Quoting myself

At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.

Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.

The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.

This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.

In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.

In 1980 they said that by 2010 some of us would be using jet packs to commute to work.
What they did not foresee in 1980 was the rise of telecommuting and that those same commuters would not have to travel very far.
Hence the need for only thirty seconds of flight time - it all make perfect sense.

3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service

The phrase "facilitate theft of service" is so vague that it could be interpreted as just being in competition with the carrier's own provided services e.g. voice,SMS, video etc.

This statement puts the Internet in the USA back into the pre-dialup days before the split up of AT&T, where the carrier could deny access to any modem because it could "harm the network" or just compete with its existing services.

The patent in question was effectively denied, but the court would not impose further limits on patenting.

No. 08-964. Argued November 9, 2009--Decided June 28, 2010

Today, the Court once again declines to impose limitations on the Patent Act that are inconsistent with the Act's text. The patent application here can be rejected under our precedents on the unpatentability of abstract ideas. The Court, therefore, need not define further what constitutes a patentable "process," beyond pointing to the definition of that term provided in 100(b) and looking to the guideposts in Benson, Flook, and Diehr.

Which is about the same as saying ( Justice Potter Stewart, concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964)),

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"]; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

Fed-Soc.org - Patents: Legitimate Rights or Grubstakes that Obstruct Progress? - Winter 2000

This history shows the patent / free competition balance to be dialectical, not static. In this country, since the turn of the century, the pendulum has cycled twice between the patent right and free competition poles. The last free-competition era occurred between 1930-1950. Perhaps the zenith (or nadir, depending on point of view) was Mercoid Corp. v. Mid-Continent Inv. Co., 320 U.S. 661 (1944) where the Supreme Court held that tying sales of a non-patented product to a patented product constituted an impermissible extension of the patent monopoly and therefore patent misuse. Ironically, Mercoid facts today could support loss of profits damages under Rite-Hite Corp. v. Kelley Co., 56 F.3d 1538 (Fed. Cir. 1995). Partially as a reaction to certain court decisions (including the need to overturn Mercoid), the 1952 Patent Act slowly turned the pendulum back in a pro-patent direction. That movement accelerated full-bore with creation in 1983 of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to hear all appeals from trial court patent infringement decisions.

As I said before The 2000-2010 "Intellectual Property" boom is about to go the way of the "Subprime" Mortgage, Dot-Com vapor startup, Junk bond and Dutch Tulip futures. The Patent Troll Business Model is inherently flawed, and just like the aforementioned others, add nothing to a nations REAL economy.

SCO Group copyright claims:
9th June 2003 What evidence of origin,ownership,copyright + GPL
And soon SCO Group Vs IBM:
12th June 2003 The Trillian Project : Proof of SCO's actions

"Now there is one element of OpenServer that is not coming over, we don't the IP, we just own all the right to distribution, ongoing development for the open server, and that has to tax and other considerations"

Random Love, CEO Caldera, keynote address,LINUXWORLD 2000 conference, August

The 2000-2010 "Intellectual Property" boom is about to go the way of the "Subprime" Mortgage, Dot-Com vapor startup, Junk bond and Dutch Tulip futures. The Patent Troll Business Model is inherently flawed, and just like the aforementioned others, add nothing to a nations REAL economy.

Let the lawsuit mushroom clouds rise over the remains of USA's Tech industries the rest of the world will go their own free way.

CIA slipped bugs to Soviets

Transcript of Internet Caucus Panel Discussion.
Re: Administration's new encryption policy.
Date: September 28, 1999.
Weldon statement.

Rep. Curt Weldon : Thank you. Let me see if I can liven things up here in the last couple of minutes of the luncheon. First of all, I apologize for being late. And I thank Bob and the members of the caucus for inviting me here.

...

But the point is that when John Hamre briefed me, and gave me the three key points of this change, there are a lot of unanswered questions. He assured me that in discussions that he had had with people like Bill Gates and Gerstner from IBM that there would be, kind of a, I don't know whether it's a, unstated ability to get access to systems if we needed it. Now, I want to know if that is part of the policy, or is that just something that we are being assured of, that needs to be spoke. Because, if there is some kind of a tacit understanding, I would like to know what it is.

Because that is going to be subjected to future administrations, if it is not written down in a clear policy way. I want to know more about this end use certificate. In fact, sitting on the Cox Committee as I did, I saw the fallacy of our end use certificate that we were supposedly getting for HPCs going into China, which didn't work. So, I would like to know what the policies are. So, I guess what I would say is, I am happy that there seems to be a comming together. In fact, when I first got involved with NSA and DOD and CIS, and why can't you sit down with industry, and work this out. In fact, I called Gerstner, and I said, can't you IBM people, and can't you software people get together and find the middle ground, instead of us having to do legislation.

...

Transcript of Internet Caucus Panel Discussion.
Re: Administration's new encryption policy.
Date: September 28, 1999.
Weldon statement.

Rep. Curt Weldon: Thank you. Let me see if I can liven things up here in the last couple of minutes of the luncheon. First of all, I apologize for being late. And I thank Bob and the members of the caucus for inviting me here.

...

But the point is that when John Hamre briefed me, and gave me the three key points of this change, there are a lot of unanswered questions. He assured me that in discussions that he had had with people like Bill Gates and Gerstner from IBM that there would be, kind of a, I don't know whether it's a, unstated ability to get access to systems if we needed it. Now, I want to know if that is part of the policy, or is that just something that we are being assured of, that needs to be spoke. Because, if there is some kind of a tacit understanding, I would like to know what it is.

Because that is going to be subjected to future administrations, if it is not written down in a clear policy way. I want to know more about this end use certificate. In fact, sitting on the Cox Committee as I did, I saw the fallacy of our end use certificate that we were supposedly getting for HPCs going into China, which didn't work. So, I would like to know what the policies are. So, I guess what I would say is, I am happy that there seems to be a comming together. In fact, when I first got involved with NSA and DOD and CIS, and why can't you sit down with industry, and work this out. In fact, I called Gerstner, and I said, can't you IBM people, and can't you software people get together and find the middle ground, instead of us having to do legislation.

...

"Consultancy" explained in 7 minutes!

Modify the Slashcode to require Anonymous posters and registered users with low Karma to have their posts/replies approved by any user with a Excellent or greater Karma rating before the posts/replies become visible to anyone with less than Great Karma rating. Also have the following Slashdot moderation process affect the karma of the users who approved the posts.

Just trial it for a couple of months and see the difference it will make.

We have been told that because others in the West - and their advocates are here tonight - carry the fearful burden of a defence which terrorises as much as the threat it counters, we too must carry that burden. We are actually told that New Zealanders cannot decide for themselves how to defend New Zealand, but are obliged to adopt the methods which others use to defend themselves.

Lord Carrington [the Secretary-General of NATO] made a case in Copenhagen recently against the creation of nuclear weapon free zones. He argued that if the people of the United States - as advocated by my friend over there - found themselves bearing the burden alone, they would tire of bearing it. Now that is exactly the point. Genuine agreement[s] about the control of nuclear weapons do not cede the advantage to one side or the other: they enhance security, they do not diminish it. And if such arrangements can be made, and such agreements reached, then those who remain outside those arrangements might well and truly tire of their insecurity. They will reject the logic of the weapon and they will assert their essential humanity. They will look for arms control agreements which are real and verifiable.

DAVID LANGE, Oxford Union debate, 1985

Since the ISPs are complaining about their lack of competence to deal with the coming flood of content...

Once solution is to have all the broadband customers install/use wireless routers that can interconnect as many as possible to a geo-local area ( your local neighbourhood ) virtual private network that shares the bandwidth load for bulk content distribution across multiple customer to ISP connections. If N users wish to fetch the same content, each person only need to download 1/N of the content, using neighbourhood network to swap the different parts. Think of it as a neighbourhood bittorrent.

This could be set up/managed as a web service, with the client P2N2P ( Peer to Neighbourhood to Peer ) software running on each users computer ( or running as a proxy service on the wireless routers ), via managed a multi platform subscription aggregation client such as Miro 2.0 Open internet TV.

The service could operate like this:
1) Via a website or web2.0 interface, people create content "channels" which are a list of URIs ( HTTP/FTP/TORRENT) of content with descriptions, just like podcasts.
2) The service would then fetch the content, on demand and store the content temporarily on its host/distribution site. The host service would do sharing via torrent, so uploading is not done by the Neighbourhood Peers.
3) The service would hold the content and distribute it to P2N2P clients so that the content can be recombined via a local Neighbourhood VPNs.
4) Each piece of content itself be encrypted at the URI source, so the service need not hold the keys, to deal with any concerns over end use privacy issues.
5) The subscription aggregation client could incorporate and distribute advertising as a means of paying for hosting the service.