I'd like to be able to pin the newest KDE/gnome/whatever to stable and do an apt-get upgrade without breaking a million things.
You can pin the newest KDE/gnome/whatever to unstable. Newest always goes in unstable first. Unstable is pretty cutting edge, but with an occasional hiccup.
The point of stable is that it works. Things go there after they are 'tried and true' in unstable, and then in testing.
In this case the key element was information. Had this information got free the satallite providers could have lost a *lot* of money. There would be no way to stop the spread of the information.
Wait a minute - there is no alleged intellectual property issue. Did he violate patents, or an NDA, or copyright? AFAICS he just reverse engineered their signal.
Aren't I, as a consumer, free to do what I want with signals someone else beams into my house without asking me to do so?
I would hold that DirecTV has a responsibility to insure the integrity of their signal, and that no one else is liable, barring trade secret or patent violations. If I reverse engineer their signal, nuts for them.
People who can't afford to pay for legal satellite should just do without. We're not talking about food or medicine here. Anyone whose moral code can justify stealing a blatant luxury like satellite TV has the moral code of a thief.
I resent any company beaming electromagnetic fields into my house and telling me that I can't do anything with them unless I pay them. I never asked for them to beam radiation into my house.
If I am clever enough to get something useful out of them without violating NDAs or trade secrets etc, I see no reason why I am violating the law. After all, they are the ones beaming the radiation into MY house .
Really? I think there is a valid bit of constitutional law here.
Who owns the electro-magnetic fields in my house? Does DirectTV own them, or may I sample them freely?
Now, I respect the rights of DirecTV to make money by selling cable through the airwaves, but I have a real problem with the government telling me what I can and cannot do with EMFs someone else is beaming into my house.
Our problem is that 99% of people read email via POP, and POP only serves one mailbox per person. It is extraordinarily difficult to train everyone to use a spam filter individually, and yet installing one on the server can't work with POP's limitations. Frustrating.
Secondly, Microsoft is in the fray now. Bet any amount they will offer a authenticating email service that requires using Windows XP to work. It will work really well, you won't be able to communicate well with people who don't use it - standard tactics. They want to give people incentive to upgrade, and to stay locked in.
It means they have to do retrys...that means spam runs take longer, especially since they have to run...then wait for a locally defined timeout, and run all those addresses again
AND they have to do it from the same IP.
All this is done by the perp who provides them with the spamming software. He writes it once and sells it for hundreds to all the spammers, who are making $1000 or more a week.
This raises their bandwidth profile. It wastes their time... all in all... it raises their cost of doing buisness and cuts into their profit margins.
It costs the spammer little in time. The cost of doing business is hardly impacted. When you take $0.000000000001 per spam and make it $0.00000000001, you didn't really slow them down.
It means they will have to upgrade their tools again. It means they get headaches. And of course, the next step is to impliment spam traps that watch activity and see that a spammer is spamming, and promotes them to a blacklist before they can even retry. (oh gee 1000 new greylist triplets from 1 IP in under 5 mins? Set the timeouts for that IP to 12 hours)
Spammers will pay for new tools, upgrade at about the same rate they are currently doing, and the cost of doing business will not change much. Greylisting is a nice idea - really - but the magnitude of the problem is being underestimated.
People will not employ greylisting on a broad scale. So, if you use greylisting, you can expect less spam. But, tools will be upgraded, and spam will go on. And on. Until the fundamental problem is addressed.
Email has to have a reasonable challenge-response component, or it has to have a price. Until this approach is broadly accepted, spam will be a way of life.
There is no magical waiting period or re-try period that cannot be trivially coded around. And, with good money on the line, will be trivially coded around.
You don't get it. Really smart people are getting paid a whole lot of money to make programs to exploit every possible crack in the way we send email. There is no general rule to spammers, except that it is a lot of money and they are very clever. Little bandaids are not going to stop this one - there needs to be a much more fundamental change. And I am not talking about laws against spam - I am talking about changes in the protocols we use to send email.
The thing that is wrong is the SMTP protocol, and most people's conception of a spammer. Once you see a few "confessions of ex-spammers", everything changes.
There are people out there who pay $10000 in startup costs, and then make $2000/week for spamming. The $10000 gets them software written by knowledgable internet security experts. This software finds any and every way to anonymify the email spam, and finds lists of people to spam.
As long as knowledgable internet security experts are getting paid good cash to enable spammers, and SMTP doesn't change, spam will only continue to get worse. There needs to be a fundamental change in SMTP protocols. It oughta take the spammers about 2 days to fix their MTA bug to get around greylisting.
Number 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
Number 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
So under "right to privacy", we are never allowed to include someone's home in a photograph? I guess that makes this product completely illegal.
No, not quite. The California Constitution does include a right to privacy. Excessive compromising of someone's privacy is considered harassment - for example - if I followed you everywhere with a webcam and broadcast your every move, that would be harassment. Or, if I set up a streaming webcam that looked INSIDE your window, that would be harassment.
In the case in question, the website DOES have a gazillion coastline pics. However, Streisand's picture is labelled as "Streisand estate", and is coincidentally centered on her property and rather tastefully done. You could easily argue that Adelman went out of his way to single Streisand out among coastal property owners and identify her estate.
Now, where she lives is public information (available through freedom of information act). But excessive compromising of her privacy is harassment, or in violation of paparazzi laws.
I think that is where she is coming from. Adelman went out of his way to be a dick, and she is calling him on it. Be interesting to see how it plays out.
This maneuver is clearly about nullifying "trade secret" status on the AT&T source of which SCO owns the copyright. Giving up trade secrets would be a huge liability for IBM - if someone had been shown the code without an NDA, then the cat is out of the bag, and there is no issue wrt trade secret.
This has nothing to do with a "copy-and-paste" type copyright infringement which may or may not have occurred.
If you were around coding postscript about 15 years ago, you would have a good idea that the time to print a file was almost completely dependent on the file size (and size of stack used). The processor in the printers of that time were not so powerful, supporting gzip would probably have taken all their RAM.
It is for this reason that postscript prologs quite often redefine all common postscript commands into one or two letter equivalents (which also renders the postscript practically illegible).
We used to spend a lot of time figuring out how to code a figure to make it print fastest. Kinda like we used to spend a lot of time figuring out how to write complex programs that ran in 16K of RAM. Such things are less relevant today. People call you a dinosaur and yell insults at you, like "RAM is cheap - just write it quickly so that it runs."
No, you are right. That is a time bomb. The only recourse is for an author to ask all potential companies for any patents that may infringe before beginning to distribute a project.
It's kinda like a minefield. You can ask all the big players where the mines are, and expect to know about most of them, but you can never be sure you will find them all. And, if you miss one, oops, there goes the house.
You are not liable for damages before you are notified by the patent holder that you are infringing. At that point you halt all distribution, and there are no damages, and no settlement.
Now, if you call their bluff, and continue distributing thinking they will lose, and they win, then you lose your house, your car, and your hair.
But you deserve it b/c you are an idiot.
Note - this is not a stance for patents on software. Just pointing out that by writing and distributing software that is on shaky ground wrt patents, you will NOT lose your home unless you are also an idiot. You may lose the right to distribute your code though.
But honestly - if you DID run a business, you'd do the same thing AOL did. Sucks to be you, but don't blame them.
That was exactly my point. I would feel a responsibility, on behalf of my customers, to provide a spam-filtering service on request. Users would quite simply be able to drop spam into a folder in their account, and the SMTP servers would be configured, on a per user basis, to reject mail that resembled that spam (using conservative Bayesian filtering). The users are themselves responsible for their own spam filtering, and the SMTP servers are spared.
As an alternate, the mail could still be received, but the mail that resembled spam more could have its SMTP server choked (intentionally dropping packets, long response latencies, etc).
Such things are well within the power of AOL to implement, and will not censor email from responsible net citizens. There are solutions to spam that do not censor innocent ppl's email as 'collateral damage', and I have no respect for ISPs that choose to do just that.
I don't run a business from my home DSL at all - I simply have a website up that allows family and friends to see pics of us. And, it offers my family an email address that doesn't cost anything and will only be seen by them (ie: a private email address from our own domain).
I have friends who use AOL - I cannot send them email - they cannot receive email from me.
No, mail servers MUST cut off crappy and un-maintained servers because they are the most frequent source of spam, either because their owners are spammers or because (as in the far east) they don't know how to maintain their server, and the "administrators" (I use the term loosely) leave the relays open. Accepting mail from a DSL line would be like having unprotected sex with a crackwhore. You just don't do it.
Right.
You make so many wrong assumptions it is tough to know where to begin. I never sent spam, I never left an open relay, my name servers never went down. It was just a DIY domain, which is now apparently being phased out by force because some people that have DIY domains use them to spam.
Now, I know a LOT of ppl that have DIY domains they use just for personal and/or family email (as I do), and we are all getting cut off as "collateral" damage. Our friends cannot receive email they WANT to receive from us. We have been censored.
Why should I spent another $120/yr to pay someone else to host my domain when I can do it better for free?
Well, I don't sue AOhelL, so correct me if I'm wrong...but don't they give you the option of using the filter or not?
Their SMTP servers will not even talk to many other legitimate SMTP servers. They think all SMTP originating from consumer hosted boxes should be disallowed (ie: you have DSL at your house, and run your own domain and email).
This applied to an enormous number of small businesses and personal sites. These ppl do not necessarily send spam (I never have), and yet AOL blocks their email.
Spam filtering MUST be based on the email recipient deciding how the filter will work, and not super-imposed from the ISP without consideration from the user.
Last week they blocked all email originating from SMTP servers hosted at DSL lines./. covered it. AOL has a wide array of auto-filtering that occurs before stuff even gets to you.
Maybe you think a little loss of freedom is a small price to pay for reducing spam in your mailbox. Perhaps you'd be happier only reading email AOL thinks is appropriate for you to read.
When someone else controls what you can and cannot read, generally under the guise of helping you, it is extremely dangerous.
AOL is currently using censorship to try to solve their problem. Their customers want the ISP to stop spam, and AOL interprets this as a license to censor incoming mail for "spamness".
It never occurred to them that perhaps the customer should decide what is and is not acceptable.
This form of spam-filtering is very dangerous - when someone else decides for you who can and can not send you email.
I am not a HEPA engineer, but I would expect a perfect filter in any given room would reduce the airborne particulate matter as a function of the ambient temperature and the amount of particles entering the room.
Generally, air exchange and quality of filtration of that air are considered the relevant variables. Certainly in some rooms diffusion and random currents of air, and a filter that worked on large particles, may be more than adequate.
That being said, you'll never see an Ionic Breeze produce an air quality suitable for even a class 100 clean room. But it could easily make life more bearable for someone with allergies.
We stepped into the spotlight as a community that claimed it had a better product than the competition.
We didn't step anywhere. A few marketing droids may have tried to speak on behalf of free software, but thousands of others just kept coding.
Are we backing down now and stating that we can't deliver, instead claiming that we're a thinktank, a group of problem-solvers rather than solution providers?
We never stood up, we'll never back down. Open Source is about a method of producing software and licenses and potentially freedoms. It is not agenda driven, anti-Microsoft (or anyone else).
Open Source is perfectly capable of delivering something superior to a commercial product.
Of course it is - look at Mozilla. But coding hours, and the quality of programmers matters as well as whether something was made with a DFSG-compatible license.
The point I was making is that programmers are not necessarily motivated by intellectual property. Many love to meet challenges and solve problems. And that describes a wide range of free software programmers. Others are paid to solve problems. Others work for support companies based on service. These are the reasons people write software with open source licenses.
I hate to say it, but you have a point with communism, there is no incentive. However I believe that the core group of open source developers have incentive, and that beating Microsoft. It's like a small idealistic group standing up against a huge goliath of a company.
Necessity is the father of invention, not intellectual property,
People work on open source because it helps solve problems. Service companies work on open source because it helps their customers solve problems. That is its value - not intellectual property, but ability to help solve problems.
Basically, anyone running a small domain operation is being shut out of email, because some people (not even most, just some) use small domain operations to spam. I used to do this precisely because I could, and because it saved me a lot of money, and because MY ISP wouldn't allow me to send email through them from my domain on their static IP.
This is a foolish policy that will do nothing to stop spam in the long run. Spammers will always find another domain to use. There needs to be something more fundamentally changed in SMTP.
Also, AOL and Earthlink are censoring the email of their subscribers, which I also view as fundamentally flawed. We use no SMTP email filtering at our university for this reason. Who is AOL to say what email I do and do not want from those sent to me?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to be able to pin the newest KDE/gnome/whatever to stable and do an apt-get upgrade without breaking a million things.
You can pin the newest KDE/gnome/whatever to unstable. Newest always goes in unstable first. Unstable is pretty cutting edge, but with an occasional hiccup.
The point of stable is that it works. Things go there after they are 'tried and true' in unstable, and then in testing.
If the signal is encryted, you have no more right to it than you do to open a piece of mail mistakenly dropped in your mail box.
Legally, I have EVERY right not only to open, but also to take possession of, mail that is mistakenly dropped in my mailbox.
Are you sure you meant your statement?
In this case the key element was information. Had this information got free the satallite providers could have lost a *lot* of money. There would be no way to stop the spread of the information.
Wait a minute - there is no alleged intellectual property issue. Did he violate patents, or an NDA, or copyright? AFAICS he just reverse engineered their signal.
Aren't I, as a consumer, free to do what I want with signals someone else beams into my house without asking me to do so?
I would hold that DirecTV has a responsibility to insure the integrity of their signal, and that no one else is liable, barring trade secret or patent violations. If I reverse engineer their signal, nuts for them.
People who can't afford to pay for legal satellite should just do without. We're not talking about food or medicine here. Anyone whose moral code can justify stealing a blatant luxury like satellite TV has the moral code of a thief.
I resent any company beaming electromagnetic fields into my house and telling me that I can't do anything with them unless I pay them. I never asked for them to beam radiation into my house.
If I am clever enough to get something useful out of them without violating NDAs or trade secrets etc, I see no reason why I am violating the law. After all, they are the ones beaming the radiation into MY house .
Really? I think there is a valid bit of constitutional law here.
Who owns the electro-magnetic fields in my house? Does DirectTV own them, or may I sample them freely?
Now, I respect the rights of DirecTV to make money by selling cable through the airwaves, but I have a real problem with the government telling me what I can and cannot do with EMFs someone else is beaming into my house.
Our problem is that 99% of people read email via POP, and POP only serves one mailbox per person. It is extraordinarily difficult to train everyone to use a spam filter individually, and yet installing one on the server can't work with POP's limitations. Frustrating.
Secondly, Microsoft is in the fray now. Bet any amount they will offer a authenticating email service that requires using Windows XP to work. It will work really well, you won't be able to communicate well with people who don't use it - standard tactics. They want to give people incentive to upgrade, and to stay locked in.
It means they have to do retrys...that means spam runs take longer, especially since they have to run...then wait for a locally defined timeout, and run all those addresses again
AND they have to do it from the same IP.
All this is done by the perp who provides them with the spamming software. He writes it once and sells it for hundreds to all the spammers, who are making $1000 or more a week.
This raises their bandwidth profile. It wastes their time... all in all... it raises their cost of doing buisness and cuts into their profit margins.
It costs the spammer little in time. The cost of doing business is hardly impacted. When you take $0.000000000001 per spam and make it $0.00000000001, you didn't really slow them down.
It means they will have to upgrade their tools again. It means they get headaches. And of course, the next step is to impliment spam traps that watch activity and see that a spammer is spamming, and promotes them to a blacklist before they can even retry. (oh gee 1000 new greylist triplets from 1 IP in under 5 mins? Set the timeouts for that IP to 12 hours)
Spammers will pay for new tools, upgrade at about the same rate they are currently doing, and the cost of doing business will not change much. Greylisting is a nice idea - really - but the magnitude of the problem is being underestimated.
People will not employ greylisting on a broad scale. So, if you use greylisting, you can expect less spam. But, tools will be upgraded, and spam will go on. And on. Until the fundamental problem is addressed.
Email has to have a reasonable challenge-response component, or it has to have a price. Until this approach is broadly accepted, spam will be a way of life.
RTFA!
There is no magical waiting period or re-try period that cannot be trivially coded around. And, with good money on the line, will be trivially coded around.
You don't get it. Really smart people are getting paid a whole lot of money to make programs to exploit every possible crack in the way we send email. There is no general rule to spammers, except that it is a lot of money and they are very clever. Little bandaids are not going to stop this one - there needs to be a much more fundamental change. And I am not talking about laws against spam - I am talking about changes in the protocols we use to send email.
The thing that is wrong is the SMTP protocol, and most people's conception of a spammer. Once you see a few "confessions of ex-spammers", everything changes.
There are people out there who pay $10000 in startup costs, and then make $2000/week for spamming. The $10000 gets them software written by knowledgable internet security experts. This software finds any and every way to anonymify the email spam, and finds lists of people to spam.
As long as knowledgable internet security experts are getting paid good cash to enable spammers, and SMTP doesn't change, spam will only continue to get worse. There needs to be a fundamental change in SMTP protocols. It oughta take the spammers about 2 days to fix their MTA bug to get around greylisting.
Number 2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights - Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
Number 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment - Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.
See essay here
So under "right to privacy", we are never allowed to include someone's home in a photograph? I guess that makes this product completely illegal.
No, not quite. The California Constitution does include a right to privacy. Excessive compromising of someone's privacy is considered harassment - for example - if I followed you everywhere with a webcam and broadcast your every move, that would be harassment. Or, if I set up a streaming webcam that looked INSIDE your window, that would be harassment.
In the case in question, the website DOES have a gazillion coastline pics. However, Streisand's picture is labelled as "Streisand estate", and is coincidentally centered on her property and rather tastefully done. You could easily argue that Adelman went out of his way to single Streisand out among coastal property owners and identify her estate.
Now, where she lives is public information (available through freedom of information act). But excessive compromising of her privacy is harassment, or in violation of paparazzi laws.
I think that is where she is coming from. Adelman went out of his way to be a dick, and she is calling him on it. Be interesting to see how it plays out.
This maneuver is clearly about nullifying "trade secret" status on the AT&T source of which SCO owns the copyright. Giving up trade secrets would be a huge liability for IBM - if someone had been shown the code without an NDA, then the cat is out of the bag, and there is no issue wrt trade secret.
This has nothing to do with a "copy-and-paste" type copyright infringement which may or may not have occurred.
If you were around coding postscript about 15 years ago, you would have a good idea that the time to print a file was almost completely dependent on the file size (and size of stack used). The processor in the printers of that time were not so powerful, supporting gzip would probably have taken all their RAM.
It is for this reason that postscript prologs quite often redefine all common postscript commands into one or two letter equivalents (which also renders the postscript practically illegible).
We used to spend a lot of time figuring out how to code a figure to make it print fastest. Kinda like we used to spend a lot of time figuring out how to write complex programs that ran in 16K of RAM. Such things are less relevant today. People call you a dinosaur and yell insults at you, like "RAM is cheap - just write it quickly so that it runs."
No, you are right. That is a time bomb. The only recourse is for an author to ask all potential companies for any patents that may infringe before beginning to distribute a project.
It's kinda like a minefield. You can ask all the big players where the mines are, and expect to know about most of them, but you can never be sure you will find them all. And, if you miss one, oops, there goes the house.
You are not liable for damages before you are notified by the patent holder that you are infringing. At that point you halt all distribution, and there are no damages, and no settlement.
Now, if you call their bluff, and continue distributing thinking they will lose, and they win, then you lose your house, your car, and your hair.
But you deserve it b/c you are an idiot.
Note - this is not a stance for patents on software. Just pointing out that by writing and distributing software that is on shaky ground wrt patents, you will NOT lose your home unless you are also an idiot. You may lose the right to distribute your code though.
But honestly - if you DID run a business, you'd do the same thing AOL did. Sucks to be you, but don't blame them.
That was exactly my point. I would feel a responsibility, on behalf of my customers, to provide a spam-filtering service on request. Users would quite simply be able to drop spam into a folder in their account, and the SMTP servers would be configured, on a per user basis, to reject mail that resembled that spam (using conservative Bayesian filtering). The users are themselves responsible for their own spam filtering, and the SMTP servers are spared.
As an alternate, the mail could still be received, but the mail that resembled spam more could have its SMTP server choked (intentionally dropping packets, long response latencies, etc).
Such things are well within the power of AOL to implement, and will not censor email from responsible net citizens. There are solutions to spam that do not censor innocent ppl's email as 'collateral damage', and I have no respect for ISPs that choose to do just that.
I don't run a business from my home DSL at all - I simply have a website up that allows family and friends to see pics of us. And, it offers my family an email address that doesn't cost anything and will only be seen by them (ie: a private email address from our own domain).
I have friends who use AOL - I cannot send them email - they cannot receive email from me.
No, mail servers MUST cut off crappy and un-maintained servers because they are the most frequent source of spam, either because their owners are spammers or because (as in the far east) they don't know how to maintain their server, and the "administrators" (I use the term loosely) leave the relays open. Accepting mail from a DSL line would be like having unprotected sex with a crackwhore. You just don't do it.
Right.
You make so many wrong assumptions it is tough to know where to begin. I never sent spam, I never left an open relay, my name servers never went down. It was just a DIY domain, which is now apparently being phased out by force because some people that have DIY domains use them to spam.
Now, I know a LOT of ppl that have DIY domains they use just for personal and/or family email (as I do), and we are all getting cut off as "collateral" damage. Our friends cannot receive email they WANT to receive from us. We have been censored.
Why should I spent another $120/yr to pay someone else to host my domain when I can do it better for free?
Because AOL says I should??
Well, I don't sue AOhelL, so correct me if I'm wrong...but don't they give you the option of using the filter or not?
Their SMTP servers will not even talk to many other legitimate SMTP servers. They think all SMTP originating from consumer hosted boxes should be disallowed (ie: you have DSL at your house, and run your own domain and email).
This applied to an enormous number of small businesses and personal sites. These ppl do not necessarily send spam (I never have), and yet AOL blocks their email.
Spam filtering MUST be based on the email recipient deciding how the filter will work, and not super-imposed from the ISP without consideration from the user.
Last week they blocked all email originating from SMTP servers hosted at DSL lines. /. covered it. AOL has a wide array of auto-filtering that occurs before stuff even gets to you.
HERE
Precisely how is this dangerous?
Maybe you think a little loss of freedom is a small price to pay for reducing spam in your mailbox. Perhaps you'd be happier only reading email AOL thinks is appropriate for you to read.
When someone else controls what you can and cannot read, generally under the guise of helping you, it is extremely dangerous.
AOL is currently using censorship to try to solve their problem. Their customers want the ISP to stop spam, and AOL interprets this as a license to censor incoming mail for "spamness".
It never occurred to them that perhaps the customer should decide what is and is not acceptable.
This form of spam-filtering is very dangerous - when someone else decides for you who can and can not send you email.
I am not a HEPA engineer, but I would expect a perfect filter in any given room would reduce the airborne particulate matter as a function of the ambient temperature and the amount of particles entering the room.
Generally, air exchange and quality of filtration of that air are considered the relevant variables. Certainly in some rooms diffusion and random currents of air, and a filter that worked on large particles, may be more than adequate.
That being said, you'll never see an Ionic Breeze produce an air quality suitable for even a class 100 clean room. But it could easily make life more bearable for someone with allergies.
We stepped into the spotlight as a community that claimed it had a better product than the competition.
We didn't step anywhere. A few marketing droids may have tried to speak on behalf of free software, but thousands of others just kept coding.
Are we backing down now and stating that we can't deliver, instead claiming that we're a thinktank, a group of problem-solvers rather than solution providers?
We never stood up, we'll never back down. Open Source is about a method of producing software and licenses and potentially freedoms. It is not agenda driven, anti-Microsoft (or anyone else).
Open Source is perfectly capable of delivering something superior to a commercial product.
Of course it is - look at Mozilla. But coding hours, and the quality of programmers matters as well as whether something was made with a DFSG-compatible license.
The point I was making is that programmers are not necessarily motivated by intellectual property. Many love to meet challenges and solve problems. And that describes a wide range of free software programmers. Others are paid to solve problems. Others work for support companies based on service. These are the reasons people write software with open source licenses.
I hate to say it, but you have a point with communism, there is no incentive. However I believe that the core group of open source developers have incentive, and that beating Microsoft. It's like a small idealistic group standing up against a huge goliath of a company.
Necessity is the father of invention, not intellectual property,
People work on open source because it helps solve problems. Service companies work on open source because it helps their customers solve problems. That is its value - not intellectual property, but ability to help solve problems.
Great argument
Basically, anyone running a small domain operation is being shut out of email, because some people (not even most, just some) use small domain operations to spam. I used to do this precisely because I could, and because it saved me a lot of money, and because MY ISP wouldn't allow me to send email through them from my domain on their static IP.
This is a foolish policy that will do nothing to stop spam in the long run. Spammers will always find another domain to use. There needs to be something more fundamentally changed in SMTP.
Also, AOL and Earthlink are censoring the email of their subscribers, which I also view as fundamentally flawed. We use no SMTP email filtering at our university for this reason. Who is AOL to say what email I do and do not want from those sent to me?