I think the primary lesson learned from the Apple Newton was that Steve Jobs should replace John Sculley. If so, I guess your assessment of its relation to the iPhone and iPad is correct.

My phone system at home is provided by my cable company, which uses VoIP (I assume) to provide phone service over the same cable that my Internet traffic flows through. In this common scenario, are the network and phone somehow logically isolated from each other even though they use the same physical medium?

FWIW, ever since I received that airline coupon, I have thought it would be nice if there was a law that stated that the lawyers and plaintiffs must receive compensation in the same form: if the lawyers get cash, the plaintiffs should get cash, and if the plaintiffs get coupons, the lawyers should get coupons.

If I had received just one dollar and the lawyers had received thousands of dollars, or, if I had received one coupon and the lawyers had received thousands of coupons, I wouldn't have felt cheated.

In my story above, the fact that I received a worthless coupon as "compensation" seemed to indicate that I was never actually part of the equation. The legal notice I received indicated that I could file my own claim (which I knew anyway), but as you suggest, it wasn't economical to do so. Nor did I feel at all damaged when I originally bought the airline ticket - until I received the worthless coupon and found out that the lawyers were getting all the money.

In cases like this, I would much prefer that all the worthless "compensation" be pooled together and given to charity or whatever - which would actually do somebody some good - rather than the current sham system that continues to operate for the benefit of everyone except the plaintiffs.

I've always regarded these class action lawsuits as a bit like gold prospecting: whichever lawyer first discovers the hidden nugget of some damages ostensibly due to class of people gets to dig the nugget out of the legal landscape and run off with it. I guess the legal theory would be that the lawyers deserve the golden nugget in return for for all the good they're doing society with these lawsuits. Likewise, plaintiffs are no more important than any other tailings in a gold mine.

Interesting points. I hadn't thought about possible whistleblower protection and/or its inapplicability to Snowden's case.

Another escape valve the system offers for "faireness" in such cases is a Presidential pardon, but that seems very unlikely. The US government as a whole sees Snowden's acts as quite damaging to national security, even if others see them as beneficial overall.

OK, IANAL, so help me out here. If that's the case, why do plaintiffs get anything at all? Why not just give all the compensation to the lawyers and let those naive plaintiffs go make themselves whole? Why in the heck should the legal system care about people who were damaged in the first place?

Actually, to me, it looks much more like a situation of the foxes being in charge of the hen house. That would neatly explain why the hens never always receive chicken feed as compensation. (My apologies if you happen to be a fox by trade.)

I guess they're not that smart. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Actually, it's common for allies to share intelligence, which works to everyone's benefit. They probably all do it selectively: nobody shares everything they've got. See the Pollard case for an example.

By "fair trial" do you mean to be tried in accordance with the law? Don't put me on the jury, because it seems clear to me that he did break the law by divulging classified information - and lots of it. In fact, he wouldn't be the popular hero he is if he hadn't broken the law. (Nobody becomes a popular hero by working secretly behind the scenes at NSA to reform the system from within.) So, I think even a fair trial would convict him. (Then again, that's why you shouldn't put me on the jury.) We could then expect his supporters to claim that the trial was unfair.

However, note that I'm referring only to the legal issue here. Whether or not what Snowden did was "right", "good", "moral", etc. is a different question that I know that many people here feel strongly about. But that's a separate issue.

Regardless, you can't simultaneously lionize him for having the guts to break the law in order to do what he and others see as the right thing, then expect him not to be convicted for breaking the law because "the full power of the US government would make any fair trial impossible."

I think the lawyers are always the winners in these class action lawsuits. Years ago, I received a notice that I was the beneficiary of a class action lawsuit revolving around an airline ticket I had once purchased. It seemed like a gift to me because I didn't even know that I had been "damaged." So, the lawyers who brought the suit seemed to be doing me a favor.

As part of the settlement, I was to receive a coupon for a discount on a future ticket from the same airline. The coupon didn't have much face value, maybe $20. Even worse, there were a lot of restrictions on it. So, it was basically worthless.

The lawyers got paid in cash. I assume the lawyers and the defendant always structure these things to minimize the real cost to the defendant in return for maximizing the payout to the lawyers. And of course, compensating the "damaged" plaintiff doesn't really enter into it.

Sorry that I didn't spell out that I meant that I couldn't use it from a business point of view. I assumed that readers would be able to figure that out without me having to explain every detail.

Although many people make money selling GPL'ed software, it just doesn't make sense for many business scenarios, in which case the business "can't use the software" (again, in a practical business sense.)

In my case, the business is a small one that I operate out of my home as a sideline. It sells something extremely specialized in very low volume. It's not lucrative, but it has made enough money over the years to be worth my time.

If I were to incorporate any GPL'ed software into it, I would then need to GPL the whole thing (isn't that the whole idea of the GPL?), and the few sales I have would dry up completely. Since it has such a small user base, I would be unlikely to make any money in any of the common open source revenue models, such as selling media or service.

So let's think about this realistically from a business point of view only, not trying to make the world a better place, like your beloved RMS. (Some of us want to be able to afford to shave, take a bath, and subsist on something tastier than toe jam.) I could incorporate a single function that had been translated from unlicensed Fortran to C and GPL'ed, and then lose my entire small business. Or, I could translate the function from Fortran to C myself, where the unspecified license of the original Fortran would remain unspecified in the new version.

So, which would you do?

Remember, you're not allowed to make the world a better place in this scenario, except by providing proprietary, closed-source software to end users that does a useful, highly specialized function, at a price that many are happy to pay.

BTW, my version of freedom is superior to RMS's because it's freer. Isn't that axiomatic? If freedom with a few restrictions is good, freedom without the restrictions must be better. I've always thought it was a great fraud to describe restrictions as "freedom".

If it makes you feel any better, I have released a small amount of useful software under an MIT-style license for all to use any way they like with full, true freedom. So I'm not all bad.

Anyway, I follow your point. But without the financial incentive that I have in selling my proprietary software, it wouldn't exist in any form. Both my software's users and myself would then be poorer for that. (I've learned that few people will pay for software unless you make them.) And I've received many nice thank-you's from people who paid good money for my hypocrisy - and were happy to do so.

Obviously, software can be licensed different ways, and the choice of license is both a matter of personal preference and pragmatism for various situations. So, use GPL if you like - I'm all in favor of it. It's just not for me.

And if you license your software child via the GPL, don't expect me to adopt your child. It probably deserves a better home than I can provide anyway.

As I had suggested, the idea of Copyleft is clever, and perhaps even original. But if "necessity is the mother of invention" and RMS hadn't provided the GPL and Copyleft to us, they must either be unnecessary or would have been invented by someone else.

The people who run a black market are dishonest? I'm shocked, shocked!

Correction: "There would still be a BSD version of UNIX".

The impact of RMS and his "GNU Manifesto" have been undeniably powerful, but I wonder what the software world would look like if there had never been an RMS. I'm certain that we would still have something like "open source" software. There would still be something like the MIT-style permissive licenses. There would still be a BSD version of Linux. Heck, a college kid from Finland might even still have created his own UNIX kernel, and maybe somebody would have pulled together all the pieces of a UNIX-style ecosystem to create a second UNIX-clone operating system that users were able to contribute to and modify.

Next, someone else might even have invented something like "Copyleft", wherein copyright law is actually used, jujitsu-style, to preserve the ability to copy rather than to limit it. Now, that's a pretty clever idea, but surely someone would have thought of it.

Maybe these things would have happened slower - much as light bulbs and cars might have happened slower without Edison and Ford, but would undoubtedly have happened.

That said, would Communism have happened without "The Communist Manifesto?" I'm not so sure. No idealogy can exist without its ideologue.