate the damage, regardless of the intent. (I apologize that I am repeating myself (again), I am just trying to straighten my thoughts) I think the ball busting that Buesch has been taking for those actions is a bit of an overkill, given the situation that he was put in not of his own choice. People are justifying the ball busting by saying that Buesch overreacted in the first place, and I'm just trying to point out that he had few, if any, alternate courses of action. I'm pretty sure I've covered all the bases, and I'm even more sure that if I haven't someone will be kind enough to point it out.
How is that a sticking point? The _only_ sticking point is the copied code. (Why people keep calling this theft is beyond me; infringement != theft)
Furthermore, imagine a scenario where this wasn't taken public ASAP. Anyone that went to the code after the copied code was added but before it was corrected would be liable to think that the code in question was under a completely different license. In this scenario it is in the author's best interest to notify as many people as possible that his code has been hijacked. The more people that know, the better it is for the author, and for the people who would potentially have used the code. Sure, you'll be stepping on a few toes in making the issue public, but it has to be done in order to protect yourself and everyone else from misappropriating code. There is *no* other way to accomplish this as effectively, that I am aware of. Why take the man to task for protecting his assets, kindly and tactfully at that? I'm not sure that we're reading the same thing, because from my end, it looks like Michael was being kinder and more patient than I can reasonably expect from anybody that I've ever met. The only alternative would be to ask the developer to make a *public* statement about the entire thing, which would have the same effect. The only difference would be the name of the person delivering the message, which is _completely_ trivial.
Maybe you could argue that it might have saved the developer some face if he was the one delivering the message publicly. You know what would have saved him even more face? Not relicensing code that wasn't his in the first place.
Wrong, language is merely a mode of transporting meaning. You understood, thus my language was sufficient.
It may not have been perfectly accurate, but I admitted the mistake in my previous post, so your making a further fuss of it is rather unwarranted. Furthermore, if you didn't care what I meant, why did you bother to correct it? You certainly could have been more kind or civil about it, or at the very least been constructive and offered the correct terminology. You over-reacted, you got called - get over yourself.
Re: Pointless name calling - Evidence: "I'd certainly call that person a moron!" I didn't say that you meant _I_ was a moron, I just said that calling names is pointless, and asked if you were finished. It really isn't that difficult to understand what my question meant, but perhaps I have been misled regarding your intellectual capacity.
They didn't, at least not in this case. Spamhaus requested that the case be handled by this court. They chould have let it go to any court, then argued that whichever court it was had no jurisdiction, or let the court decide whenever it was handed the case that it didn't have jurisdiction. But that's not what happened. By requesting a specific court, it appeared that Spamhaus was going to actually fight the merits of the case, which would have waved jurisdiction arguements. So, to any court handling the case at this point, it would appear that Spamhaus was going to accept U.S. jurisdiction. But Spamhaus was just moving it to a court that they knew didn't have jurisdiction so that they wouldn't even have to show. I don't know why they didn't just let it go to any court, state or federal, and then claim grounds of no jurisdiction. Maybe their lawyers thought they might run into trouble in U.S. federal courts or something, and thought they had better chances of going this route. Nevertheless, the decision was Spamhaus', not any judge with a "god" complex.
I hate spammers, I think Spamhaus is fantastic. But it doesn't change the situation at hand, which is that there is potentially or allegedly illegal activity going on in servers located within the U.S. Someone is liable for it, and most likely it's the individuals operating those server. The problem is (for e360 anyway) there are hundreds if not thousands of them, and they can't be bothered with that many individual lawsuits. So, they went straight for the company causing them problems, and fell flat on their faces while doing it. I guess you can get mad at the U.S. court for it "thinking" that it had jurisdiction over a foreign company, but that's just the way the system works. As I said before, at the face, it appears that some illegal activity is happening on servers located in the U.S. Someone in the U.S. is liable for that, and e360 alleged that it was Spamhaus. Be mad that Spamhaus acted like retards over the whole thing, not at the courts for doing their job. Otherwise you've just got your sights on the wrong target, just like e360 did. I think a much bigger issue, one that's actually worth getting pissed off about anyway, is that the activity in question (blocking spammers) is actually possibly illegal in the U.S. The most fantastic part about all of it, is that it isn't in the U.K.
Well, now you're just being a smartass.
I meant to say defendant, I would think that it was rather obvious what I meant. It appears you understood my meaning anyway, so I am not wrong in thinking that it was obvious. Are you finished with the pointless name calling?
Should read: "This is old news anyway"
Read these: http://arstechnica.com/search.ars?Tag=spamhaus/
Arguing the merits of the case would have been an admission of jurisdiction on Spamhaus' part. This is old anyway.
Also, they weren't forced to delist the company. That was part of the original ruling, and apparently it went to the the feds to appeal to ICANN to have them delisted, and ICANN responded that not only were they incapable of doing so, but it wasn't their responsibility either. It would be up to the domain registrars to delist them. To add further complexity to this issue, Spamhaus' registrar is based out of Canada. I'm pretty sure that's outside of U.S. jurisdiction, but who knows these days.
IANAL and I'm pretty sure that someone more knowledgeable in this subject than I will post a clarification of this. Still, it should be said that one of the ways the U.S. courts provides to contest jurisdiction is to just not show up, then after a default ruling, they can go ahead in continuing the process of contesting jurisdiction. I gather that another way of doing this is to actually show up in court and declare that there is no jurisdiction. The tricky part is that if you show up in court and first declare that you are not guilty or guilty or whatever, by default you have waved your right to claim that there is no jurisdiction. By claiming one way or the other you have imposed the jurisdiction upon yourself.
Furthermore, it seems that Spamhaus or it's lawyers were (unsurprisingly) at least superficially aware of the rules of how this works, as they had motioned to have the case moved to the Illinois court themselves, instead of a federal court or whatever. Then by not showing up, they set themselves up to appeal on grounds of lack of jurisdiction. The default ruling is merely a superficiality that will eventually work itself out through the (I suppose) the appeals process.
Regardless, the judge really had no choice in the matter, given Spamhaus' choice. He doesn't deserve being spammed any more than you or I, and from what I've read he seemed either reluctant to rule against Spamhaus, or perhaps he was just annoyed that Spamhaus didn't handle this in a more direct manner.
Depends on your taste really. If metal is your thing, check out Tourniquet.
I'm an atheist, and don't really listen to that much metal, but these guys did some pretty cool stuff in their day. I haven't listened to any of their newer stuff, so I can't really say anything about that.
I'm also sure there's a pretty good pun about stoning in there somewhere, but word fail me.
Not only is it doing fine, but that cycle is a vital part of the industry. Every time the hottest new style is stolen by the lesser companies, the big fancy companies use it as an opportunity to come out with the next style.
3 .html/
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061124-828
I tried to think of how this could be a plausible business model for the music industry, but either it's already happening, or it doesn't seem to fit. Unfortunately, I doubt there is a record exec that actually appreciates musical "style". If they did, they'd understand the derivative nature of music, and wouldn't be having DJ's arrested for copyright infringement. Hopefully one day they'll behave just like how the all-grown-up fashion industry behaves; you don't see Prada suing the pants off of high school girls who bought knockoff handbags. Hell, you don't even see them sue the makes of the knockoff's. They just ditch their old stuff, and make new stuff for the people to buy.
You're coming off awfully strong for someone who agrees with what the target of your post just stated. You can argue the finer points of monopolies all you want, but the point ( that you so adequately made ) is that the monopoly is thrust upon the telcos.
The post that started this thread was from someone arguing that market forces would straighten it out in the end. The reply that you are attacking was merely making the point that market forces _do_not_ properly act upon or affect the bells or any other monopoly. It is naive to believe that this problem would "work itself out" in the economic conditions that we have today. It's arguable whether it would actually work itself out even in a truly open market without regulation or monopolization, but that's pretty irrelevant.
I don't know if regulation is the answer. It could certainly help, but it could also horrifically backfire. But one thing is apparent to me: this problem will not fix itself.
If you look at any company's data retention policy, it's really just a "data loss" policy. Most are crafted with the thought, "When is the earliest that we can legally destroy this data, and be able to reasonably argue that we aren't liable." Keeping in mind that you could probably be held liable for destruction of data after any time period of retention. It really just comes down to who has the best lawyers.
You both missed out on the typo:
pressreleaseaseasjournalism = press release ase as journalism
Whatever the hell that means.
> (A)ttack
Douchebag, T-Mobile is a German company...
Sorry about the douchebag comment.
You know, science has fucked enough of this stuff up.
We used to know that the earth was flat, and the universe revolved around it. Then scientists with their "theories" came along and screwed everything up. If only they had focused on the "known facts" at the time, instead of messing around with these scientific theories, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Possibilities include:
Inner House League
International Humanitarian Law
or a combination of the two:
International Hockey League
[blockquote]Either your comment is stupid or Apple customers are stupid.[/blockquote] You seem to have negated the possibility that both statements are true.
2. Paint a mural of a lake on it
3. Coat with dimethyl sulfide
4. Watch birds smash into it
Now if that isn't reason enough why this research should considered useful, then there is something wrong with this world.
Also, to take your point a bit further, the traditional fantasy novel that appeals to it's typical niche audience is almost designed in a way to be unappealing to the general populace. Long drawn out histories that have no real meaning to the storyline, overdrawn over-dramatic characters, and just a lot of general nonsense.
In contrast, it's the simple, practically cardboard cutout characters, and basic hero/villain stories that seem to have an impact on the largest audience.
The simplicity of the Monomyth still has great appeal.
"Answer: Deal with the problem at your end."
I agree with you, but really, this is the sort of thing the article was complaining about. He's essentially complaining about not wanting to have to deal with the problem at his end, which is a perfectly reasonable complaint.
Also, I think there is one other reason why he's failed to utilize Linux in a corporate environment for over 10 years straight. It's him. He talks about wanting to support the Open Source community, which is great, I guess. Probably not the best reason to start a migration to Linux. Maybe a little research and planning before hand would have shown him the solution that he was looking at didn't meet the requirements of whatever project he was working on. In fact, admitting to doing this repeatedly over the course of 10 years pretty much shows a lack of understanding of how to plan and implement a migration. I'm not convinced that short-comings in Linux are to blame for this one.
Well, as you point out, this wouldn't work very well for the federal government in the United States. However, I think if you break it down into a more local level you could see better government representation at that level. This could be a good thing for something such as a large city, though I'd definitely be afraid of which petitions get the most submissions in areas such as the bible belt. Then again, how many rednecks know enough about those internets to actually make a difference?
Then there is the question of whether or not it's really necessary at the local level. I don't really have too many complaints about my views being represented at the local level. My views might not be the one that are legislated, but at least they seem to be taken into consideration at the local level.
So, as we have agreed, this probably wouldn't work so well at the federal level, and I'm challenged to think of a methodology that would work. At least they are trying something different to solve their problems. It's seems that we're just stewing in our own excrement right now.
(sorry for repeating myself so often, I just want to be clear and am too exhausted at the moment to refine my thoughts)