Secret from the general populace: yes. Secret from large corporations and lobby groups: hell no.

I'm not sure whether you've ever tried influencing a non-binding agreement that was reached in diplomatic circles and which supposedly still needs to be ratified by politicians in public. I can tell you that by the time a completely negotiated deal ends up in a parliament, senate or council of ministers, there is an enormous amount of political pressure to approve it because of all of the efforts that went into negotiating that text. At that point, the negotiating parties have basically all said "yes, we agree with this and are willing to defend this text before our national politicians", and a very much used argument (that also carries a lot of weight) is then "we don't want to seem unreliable to our negotiation partners".

Sure, they may sometimes make a little bit of fuss about small details to "demonstrate" they're not just rubberstamping it, but actually completely changing positions on a matter of substance almost never happens (unless there is a huge public outcry, or a very big business interest). And even if that happens, it means all those negotiations were largely for nothing, which could have been solved by having more transparency in the first place.

You may want to read my entire message again. It was about comments like yours, not about the cleanup initiative itself.

The message I linked to at least adds several lines to a file called "symhacks.h" to deal with limits regarding the length of symbol names (which is probably required due to a limitation of the used object file format on that platform, and hence not easily resolvable by changing the compiler or linker).

Conversely, I think part of the current cleanup is that it's not just a cleanup of bad/dangerous code, but also throwing away functionality/support that the people performing said cleanup personally don't consider to be relevant. It's their full right to do so, of course, but it's a rather bad example if the intention is to show how badly OpenSSL is supposedly maintained.

I'm not sure why you put this conditionally, since there obviously is such a demand.

That code is not dead, there are actually still people using OpenSSL on OpenVMS and actively providing patches for it: https://www.mail-archive.com/o...

They also distribute (and hence support) quite a few Windows games with a Wine wrapper for Mac OS X.

That's correct. Therefore a funding model for software without introducing artificial scarcity relies, as I see it, on directly funding those development resources. E.g., I've been working on the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) as a hobby project since 1997, but the last couple of years I've been approached by several companies to implement certain features and extensions to it, and I've done so from time to time on a self-employed basis. Another funding model that's been making inroads lately is crowdfunding.

Note that I'm not saying that these models are easier than one whereby you introduce artificial scarcity, especially if you have a general end-user or business application as opposed to a fairly niche developer tool like FPC. More scarcity at a similar level of demand = more income, that's an economic given. However, as a result I don't think there is anything wrong with the statement that selling proprietary software licenses is an economic model based on introducing artificial scarcity (maybe as a proxy for a real scarcity, but possibly in a way that values this first scarcity higher than its "intrinsic worth" -- similarly to how monopolies result in higher prices).

RMS definitely is radical, but I've never known him to use strawman arguments.

I guess he's also talking about backdoors for law enforcement (aka "legal interception") and other purposes.

His explanation indicates why he does mean proprietary developers rather than just corporations: e.g. in the US definition of core democratic values, there are aspects like personal freedom (e.g., modifying software) and the common good (e.g., sharing things with others). Note that he's not arguing here that it should be illegal for others to write proprietary software, i.e., he's not arguing to impinge on other people's liberty.

It limits the possibilities for expressing their creativity. Schools should be places where encouraging creativity is one of the highest valued goals. I know that is generally not the case right now (amazing video, btw), but this is a (small) way in which the situation can be improved.

I'm obviously not RMS, but I'd argue they should be prepared for functioning in society, for critically thinking about that same society (and anything else), and for contributing to a society that they consider to be better than what it is today.

I'd say: prepare them to become the best they can be. That can include a particular kind of job, being an artist, college (about which you can have very similar discussions as about school), developing free software or any combination of the above and many more things.

Now that last part is a great a strawman on your part: encouraging students to use Free Software, which they can share and modify freely according to the copyright license terms of that same software, is by no means the same as preparing them for ignoring copyright. It mainly teaches them that there are also alternatives to software whose business model depends on artificial scarcity. They will get to know MS Office and other popular products anyway, and if you can work with OpenOffice or LibreOffice, the jump isn't that great in any case. Maybe one of the primary things schools should teach are transferable skills (of which creative thinking is probably the "übervariant").

As long as Apple still signs the older iOS version, you should be able to downgrade (even via iTunes). See e.g. http://www.iphonehacks.com/2013/06/downgrade-ios-7-to-ios-6.html . You could call it a hack, but since it's standard iTunes functionality I don't think it really is.

Probably because of Apple's extremely annoying policy that you cannot downgrade iOS anymore a couple of days after they release a new version. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHSH_Blob for more details. The ability to downgrade to iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 was disabled around 22 September.

Since iOS 7 was only released recently, there are probably still quite a few devices with iOS 6.1.3/6.1.4 in the channel, and that person probably got such a device in exchange for his iOS 7 "upgraded" one.

That is incorrect. The so-called terminator genes were never commercialised because of vehement opposition by many different groups. Breeding successive generations is only stopped by patent lawsuits.

You might want to look at your own facts.

I realise that being cynical is so much easier: no chance to be disappointed, easy to look down on other people, feel smug about your oh so original snarky comments. However, you'll never achieve anything of worth (unless you only think in terms of monetary outcomes) on the given subject with that attitude.

I was involved in the fight against the fight against the software patent directive in the EU, and the only reason basically a bunch of students won the fight about that particular directive against a multimillion euro campaign by the giants of the electronics and software industry was that we weren't aware in advance that we couldn't win and that we didn't already "know" that all (or even most) politicians are useful idiots that only care about their image and paycheck, and instead kept bombarding them with facts and academic studies (even organising a couple of conferences ourselves). And having gone through the entire process and a few ones later too (some of which we lost), I still don't "know" that all/most politics is a sham.

I stand by my point (yes, the AC was me too) that politics without legalised bribery is far more sane.

To quote the excellent Rap News 19: Whistleblower:

Some praise these acts as heroic, worthy of mimicking
Others condemn them as illegal and prohibited
But, can't both be equally applicative?

To be good humans we're sometimes
called upon to be bad citizens.
Some nations were even born by
breaking laws of the tyrannous.

Do you support heroes from days of yore
who in order to cause reforms disobeyed the law?
Then what about those in the present
who heed the same call?