I think IceCat is already a separately maintained fork. So hopefully we could change that if it became necessary.

I don't think so. 'The Government' is not one homogeneous organism, the surveillance stuff is mostly pushed by Jacqui Smith, but this research is handled by a completely different department.

They'll probably invest millions of public money into it and then privatize it off to their friends - that's what they usually do.

And as you brought up yourself - I am far more worried about throttling and false advertising than surveillance (although Phorm is worrying).

Well I consider the OP a troll - see they are posting on a website dedicated to technology news against investment in technology using clearly flawed arguments.

The whole argument with Down Syndrome at the end is a classic Ignoratio elenchi. And the same argument could be made against the space program, or any major public investment.

And then using Orwell quotes against public spending, does the OP not know that Orwell was an outspoken Socialist (even moving to and fighting in the Spanish Civil War). The OP is just a classic Internet Libertarian, with a superficial understanding of what they quote - I am sure they saw V For Vendetta and now praise Guy Fawkes as a hero despite the fact he would've changed England to a theocracy under the Pope.

I wish I had some modpoints to mod you down.

English Heritage is well worth the money, as is this research as it will be the future of broadband.

It really seems you're just trying to find something to complain about. The NHS is also well worth the money but that's another argument.

I'm sick of seeing Libertarians misquote Orwell - George Orwell was a Socialist and I am sure he would have supported national investment in technology and preserving our history.

Most libraries are LGPL though for that very reason. Having GPLd libraries can be handy though, as it'd be nice to see some Open Source game engines come to GNU/Linux.

Tonight we design in Hell!

Wow, this is a (symbolic) victory for Free Software, and GNU.
Wikipedia was originally conceived as GNUpedia, then Wales made Wikipedia and it was decided to merge them onto Wikipedia.

Many people, including Eric S. Raymond, said it would fail.
But it has worked excellently. +1 for communal development.

For those interested here is Richard Stallman's original proposal which led to GNUpedia and eventually Wikipedia.

" no one except the super-rich can afford to even take these cases to court" This isn't true, as here in the UK the loser pays the fees, so small businesses etc. could also afford it.

Indeed, Richard Stallman has just written an article on this: Free Software is not about saving money.

Yeah, but it's quite easy to infect Windows by accidentally clicking an ad or something. It doesn't necessarily mean the kids are watching Backdoor Sluts 9 :P

Why is the Government intervention here always so terrible? Can't we elect a decent technology minster to back net neutrality and stop censorship, not pander to corporate interests. This is why we should elect the cabinet not the party.

A huge step forward would be getting Epic and Valve to open source Unreal Tournament and Half-life respectively as id Games has done with Quake.

The problem is it takes a lot of work to develop a game engine (and a lot of planning too). Just a few FOSS engines would help push it forward a lot.

Yeah, that's a good idea except for the loss in manpower might mean they can't keep up with developments.

I could easily see it happening though, if MS sponsor Firefox and they change the search to Live Search.

There isn't an issue with copyright. The GPL is copyright, but that's great. The issue is with restrictive copyright licenses that do not benefit the public (the initial aim of copyright).

Please read Misintepreting Copyright

I find it hilarious the way Libertarians use his work to say why the government is evil, when Orwell himself was a socialist, almost as far from Libertarianism as you can get (although he wasn't statist).