That is patently false. The point of the GPL is to place copyright restrictions on further use of said work. If you wanted to prevent copyright restrictions on derivations of your work, then you want to use a close sourced license as you then have complete control of how it is used (including the right to give up that control). If you wanted to place no restrictions then you should release it to the public domain or use a BSD style license.

I am a fan of the GPL so don't get me wrong and misinterpret this as anti-GPL. That is not the point here, simply put most people have a very skewed understanding of what it does and how it works.

The GPL simply places specific restrictions on expansions of the work. Among those restrictions is adding additional restrictions via the GPL (if you obtain non-GPL copyrights then you can still add additional restrictions via non-GPL contract).

Lastly I have to point out that the GPL depends on copyright law (at least in the US) and as such it is only enforceable for the lifetime of the copyright. Any thoughts that the GPL forever protects anything is also misunderstood.

Actually if you look at the total personal budget for the life time of the Apollo missions it actually take considerably more time than 34,000 man years. First you take the actual NASA teams which included the mission staff, engineers, astronauts, support personnel and backup teams. Next you include all of the personnel needed to design, manufacture, transport and assemble all of the equipment. Lastly you have all of the military and recovery personnel.

The best number I have found quotes that more than 400,000 people were involved in the project for about 10 years. That gives us a total of about 4 million man years. (Citations 48 and 49)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories#Critical_examination_of_hoax_accusations

I hosted a 300+ person MMO server from 2003 to 2005 on a home computer (not even a beefy one either). It never even came close to max load (peak was about 40% of CPU/RAM with almost all users on at once). They take less resources than you would think.

So what your really saying is that many of us younger /.ers could be great bosses some day... =P

Most of the rated programs require a server cluster to run at high skill levels. While it is nice that they can reach a level to be competitive against strong players, it is really stretching the facts to claim a personal user couldn't easily crush a standard install of any of the above programs.

Some examples from wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go#Recent_results:

Sun didn't have a problem marketing. EVERYONE knows who they are and what products they have. The problem is that in most situations the product is more expensive per unit of measurement over cost than competitors.

I've written professionally in Java (amoung many other languages) for more than a decade. If you think that A) re-writting a OS written in C in Java or B) ANY OS should ever be written in Java; then you clearly have no idea about either.

For starters, the strength of Java is that you don't need to compile it to native machine code. This is almost 100% true. Conversely for an OS to function it MUST be compiled and assembled into machine code. If you are going to do that why use Java? There are many other languages better suited. C for example, which is what the vast majority of Solaris is written in.

Next, do you have any idea how much time, how many developers it takes to write an OS. Even re-writing verbatim? That does not even count testers. We are talking about more than the total yearly cost of running Sun. It is in the hundreds of millions if not billions or tens of billions.

All for what? A product that runs on a few more machines? Not to mention Solaris runs on 90+% of all machines out there now anyways. Your suggesting they add a insanely huge workload for almost zero return!?

Lastly on that subject, if you wanted Solaris running on an embedded device, why not just INSTALL IT. That is it, you don't need any VM, you don't need any third part intermediary. Just have the device run Solaris natively. It is how it is done now. You can order such things from Sun/Oricle now and have been able to for some time.

As for your suggestion that open sourcing was to late/to little. I disagree. It was done wrong. There were no income streams tied to open sourcing most of the projects. They simply said, "ok, this is open source now". What they should have done (as suggested in other posts) is offer to help customize their systems to specific clients. Or offer consultation work. Anything really. But just shouting "hey, its free now" is never going to do anything to bring in income for a company.

I think you are simplifying and ignoring the details.

It seems his point was that the company should have open sourced things at a correct time and did not. They should have open sourced some products more aggressively early on and NOT open sourced many products they did at the end.

What does relevance have to do with anything!? Income is what is relevant to a shareholder. NONE of the projects that Sun open sourced in the last few years increased income for the company. If anything, because of the way Sun did things, they decreased the income.

!?! Do you know what Solaris and Java are? I literally, have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

How does that make any sense? The prosecution could simply make a motion to withdraw the case at any time. All they have to do is stand up and say, "never mind" and the case is done. They don't have to introduce any testimony or evidence to do that.

What happened here is going to be a big negative on the prosecutors record. It is BAD for him. It is not far off of getting fired (for cause) from a job because you were watching porn at your desk.

While slightly amusing your story makes no sense. If the prosecution wanted to drop the case they would simply withdraw the charges. That simple. Also the prosecution can not make a motion to dismiss their own case, the defense has to do that. Lastly in this instance such an dismissal is going to remain as a giant stain on the prosecutor's record.

I am willing to bet that if you were there, you would not call what the judge actually did, "abuse" or a "tirade". Most likely he did use pretty strong language. Most likely this was also still appropriate to the situation AND professional.

My guess is this got coverage because you almost NEVER see a judge sternly reprimand a prosecutor. You have to mess up really bad to deserve one and any competent attorney is going to prepare ahead of time to avoid any such situation. Most likely they simply would not bring the case to trial if they thought such a situation was going to arise.

Even the example language quoted in the summary is reasonable and mild, "serious concerns about the government's case."

My personal belife is that we have far to little information to be conclusive about anything. Speculation and work based on that is good, but to assume anything is without flaws is dangerous.

Having said that, I just had to point out that even in the article you linked includes other quite plausible reasons:

Also note that one additional dim stars are the most likely non-dark matter reason for such an occurrence. We just added 3 times the visible mass to the galaxy at large, calculations only require 6 times the visible matter in that cluster for the same effect without dark matter.

Again, as someone directly involved it is pretty obvious you have no idea what you are talking about. I can assure you that every time *I* have been involved in such a situation comcast continued until ordered to stop. They would have continue if not so ordered (or as part of the settlement).

To put it more concisely, without the two actions in question, comcast would have NEVER stopped the offending action. Your point is that they have done something bad for some time so there is no point in EVER doing anything about it. That makes no sense. While it is not good that comcast took egregiously bad actions in the first place it *is* good that they did stop those actions. Further more, both sets of actions are things that for the rest of time comcast can not do again without facing massive punitive damages.

Lastly neither set of lawsuits lasted even close to a year from inception. The first instance a restraining order was issued almost half a year from the start of the offending practice forcing them to stop. In the second instance comcast voluntarily stopped while the litigation was pending (part of the pre-settlement bargaining).

It is nice that you have opinions on these subjects, but when you are talking to a person who was actually involved please realize that making claims of fact *after* the person already stated what actually happened is pretty dumb.

As for the issue of our current Congress. Well, we will just have to disagree.

That is the point of the lawsuit. I am a little confused here on what you are trying to say. The reason *we* sued comcast was to force them to stop XYZ practice. When we won the two previous cases part of the settlement agreement/court order was that they stop XYZ practice, which they then stopped.

The likelihood of *THIS* congress doing anything is about slim to nil. Many may be "pro business" (this is a dumb term, no one is anti-business) but many are not and NONE of them agree with each other.

*I* pay for that service. That is the point of the customer paying for the internet, to get data streamed from other places to my box. If suddenly Comcast wants someone else to pay for my data stream that is fine, but they need to stop charging me too. Trying to charge two parties for the same data stream, that is unethical.

Further more, EVERY data stream from netflix to a comcast customer is paid for by the comcast customer already. Comcast wants it to be paid for twice.

As a current Comcast customer (for many years) I can assure you that while I don't give a flip about $15, however I have no problem suing Comcast again. Over the last decade I have been apart of 2 class action lawsuits against Comcast. Both were won. The real benefit is that this backasswards company stops doing whatever stupidity it is doing at the time, not the discount.

My prediction:

1) FCC is going to intervene.

2) If another company in this situation refuses to pay comcast and comcast blocks them it will take all of 3 days before a suite is filed asking for class action status.