I thought you were going to say that you had this really nifty highly obscure homebrew checksumming program. Unless you make it a habit to memorize checksums, then how will it help having tripwire running if someone has front-panel access to your box?
They might fall for the first person they were investigating who used that to protect his system, but probably not the second.
True, but that does not mean that they are not going to break the rules. The knowledge that they couldn't use the evidence would in no way deter them from collecting it.
Unlike your local PD, the FBI risks a lot more harm than possible benefit from such a strategy. All it would take is one whistleblower to make the whole thing blow up in their faces. I suspect that if the FBI says they are using those communication restraints it is because they are. Even the political damage, much less the criminal liability of lying to the courts, would be overwhelmingly more costly than losing this relatively unimportant case.
Wow, I certainly didn't intend to cause such a furor. Max referred to the version of OO he was running as version 6 and said it had been built that morning. Not being personally familiar with the project I just quoted him; at least as far as I understood.
One of the points he kept making was that the open source product won't be QC'd like StarOffice is (it is up to the open source community to use it, test it, and report back bugs), so it seemed quite reasonable to me that when he said version 6 that it really was that version.
I suppose he may have been using the term loosely, or perhaps I misheard and the dozen or more times I thought he said version six he was actually saying 638c.
In any case the code is supposed to be feature complete, so I'm sure they would be happy for anyone who is willing to download the package and try to use it.
One other subject that came up several times in the talk was the poor quality of publicly available fonts. Although one of the audience members tried to convince him to buy the relevant fonts and free them (in the same way as StarOffice
was itself), there aren't any plans to solve that particular problem. The fonts look legible to me, but have unusually large intercharacter spacing so the code may be coercing fonts into the bounding box of a commercial font without really checking the font metrics of the real fonts being used.
Live data buffering is how all circular buffers
are used. It is the same as in the TCP windowing
buffer implemented 30 years ago.
Taking that well known type of buffer and applying it to video is brutally obvious. Network streaming video like that of the Real Video
client does the same thing.
I find it disappointing; it is a straight forward implementation of a problem. No insight, nothing new.
I don't see how you can say that a work that is freely available is somehow worth more than a work that is not. Perhaps more useful, but even that is dependent upon the actual value of the information. And the actual value of the information is not dependent upon whether it is freely available or not.
Well, that is the whole point of the debate. I argue that it is more valuable because it is
more useful en toto. Business would
argue that e.g HP-UX is more valuable than
Linux because it is more capable of reaping
profit. But when calculating value should you
look at the benefit to the creator, or the
benefit to society? I argue that they are
ultimately the same; that proprietary rights
are just one means of extracting a tax from a
positive balance work cycle. But there are
numerous other ways to extract taxes -- they
could be legislated as for example the BBC
creates information that is freely usable by
all Britains. Taxes can be extracted by
enlightened self-interest, as is done for
example by the public radio system in the
United States or certain popular artists. Information can be generated
as a free byproduct of sponsored research, as is
historically true of the University system,
and some public works projects.
Or information could be shared throughout a
commonwealth as the GPL attempts to do, and as
some communes do successfully.
Actually the one complaint I have about the
GPL is that it doesn't provide a means of taxation
sufficient to support reinvestment for further
development. There are some attempts at building such a system, but my estimate of the total earnings of all commercial GPL distributors is
that they barely cover their own costs much less
the costs of developing the software they
distribute.
In terms of music, if the artist doesn't
collect enough revenue from their work they don't
eat and that source of music disappears as they
go off to find other work that will sustain them.
But making music or other information uncopyable by technical or legal means isn't the
answer. While it does create a taxation point
for the artist to support themselves, it doesn't
realize the full utility potential of the medium.
The best bet I see right now is what MP3.com
is doing with their Payola artist
payback system. If they went one further and
started charging for client access to the
full library of music, then people could still
copy the music all they want, but revenue from
clients who want streaming/anywhere access
should be sufficient to repay artists for their
work and is still in proportion to the demand
for their music.
In any case I think that completely cutting off
the ability of the public to copy and share
information reduces its uses effectively to
zero when looking at the counterexample of the
net.
When I write 'Information Wants to be Free', I'm
not trying to anthropomorphise Information.
What I mean is rather that information itself is
intrinsically freely copyable; that efforts like
laws or copyrights that restrict that copying are
running against the most prominent features of the
information itself.
From that the reader is meant to deduce that
applications which do allow free copying of data
will out-compete those applications which restrict
data by virtue of their better adaptation to the
real characteristics of the information.
So you write:
Information only 'wants' to be free insofar as its creator wants it to be free.
But this only sidesteps the argument, painting
in a disagreement where none exists. The real argument is this: 'The creator of information
who allows his work to be freely copied has
information that is much more valuable than
a creator offering similar information but who
attempts to restrict the copying of that information.'
In my last project we had about 80 developers about
half of whom were running linux on at least one
of their boxes; so 40 desktops (admittedly specialized). It won't be the biggest installation
by far, but I was genuinely surprised by the level
of interest among other developers here.
But how about "Unix has not been under active development for the last 10 years.", which is true. SVR4 was declared "done" along with Motif/CDE and everything since then has been primarily scalability improvements.
Certainly UNIX has gone through a sort of dark
age. The most exciting development for UNIX in my
opinion is the recent reemergence of loosely coupled computing. The XML proposition of data
that is free of semantics or methods is really very similar to UNIX's concept of 'everything is
a file.'
Reuse of code in an OO development model
is restricted to reuse only where you can comply with the uses envisioned by the original author. Data reuse that is independent of the original
author's intended uses vastly increases the
possibility of radical new uses.
Rob Pike's paper tends more to support my position than yours. He complains about the
sad state of OS research, but he certainly
recognizes that there isn't any demand for it.
In other words: No Unix does not need
to be replaced. As Pike writes in his conclusion:
"People have decided how they want Operating Systems
to work. [...] Research has effectively been sidelined." Not that I agree with his gloomy
assessment of the world, but we would surely
both agree that there isn't any call for new
disruptive research.
Nor do I think that there will be a need for
disruptive rather than evolutionary research
until one of the prime factors changes; where
wearables, home servers, and good speaker independent voice recognition are some examples of new products which
could lead to new disruptive operating systems
research.
unix needs to go.. it's what, 30+ years old.. the ideas behind it are still viable, but need to be reincarnated in something new, not only add-ons to existing operating systems (same goes for microsoft)...
This is soooo misguided! Software that is 30
years old is probably the only software in the world that has all of its bugs worked out. If it is still useful then use it, don't worry about how old it is. Having looked at the minimalism of
plan 9, I can't say I've ever been tempted to use
it. Plan 9 suffers from reinvention syndrome; the
creators want to create something that perfectly represents the abstractions they were trying to create in Unix; but it doesn't balance use with
ideal in any pragmatic way.
Similar to Plan 9 was the old NT3.51 kernel, a perfect microkernel architecture. Dead slow because nothing but the kernel was running in ring 0, so even video access had to go through a couple of layers of OS context before modifying a register, but beautiful in its construction.
Where does Salon get enough money to continue
to produce the site if not from ads? Will you
donate bandwidth in exchange for free access
(napster)?
Will you donate articles (slashdot)? Will you
wait in line for limited resources (pre-breakup
Soviet Union)? Will you donate money out of
enlightened self-interest (public radio)?
These aren't really idle questions; everything
that exists has to collect more than it uses or it quickly uses its available resources and then dies. Even Open Source software grows only because people are willing to donate (time), and
because the incremental cost of living is moderately low.
But how do you set up a system of taxation sufficient to support a system which has historically been supported by now scarce venture
capital? Without an answer to that all of this must eventually die.
I think Salon is risking their reader base by using this sort of ad system.
For a system to be viable it has to generate
some surplus energy. Every living organism does this. If Salon can't generate enough revenue from
advertising to cover minimum expenses then eventually the system will consume all of the
available resources and the system will die.
Personally I hate annoying ads, so I pay $25/yr to read
Salon ad-free. I'd actually be willing to pay a mixture of ads
and money if the ads weren't annoying, but Salon
doesn't offer that as an option.
The bottom line though is that if no one cares about Salon's reporting enough to either wade through the ads, or to pay the yearly support fee, then Salon will deservedly die. But don't think
that it would be any different if they stopped running ads -- the system needs to collect more than it spends and not running ads is just another way to stop collecting money.
Please tell me why this has any relevance to me. I'm not an American,...
DMCA, coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
Seriously, where in the world do you live that
US law doesn't impact your daily life. If the US becomes totalitarian the whole world suffers as
we push similar totalitarian laws on your governments (in the interests of free trade, or
what ever else it doesn't really matter.) The
world is becoming much too small to think that
you can live your isolated little lives in peace.
This isn't meant to be an America is the Best post, but a wake up call. Look around you and see the way the world is. Your government; even my
government is unimportant. What is important is
how our governments interact and where one DMCA goes, another follows quickly on its heels -- especially among trade allies, but even throughout the whole world.
With the recent legislation making digital signatures the legal equivalent of personal
signatures, this is surprisingly doable. Assuming that you can convince Slashdot readers to install crypto software, and that crypto isn't soon to be outlawed that is.
I wonder though if Slashdot would still be as
effective as it is if it were not for the effective anonymity of the site. Although AC
posts have declined, the difficulty of associating
a handle with a real name essentially allows people to spout half formed thoughts that these
same people on further reflection would be unwilling to sign their names to.
...sorry about the formatting of the previous post. When was <pre> removed from the list of
approved HTML tags?
Well, that computer is my mail server and web
server among other things, so it never gets turned
off. On the other hand I don't exactly sit in
front of it all day. It doesn't even have a
keyboard or mouse attached to it.
I do grok the need to spend time away from the
keyboard though; my latest project is tearing walls
out of an extension that was added to my house in
the early 70's, and framing in a new wall for a
wine cellar. Just pulled off the last of the old
dry wall last night...
Never the less, when I am online, I'd like to do something to get these viruses to stop propagating. I've tried messaging the operators
through smbclient:
smblookup -A <ipaddr>
[...]
LOGIN <03>
smbclient -U security -I <ipaddr> -M LOGIN
This machine has been infected with a virus!
Please get the latest updates for Microsoft
IIS, and install some up to date virus checking
software. Until then your machine is spreading
that virus through the web, so please shut it
off.
^D
Hasn't had any effect so far. I doubt anyone ever looks at the consoles of these woefully unmaintained machines.
Well, that computer is my mail server and web
server among other things, so it never gets turned
off. On the other hand I don't exactly sit in
front of it all day. It doesn't even have a
keyboard or mouse attached to it.
I do grok the need to spend time away from the
keyboard though; my latest project is tearing walls
out of an extension that was added to my house in
the early 70's, and framing in a new wall for a
wine cellar. Just pulled off the last of the old
dry wall last night...
Never the less, when I am online, I'd like to do something to get these viruses to stop propagating. I've tried messaging the operators
through smbclient:
smblookup -A
[...]
LOGIN
smbclient -U security -I -M LOGIN
This machine has been infected with a virus!
Please get the latest updates for Microsoft
IIS, and install some up to date virus checking
software. Until then your machine is spreading
that virus through the web, so please shut it
off.
^D
Hasn't had any effect so far. I doubt anyone ever looks at the consoles of these woefully unmaintained machines.
So I checked my web server error logs last night,
and counted up how many times my box has been attacked. I have over two thousand individual hits from a single IP address (you'd think that the scanner would give up after one try.) About 170
distinct IP's have tried scanning me.
Mailing abuse seems to be ignored these days; are all of the ISPs scaling back their security staff at
the same time as more virulent attacks are released
to the net? If anyone has any other suggestions
of what to do with these attacks, I'd love to hear it.
His entire argument seems to rest on the idea that laws are worthless. Quite aside from ignoring
the genuinely beneficial impacts of a system of laws, simply ignoring power and control structures isn't
a very promising strategy.
It is as if he were arguing that to win a soccer game you should stop all that messing around with the feet stuff, pick up a notepad
and start writing poetry instead. Arguing that
the rules are stupid because they don't allow you
to use the most useful appendages you have misses the point.
The legal system simply is. We live within
it. Pretending it doesn't exist is even more
useless than spending all of your life worrying
about it.
FWIW I think this is a wonderful thing. When
the Moz team first started relicensing parts of
the source base about a year ago it made it much
easier to convince our lawyers to let us fiddle
with the code.
So I could take any public domain software and call it my own without modifying it. Because public domain is the "giving up any rights to the work".
Basically what I want in a license is credit where credit is due. I want the world to know that I wrote my code, but at the same time alow them to use it for whatever the hell they want. So basically my thinking is "Since I don't make money off the code I write on my spare time I don't care if anyone else makes money off of it. But I at least want credit for doing the work".
Aha! So you want people to use it for 'whatever the hell they want' except that they
can't claim credit for code you wrote.
Aside from technicalities, how is that different from allowing people to use it for
'whatever the hell they want' except that they
can't take the code, improve it, redistribute it
and refuse to share their improvements.
Neither of these seems inherently more morally
defensible than the other. If you really want people to do whatever they want full stop then put it in the public domain and be done
with it; but don't get all high and mighty because you only want fame, while I want to
grow an open source community. I happen to prefer my values over yours.
Users of GPL'd code need do nothing to use GPL'd code. The license doesn't apply to them.
Users who have taken the affirmative action of
redistributing the GPL'd code either do so in violation of Copyright Law, or must accept the GPL. There is no general right to redistribute code that is copyrighted, so without accepting the GPL redistributors are in violation of Copyrights.
You have completely misread Eben's argument. It is Copyright law that applies, not the license. The License is just something which allows you to comply with the law.
Re:How to win a war in the Middle East
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
Well, the question was meant to be academic. As in
how (in theory) could we win a war in the middle
east. The question was occasioned by the continuing references to WTC1&2 as comparable to Pearl Harbor. I was simply pointing out that aside from the obvious distinction that we don't yet know who to
blame for the tragedy, we aren't even likely to
be up against an enemy who can be fought, overcome,
and restructured.
It is possible that we will (as you suggest) consider ourselves at war with all terrorists (and all countries that protect terrorists) but that
could include for example Ireland (when was the last time you reported your local IRA front
company), many allies within the middle east,
and arguably even the US itself (do our citizens
not send money and support to terrorists?)
How to win a war in the Middle East
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
I've been thinking about how you would even
go about trying to win a war in the middle east.
It is quite a tricky problem.
Unlike either Germany or Japan, terrorist groups are not organized into strict hierarchy. Even if the leaders were convinced surrender,
there isn't any reason why the individual self
organized cells should do so.
Nor is the social system a structure founded
on laws; rather it is a system founded on morals,
with the moral teachings subject to many
interpretations by the church leaders. So unseating the government and showing the people
that the government was corrupt is also not
possible.
The only way I can see of winning such a war
is by doing something the US at least would
consider very distasteful; that is we would have
to displace not the government, but the religion.
Topple the religious system, and show that the
system of morals is corrupt. But the US' seperation of church and state will make us
incapable of that sort of attack, while anything
less will be unsuccessful.
I think the reason that Germany and Japan
were both successfully changed was because they
maintained the local form of government without its
belligerence. Aside from a religious crusade we would be loathe to conduct, I can't see how the
same result could happen here.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought you were going to say that you had this really nifty highly obscure homebrew checksumming program. Unless you make it a habit to memorize checksums, then how will it help having tripwire running if someone has front-panel access to your box?
They might fall for the first person they were investigating who used that to protect his system, but probably not the second.
True, but that does not mean that they are not going to break the rules. The knowledge that they couldn't use the evidence would in no way deter them from collecting it.
Unlike your local PD, the FBI risks a lot more harm than possible benefit from such a strategy. All it would take is one whistleblower to make the whole thing blow up in their faces. I suspect that if the FBI says they are using those communication restraints it is because they are. Even the political damage, much less the criminal liability of lying to the courts, would be overwhelmingly more costly than losing this relatively unimportant case.thx
One of the points he kept making was that the open source product won't be QC'd like StarOffice is (it is up to the open source community to use it, test it, and report back bugs), so it seemed quite reasonable to me that when he said version 6 that it really was that version.
I suppose he may have been using the term loosely, or perhaps I misheard and the dozen or more times I thought he said version six he was actually saying 638c.
In any case the code is supposed to be feature complete, so I'm sure they would be happy for anyone who is willing to download the package and try to use it.
One other subject that came up several times in the talk was the poor quality of publicly available fonts. Although one of the audience members tried to convince him to buy the relevant fonts and free them (in the same way as StarOffice was itself), there aren't any plans to solve that particular problem. The fonts look legible to me, but have unusually large intercharacter spacing so the code may be coercing fonts into the bounding box of a commercial font without really checking the font metrics of the real fonts being used.
I find it disappointing; it is a straight forward implementation of a problem. No insight, nothing new.
Actually the one complaint I have about the GPL is that it doesn't provide a means of taxation sufficient to support reinvestment for further development. There are some attempts at building such a system, but my estimate of the total earnings of all commercial GPL distributors is that they barely cover their own costs much less the costs of developing the software they distribute.
In terms of music, if the artist doesn't collect enough revenue from their work they don't eat and that source of music disappears as they go off to find other work that will sustain them.
But making music or other information uncopyable by technical or legal means isn't the answer. While it does create a taxation point for the artist to support themselves, it doesn't realize the full utility potential of the medium.
The best bet I see right now is what MP3.com is doing with their Payola artist payback system. If they went one further and started charging for client access to the full library of music, then people could still copy the music all they want, but revenue from clients who want streaming/anywhere access should be sufficient to repay artists for their work and is still in proportion to the demand for their music.
In any case I think that completely cutting off the ability of the public to copy and share information reduces its uses effectively to zero when looking at the counterexample of the net.
From that the reader is meant to deduce that applications which do allow free copying of data will out-compete those applications which restrict data by virtue of their better adaptation to the real characteristics of the information.
So you write:
But this only sidesteps the argument, painting in a disagreement where none exists. The real argument is this: 'The creator of information who allows his work to be freely copied has information that is much more valuable than a creator offering similar information but who attempts to restrict the copying of that information.'
In my last project we had about 80 developers about half of whom were running linux on at least one of their boxes; so 40 desktops (admittedly specialized). It won't be the biggest installation by far, but I was genuinely surprised by the level of interest among other developers here.
Certainly UNIX has gone through a sort of dark age. The most exciting development for UNIX in my opinion is the recent reemergence of loosely coupled computing. The XML proposition of data that is free of semantics or methods is really very similar to UNIX's concept of 'everything is a file.'
Reuse of code in an OO development model is restricted to reuse only where you can comply with the uses envisioned by the original author. Data reuse that is independent of the original author's intended uses vastly increases the possibility of radical new uses.
Rob Pike's paper tends more to support my position than yours. He complains about the sad state of OS research, but he certainly recognizes that there isn't any demand for it.
In other words: No Unix does not need to be replaced. As Pike writes in his conclusion: "People have decided how they want Operating Systems to work. [...] Research has effectively been sidelined." Not that I agree with his gloomy assessment of the world, but we would surely both agree that there isn't any call for new disruptive research.
Nor do I think that there will be a need for disruptive rather than evolutionary research until one of the prime factors changes; where wearables, home servers, and good speaker independent voice recognition are some examples of new products which could lead to new disruptive operating systems research.
This is soooo misguided! Software that is 30 years old is probably the only software in the world that has all of its bugs worked out. If it is still useful then use it, don't worry about how old it is. Having looked at the minimalism of plan 9, I can't say I've ever been tempted to use it. Plan 9 suffers from reinvention syndrome; the creators want to create something that perfectly represents the abstractions they were trying to create in Unix; but it doesn't balance use with ideal in any pragmatic way.
Similar to Plan 9 was the old NT3.51 kernel, a perfect microkernel architecture. Dead slow because nothing but the kernel was running in ring 0, so even video access had to go through a couple of layers of OS context before modifying a register, but beautiful in its construction.
Utility trumps perfection.
Where does Salon get enough money to continue to produce the site if not from ads? Will you donate bandwidth in exchange for free access (napster)? Will you donate articles (slashdot)? Will you wait in line for limited resources (pre-breakup Soviet Union)? Will you donate money out of enlightened self-interest (public radio)?
These aren't really idle questions; everything that exists has to collect more than it uses or it quickly uses its available resources and then dies. Even Open Source software grows only because people are willing to donate (time), and because the incremental cost of living is moderately low.
But how do you set up a system of taxation sufficient to support a system which has historically been supported by now scarce venture capital? Without an answer to that all of this must eventually die.
For a system to be viable it has to generate some surplus energy. Every living organism does this. If Salon can't generate enough revenue from advertising to cover minimum expenses then eventually the system will consume all of the available resources and the system will die.
Personally I hate annoying ads, so I pay $25/yr to read Salon ad-free. I'd actually be willing to pay a mixture of ads and money if the ads weren't annoying, but Salon doesn't offer that as an option.
The bottom line though is that if no one cares about Salon's reporting enough to either wade through the ads, or to pay the yearly support fee, then Salon will deservedly die. But don't think that it would be any different if they stopped running ads -- the system needs to collect more than it spends and not running ads is just another way to stop collecting money.
DMCA, coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
Seriously, where in the world do you live that US law doesn't impact your daily life. If the US becomes totalitarian the whole world suffers as we push similar totalitarian laws on your governments (in the interests of free trade, or what ever else it doesn't really matter.) The world is becoming much too small to think that you can live your isolated little lives in peace.
This isn't meant to be an America is the Best post, but a wake up call. Look around you and see the way the world is. Your government; even my government is unimportant. What is important is how our governments interact and where one DMCA goes, another follows quickly on its heels -- especially among trade allies, but even throughout the whole world.
I wonder though if Slashdot would still be as effective as it is if it were not for the effective anonymity of the site. Although AC posts have declined, the difficulty of associating a handle with a real name essentially allows people to spout half formed thoughts that these same people on further reflection would be unwilling to sign their names to.
...sorry about the formatting of the previous post. When was <pre> removed from the list of approved HTML tags?
Well, that computer is my mail server and web server among other things, so it never gets turned off. On the other hand I don't exactly sit in front of it all day. It doesn't even have a keyboard or mouse attached to it.
I do grok the need to spend time away from the keyboard though; my latest project is tearing walls out of an extension that was added to my house in the early 70's, and framing in a new wall for a wine cellar. Just pulled off the last of the old dry wall last night...
Never the less, when I am online, I'd like to do something to get these viruses to stop propagating. I've tried messaging the operators through smbclient:
Hasn't had any effect so far. I doubt anyone ever looks at the consoles of these woefully unmaintained machines.
Well, that computer is my mail server and web server among other things, so it never gets turned off. On the other hand I don't exactly sit in front of it all day. It doesn't even have a keyboard or mouse attached to it.
I do grok the need to spend time away from the keyboard though; my latest project is tearing walls out of an extension that was added to my house in the early 70's, and framing in a new wall for a wine cellar. Just pulled off the last of the old dry wall last night...
Never the less, when I am online, I'd like to do something to get these viruses to stop propagating. I've tried messaging the operators through smbclient: smblookup -A [...] LOGIN smbclient -U security -I -M LOGIN This machine has been infected with a virus! Please get the latest updates for Microsoft IIS, and install some up to date virus checking software. Until then your machine is spreading that virus through the web, so please shut it off. ^D
Hasn't had any effect so far. I doubt anyone ever looks at the consoles of these woefully unmaintained machines.
So I checked my web server error logs last night, and counted up how many times my box has been attacked. I have over two thousand individual hits from a single IP address (you'd think that the scanner would give up after one try.) About 170 distinct IP's have tried scanning me.
Mailing abuse seems to be ignored these days; are all of the ISPs scaling back their security staff at the same time as more virulent attacks are released to the net? If anyone has any other suggestions of what to do with these attacks, I'd love to hear it.
His entire argument seems to rest on the idea that laws are worthless. Quite aside from ignoring the genuinely beneficial impacts of a system of laws, simply ignoring power and control structures isn't a very promising strategy.
It is as if he were arguing that to win a soccer game you should stop all that messing around with the feet stuff, pick up a notepad and start writing poetry instead. Arguing that the rules are stupid because they don't allow you to use the most useful appendages you have misses the point.
The legal system simply is. We live within it. Pretending it doesn't exist is even more useless than spending all of your life worrying about it.
FWIW I think this is a wonderful thing. When the Moz team first started relicensing parts of the source base about a year ago it made it much easier to convince our lawyers to let us fiddle with the code.
Looks fine under Mozilla... ;)
So I could take any public domain software and call it my own without modifying it. Because public domain is the "giving up any rights to the work".
Basically what I want in a license is credit where credit is due. I want the world to know that I wrote my code, but at the same time alow them to use it for whatever the hell they want. So basically my thinking is "Since I don't make money off the code I write on my spare time I don't care if anyone else makes money off of it. But I at least want credit for doing the work".
Aha! So you want people to use it for 'whatever the hell they want' except that they can't claim credit for code you wrote.
Aside from technicalities, how is that different from allowing people to use it for 'whatever the hell they want' except that they can't take the code, improve it, redistribute it and refuse to share their improvements.
Neither of these seems inherently more morally defensible than the other. If you really want people to do whatever they want full stop then put it in the public domain and be done with it; but don't get all high and mighty because you only want fame, while I want to grow an open source community. I happen to prefer my values over yours.
Reread what he said. He very clearly stated that:
You have completely misread Eben's argument. It is Copyright law that applies, not the license. The License is just something which allows you to comply with the law.
It is possible that we will (as you suggest) consider ourselves at war with all terrorists (and all countries that protect terrorists) but that could include for example Ireland (when was the last time you reported your local IRA front company), many allies within the middle east, and arguably even the US itself (do our citizens not send money and support to terrorists?)
I've been thinking about how you would even go about trying to win a war in the middle east. It is quite a tricky problem.
Unlike either Germany or Japan, terrorist groups are not organized into strict hierarchy. Even if the leaders were convinced surrender, there isn't any reason why the individual self organized cells should do so.
Nor is the social system a structure founded on laws; rather it is a system founded on morals, with the moral teachings subject to many interpretations by the church leaders. So unseating the government and showing the people that the government was corrupt is also not possible.
The only way I can see of winning such a war is by doing something the US at least would consider very distasteful; that is we would have to displace not the government, but the religion. Topple the religious system, and show that the system of morals is corrupt. But the US' seperation of church and state will make us incapable of that sort of attack, while anything less will be unsuccessful.
I think the reason that Germany and Japan were both successfully changed was because they maintained the local form of government without its belligerence. Aside from a religious crusade we would be loathe to conduct, I can't see how the same result could happen here.