Sure... but the fact that you've got to do this all by hand is going to make comparing any given piece of code with another for copyright violations impossible... and all the most similarity you will find afterwards is that similar ideas may have been employed to solving the problem that were used, but ideas are not copyrightable.

I don't equate them... but plenty of people do. Ignoring the fact that such people are incorrect will not alter their perception.

Yes... but that's something you'll be doing entirely by hand. For largish programs,this can easily be infeasible.

One might suggest that the fact that Mojang has not objected to this use is sufficient to create an effective implicit licensing arrangement, but that still wouldn't allow anyone else, regardless of what they had done, to try and slap a GPL on it, since they are not the copyright holder.

The problem with this, you realize, is that Wolfe's contributions are highly in demand in the Minecraft community, and if Mojang does this, the community as a whole will probably just turn on Mojang, even if Mojang isn't actually legally in the wrong here, because the party who *IS* in the wrong happens to control something that a lot of people really want.

In a nutshell, Wolfe is risking it all on the notion that his contributions have given him a controlling mindshare over Minecraft. This is going to end ugly.

What would they have to replace, exactly? Mojang didn't violate any license or copyright.

That he is an author of a significant part of what people want is wholly irrellevant, he is doing *exactly* what makes people leery of using open source at all in the first place.... and happens to be in the wrong. His code is dependant on Minecraft, not the other way around.

Okay, I totally get how you can decompile java code, but I do not see how, after obfuscating, one is *EVER* going to get back to something that resembles the original source code from the binary. It was my understanding that once you have obfuscated a java program, all of the identifiers from the original source code which might otherwise be visible in an ordinary java decompile are irreversibly mangled... it becomes intractable to even identify general pattern use, let alone any actual source code copying.

I call shenanigans... I don't see how any alleged deobfuscation tool could be used to see what they are talking about.

It hits the point squarely on the head... Mojang is not at fault here.

Someone who believes that hypothetical scenarios are somehow more reflective of reality than actual history.

That's only applicable when your nat is all or nothing. It is also possible to use a nat like a ran parent proxy for local LAN ips while still doing perfectly normal routin for any global ips. You can easily do this with ipv6 because the ip ranges for thing like LAN-local and globally visible ip addresses is well defined in ipv6

I think I'd have to agree with this. I never nailed it down to that particular aspect of perl before now, but I can easily see how this characteristic of perl makes it very difficult to identify idioms in the language. With so many ways to do things that you can't always quickly identify what is being done simply by looking at the source code, unless it has been quite rigorously commented.

Code written in an idiomatic style rarely needs much commenting, because people familiar enough with the language to do what the code needs to accomplish will also be familiar with the idioms in the source code, and in practice, only minute or two of examining the source code fragment is ever necessary, even for code that has never seen before, have a general understanding of what the code is trying to accomplish, even if they do not necessarily understand the bigger picture of how the code is being used.

Of course, it's entirely possible, and not even particularly hard, to write obsfuscated code in almost any language, but with perl, my experience is that it takes a special kind of discipline to *NOT* write such code, while at least in other languages, in my experience, writing in a readable style tends to require only a modest amount of discipline.

Do you even understand what the point of geostationary orbit is?

The distance involved is anything but arbitrary.

NAT maybe seems simple on your home router where you just switch it on and it just works, but see if you like it so much when you have to work with protocols that like to hide IP addresses inside application traffic, especially when you then throw encryption into the mix, and have multiple NAT layers involved.

That's only because of the way most people use NAT... Typically, either every device on a network utilizes it, or none of them do. There is no strict requirement that this be the case, however.... that's just how home routers are usually built. It is entirely possible to achieve the functionality of NAT where it is desired, while still having devices with globally visible IP's on the same network.

NAT doesn't take anything away from IPv6 because any incentive to use it in the first place with IPv6 isn't the same as it is in IPv4.... It would be much more like a transparent proxy that is available to (possibly specific) local addresses in the local IP range.

You can do that with ipv6 anyways.. and without even bothering with NAT. home devices can be assigned addresses in a local range, and will not be accessible from outside any more than if they were NATted, since IP's in such ranges are explicitly designed by the protocol spec to not be routable. As long as your cable modem adheres to the spec, there is no danger of accessing it from the outside any more than if it were behind a NAT.

Of course, in practice, I expect some kind of NAT solution will be in fairly wide use even in IPv6 anyways, since there will be no lack of use cases where you do not want your device to generally have a globally visible IP and be visible to the outside, but you may still have occasion to want to make requests of services in the outside world, using a local proxy to route the responses to those requests directly to your local IP, even though you do not have a global IP, much like NAT currently operates. This can also be solved by utilizing a global IP and configuring a firewall to block inbound traffic to that IP unless it is in response to a specific request by that device, but this is generally less convenient to configure properly than using a NAT-like arrangement.

Notwithstanding, at least with IPv6, the number of IP's is large enough that every device that anyone might ever want to have its own IP actually can... instead of only satisfying the about 70 or 80% of users, like ipv4 does.