get the world's smartest hackers thinking about how news organizations can harness the open web.

Or how about we don't! The new organizations can do there own dirty work. If someone could harness the power of the web, in a manor that helps the media, this would have value, it would potentially make someone very rich. Media has its own agenda, it isn't in our favour (as in the public) the worlds best hackers should be doing what they have always done.

Besides I remember about a year ago (I think) Eric Raymond asking, do we need the GPL?. The debate around this was quite sane with many people looking rationally at all the licences, giving reasons for choosing one over another. Even the GNU people made fair points, in regards to protecting the labour of those who contributed to the code base. I think the community has moved on from irate arguments on freedom, this maybe because Stallman's (as important and influential as he is) view is balanced by others such as Torvalds.

Are you some kind of troll
If BSD is good for you use it, most companies would probably want LGPL. Gives people the right to use the code, but also protects your interests. When Microsoft wanted to contribute to the Apache project they used this licence for this reason

If a Government makes it law for any entity that has data to to share it with them on request, that's spying. If they incentivize companies, with payments, thats spying.

Your not being spied on for nothing. This week end 50 facebook pages from anti cuts and anti austerity movements were pulled down, so freedom of speech in this case.

Its funny but a device, the computer, that many clever people developed to free us and improve our lives is ruining our privacy and harming our freedoms. Even governments and their agencies are afraid, wikipedia allowed them to be spied on in an industrial scale, police are weary of cell phones with cameras etc.

Skynet, also a nick name given to the stock market, due to the amount of computerized selling.

For such an embarrassment these leaks do go some way to promoting the US world view, or is that just editing from the media outlets. Examples such as many middle eastern counties (Saudi, Jordan and Egypt etc) urging US to bomb Iran, as well as the links below
Iraq document leaks show US forces found WMD after invasion - http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-continued-in-iraq-with-surprising-results/
Wikileaked documents normalise Iraq civilian death toll at 'massive' 66,000

I've heard that web designers do this so its hard to copy their work!

Dam my cheap mod ploy is foiled drkamil

Jedi Mind Tricks your next

Let's start with the storming of the US embassy and hostage taking, and go from there, shall we?

Why start there is it because the past makes Irans acts seem more reasonable. Why can we not look at interactions put them in a time line and see the train of events. This clearly is better than making arbitrary cut off points. Besides are you sure The US would come out the most wronged party even if we accepted your arbitrary cut of date, what was their role in the Iraq Iran war
It's obvious from my comments how I view Iran and other middle eastern states, oppression is oppression. But you know there is one problem all people seem to have with the actions of others viewed as a serious breach of acceptable behaviour. Your own misdeeds are viewed differently. This can be detected as soon as you here the terms "that's different" or "you don't understand" when comparing similar actions. There is also a counter argument that goes "that's our culture" made by the other which is simply the "you don't understand" argument in a foreign language.

wow modded troll! Please someone tell me why!

The US but the UK works closely with the US and collaborates on any issues such as coups in former colonies, ditto France.

They, along with Syria, are (allegedly) a major source of funding and weapons for Hezballah

According to Noam Chomsky Israel was also a supporter of a similar group called Hamas in its early days. This was to combat fatah. What's going on here is the polity don't really care about who they support as long as it furthers their aims.
Our polity views conflict as an opportunity to be exploited. An example would be Turkey, in 1996 there was an assault on Kurdish communities in the south. 30000 villages were bombed and there were 1 million refugees. The American government responded by making Turkey the number one country to receive US aid, war is profitable. This is not an isolated incident if your an ally them your crimes are hidden. Saudi Arabia is like Iran a middle eastern theocratic state with human rights issues and [even greater] involvement in international affairs (particularly in the Muslim world). Why are Iran sanctioned and not Saudi, is it just oil. Look at Syria and Jordan both are next to each other (Arabs call this region the Sham because of cultural similarities between their Arabs who live there) both are secular states, both are oppressive regimes, one is on the terror list the other is ignored by the media and given aid.