Efficency is were wealth comes from. If everyone is breaking windows the economy will grid to a standstill, there has to people doing actual productive work and software is an important foundation to modern world and shouldn't be squandered or guildified in the name of jobs. I appricate that you don't BS about your motives though.

Anyway as long as there is people still working there will be work for software engineers, actually our job is to put other people out of jobs (regardless of license of the software). I really think "software engineer" will be the last job in existence once we have automated everything else.

Anytime you write software that makes people more productive or automate business processes, you are taking a step down that road.

Per TFA:
"FairPlay is cracked by Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD Jon"), previously known for his part in the DeCSS software, which was released four years earlier for decrypting DVDs."

You are talking about a man who is fundamentally against the way the world works and made it his life mission to change it.

"Migrate folks to it" with what authority?

I assure you the system administrator teams running those 21 other e-mail systems will not let you touch it with a 500 foot poll, and no strong leadership compels them otherwise.

The problem is this is exactly how those 21 e-mail systems came to be. I bet they all had the idea of becoming the "one corporate e-mail system", but got mired in politics and insanity along the way.

You can implement reliable transmission over UDP. And you have more options as well: you can do it with error correction algorithms for latency intorelent applications, something TCP can't provide with it's ARQ design.

TCP is simple to use (from the view of someone doing network programming), but under the scenes it is crazy complicated to implement properly.
 
  Fortunately you really only need someone to implement a TCP stack once (in open source) and it can be reused in a multitude of operating systems. BSD pretty much set the standard for a TCP/IP stack (TCP Reno) and everyone went from there.

Stream protocols that offer error, flow and congestion control over heterogeneous datagram networks are NOT trivial.

TCP is not trivial at all. In fact & efficient algorithms to implement features of TCP is still an area of active research. IETF RFCs in various stages of standardization related to TCP probably amount to thousands of pages at this point, and it's still growing. Linux recently got a new algorithm for congestion control for instance: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~rhee/export/bitcp/cubic-paper.pdf

So all Israeli Jews are European? Really? Really?

Arab-Islamic terrorists like Hamas want the total extermination of the Jewish people and conquest of the world. Israel has every right to defend themselves from such psychopaths.

I remember On2 used to say VP8 (WebM) had far better quality than H.264.

Don't forget Google owns a lot of patents on video compression since they bought On2, and they have no intention of licensing them out for H.264. If MPEG LA wants to start a patent war with Google, they might find themselves counter-sued with the potential of their H.264 format getting recalled off the market.

We "fanatical FOSSies" are pushing towards a world where people are free to do interesting things with technology without needing permission or excessive upfront money. H.264 is not one of those technologies.

With regard to software specifically, this movement to strip an entire category of inventions of protection lacks nuance. What I find most interesting is that its biggest proponents are people within the software industry itself, but usually not the real innovators. Are you saying software simply can't be inventive? That you can't possibly think of something in software that anyone else couldn't have thought of, even given the exact same problem set? Because boy oh boy, if that's true, we're really overpaying software "engineers" then, aren't we?

What I find interesting is the biggest proponents of software patents are the patent lawyers themselves, and usually not software engineers. Well that that all interesting, because lawyers with their $10k filing fees and multimillion dollar lawsuit fees (usually by suing software companies) seem to benefit the most from their existence.

Understand, when a lawyer tells you what is good for your industry, run the other way. RUN FAST.

The "average Joe" doesn't give a dime to Oracle. It's the IT/software professionals that give millions of dollars of their departmental budgets to Oracle. The kind with an anti-Microsoft slant are even more likely to be doing this.

Ergo, Oracle should be VERY concerned of the opinion on Slashdot.