Er, no.

The 'why' has little to do with IP law and a lot to do with group dynamics, especially herd behaviour. Take this statement, for example:

One of my personal pet causes is developing a better alternative to HTML/CSS. This is a case where the metaphorical snowdrift is R&D on new platforms (which could at least initially compile to HTML/CSS).

The problem with the 'snowdrift' here, to abuse the metaphor, has nothing to do with IP law, and nothing to do with lack of innovation. It has everything to do with the size of the drift. You don't have any choice but to wait for someone else to come along to help shovel. But the author is trying to say, If everyone doesn't shovel, nobody gets out. And that's not always true.

A quick reminder: When HTML first came out, the very first thing virtually every proprietary software vendor of note did was publish their own website design tool. And each of those tools used proprietary extensions and/or unique behaviour in an attempt to corner the market on web development, and therefore on the web itself.

But the 'snowdrift' in this case was all the other companies. Because no single one of them was capable of establishing and holding overwhelming dominance, the 'drift' was doomed to remain more manageable by groups than by any single entity. (Microsoft came closest to achieving dominance, but ultimately their failure was such that they have in fact been weakened by the effort.)

Say what you like about the W3C, and draw what conclusions you will from the recent schism-and-reunification with WHATWG. The plain fact is that stodgy, not-too-volatile standards actually work in everybody's favour. To be clear: they provide the greatest benefit to the group, not to the enfant terrible programmer who thinks he knows better than multiple generations of his predecessors.

Yes, FOSS projects face institutional weaknesses, including a lack of funding. Especially on funding for R&D. But funded projects face significant weaknesses as well. Just look at the Node.JS / io.js fork, all because Joyent went overboard in its egalitarian zeal. Consider also that recent widely publicised bugs, despite the alarm they've caused, haven't really done much to affect the relative level of quality in funded vs proprietary vs unfunded code bases. They all have gaping holes, but the extent of their suckage seems to be dependent on factors other than funding. If not, Microsoft would be the ne plus ultra of software.

Weighed in the balance, therefore, FOSS's existential problems are real, and significant, but they're not as significant as those faced by all the other methods we've tried. So to those who have a better idea about how to balance community benefits and obligations, I can only reply as the Empress famously did when revolutionaries carried her bodily from the palace: 'I wish them well.'

I'm not sure that's really the canonical use of the term. I would think that selling said arms to one's own government at extortionate prices would be closer to the standard definition.

But niggling aside, the real problem with this article is that it equates the control of technology with control of behaviour, and assumes that it's even possible to usefully control the proliferation of technology.

Instead of advocating a software proscription list, why not seek to promote international legal standards concerning the right to privacy, and a respect for the rule of law among all nations?

Actually, don't answer that. I know why. Because building democracy is hard and even the purportedly enlightened, 'free' nations are busy backing away from individual human rights.

Well, you need to define 'best' under these circumstances. The Linux kernel became 'best' when it was found that it supported and sustained the involvement of the widest developer/manufacturer constituency at a reasonable level of quality. That's hardly a glowing endorsement of the quality of the code or the operation of the kernel in real-world scenarios.

Remember that the abiding challenge for technologists is not so much 'best' as 'good enough'.

So yes, GP is wrong to see the free market as one in which the best ideas win. They don't. But the most workable available solutions do tend to get the most support. In Commodore's case, their sin was failing to market it in a way that made it readily accessible (i.e. price, distribution and support) and usable (developer support and software market). So you can praise the quality of the device, but from the buyer's perspective, it wasn't the 'best' solution after all, was it?

eggcorn |egg korn| noun In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease".

humor
(h)yoomr
noun
noun: humour
1. the quality of being amusing or comic, especially as expressed in literature or speech. "his tales are full of humor"

No, actually. Unless by 'sucks' you mean, works imperfectly, but still better than those parts of the world that did not benefit from my tax dollars.

I say this with the benefit of experience. I've traveled to dozens of countries, rich and poor, and those with solid tax bases have dependably better public infrastructure than those without.

The cause of your crumbling infrastructure in the US is largely people not paying taxes.

Whose brainchild, specifically? I'm very interested in knowing. Because I think you'll find that the idea did not originate in Wikipedia, but that it was presented to them by others.

I hope you'll forgive my cynicism, but 'physically going' to the developing world teaches very little indeed about the broader truths of living in poverty. I say this having lived the last 11 years in a Least Developed Country, and having worked for half a generation with a parade of well-intended people who, to put it bluntly, haven't got a fucking clue, but who suck up all the oxygen in the room, making it impossible to get real, meaningful work done.

Do I sound bitter? Yes. I believe I've earned that right. Does that diminish my determination to work on real issues? Not one iota.

Yes, and instead of helping to fight this phenomenon through better policy and changed attitudes among the global institutions, what we get instead is people perpetuating the problem by empowering the very telcos who prey on those children.

Let's be perfectly clear about this: asking telcos to make a special exception for one or two services is probably the worst possible response to the situation. It's short-sighted, it generates little real benefit, and worst of all, it creates the impression that people are actually doing something, when they're doing less than the minimum needed to move the development markers.

You can defend these people all you like. I still maintain that:

a) They were misguided and wrong; and
b) The basic idea was inspired and promoted by a number of very cynical individuals to a bunch of very naïve (if well-intentioned) people with little meaningful experience in actual development work.

Let me state things clearly. These {facebook|wikipedia|whatever}.zero campaigns are a direct and unequivocal attack on Net Neutrality. They are the brainchild of some very smart, cynical people who know exactly how insidious the whole idea is, and whose job it is to set Open Data people against Open Networks people.

This is not an unintended consequence. This is the consequence.

My part of the world consists pretty much entirely of developing nations, and when we discussed these zero initiatives, we pretty quickly came to the conclusion that having offline versions of wikipedia (commonly available) was a more desirable thing than having a zero-cost version of it mediated by our friendly neighbourhood telco.

And Facebook zero was scoffed at when it was touted as a social Good.

ARRRGGGHHHHH.... CLARIFIC-I-ATION. I can't even spell it wrong when I WANT to!

Indeed. Now, most of you are out in the world seeking clarity. But, as long-time contributor Bennett Haselton writes, much more important than that is 'clarifice', the ability to explain truthiness without resorting to expertise or insight. Keep reading to see Bennett's clarification of how over two hundred years or jurisprudence can be usefully transposed onto decades-old technology....

Not necessarily. If the vulnerability du jour is catching media attention the way Ebola did, then you're probably not doing work you should be doing because you've got a CEO who just publicly pronounced that not one of your customers ever is going to get $EBOLA because of you. And suddenly your entire development cycle is in ruins, every manager everywhere has to explain in voluminous detail why his business unit will not be the cause of the next $EBOLA crisis, consultants will be hired to waste your time confirming that you really never were going to contribute to the global $EBOLA scare anyway....

... and meanwhile, your maintenance cycle is fucked, you have no budget left to do the upgrades that you need to avoid good old-fashioned data loss due to hardware failure, your children have forgotten who you are, and your wife just accidentally emailed her entire carpool pictures of her naughty bits (instead of her little piece on side, as she intended).

And your dog ran away.

NOW how does all that funding and awareness feel, eh kid?

Don't scoff. There are a number of scenarios where even several thousand bucks can go over the board without a second thought as long as there's some demonstrable benefit. In photography or video editing, your billing rate can be such that a couple of hours saved waiting on disk I/O can be sufficient to justify some serious spending on storage.

I've got 10 TB on my desk at home, and photography is not my primary work. It was nothing to me to drop over a thousand bucks on a decent hardware RAID controller and disk array. I'd seriously consider moving to SSDs as my primary storage medium if the price got down to 2-2.5 times the cost of a traditional disk.

Careful, you'll give yourself a aneurysm.

Eastern Arctic, at about the same time. Worked with Jeff Philippe a bit, too. He was operating out of Yellowknife back then. We set up what was at the time the most remote commercial ISP in the world. It was a great lesson in doing more with less, but still operating in a place where the broader context was more or less sane.

The thing that people forget when they're working in developing countries is that you can't take even the smallest things for granted. The movement of goods can resemble Brownian motion more than anything else. I've been in situations where the tool (or part) I needed simply didn't exist in the country. And I'm not talking about arcane, hard-to-find items - I mean things like the proper allen key to mount drives into their enclosures in a rack mount server. Power is abysmally poor, and UPSes degrade about as fast as bread on a hot day - and they're all hot days.

Long story short: It's tedious, difficult work with few rewards. Often you measure success in disasters averted. I wouldn't recommend it for most people, and I wish that some well-meaning people would stay the fuck away. But those who end up here, end up living a life to be envied.

Stay home. Seriously. As someone who has spent the last decade working on technology in the developing world, I can tell you that most of what I do is clean up after well meaning people who don't know enough about technology to avoid making simple mistakes, and who know next to nothing about local conditions. I cut my teeth working on the Canadian frontier, and I suggest you do something similar. Don't try to help until you're confident you can.

That's not just the Netflix perspective. It's the perspective that most sane individuals have.

Erm, even in the 1990s it was clear that point to point video was going to be an integral part of the internet. And I don't mean 'clear to me in hindsight', I mean clear to the guys selling fibre and switching gear to telcos and ISPs. I consulted with one of the largest and most advanced network equipment companies in the world, at one of their development labs. They were already talking about video on demand as a certainty in 1998, and rushing to get products to market.

If Comcast's management, in their infinite wisdom, were unable to see the writing on the wall 15 years ago, then they have only themselves to blame. The problem is that they have little incentive to invest aggressively, because they don't face substantive, effective competition in the majority of their marketplaces. So now, their complacency is such that they feel they have a right to bitch about the expense of providing a level of service that is well behind the state of the art in Europe, even lagging behind powerhouses like Estonia?

To answer your question, therefore: The money should come from reinvestment of profits. Just like it every other ISP and telco that has managed to leave them in the technological dust. If you plan to make the case that Comcast is somehow struggling to get by on the pittance they charge because of vanishingly small margins, then I'd suggest that the answer there is for them to give way to a company that actually knows how to make money in a sure-fire profitable business that features some of the more profitable corporations in the world. The fact is, they're making more and investing less than ever before.

You should pay the same because the baseline level of service should be minimum 10-20 Mbps these days. The fact that you use a vanishingly small percentage of that capacity should be your problem, not everyone else's. Pulling one or two video streams is baseline operability these days. For fuck's sake, I can do it and I live in the developing world in a place with some of the most obscenely high prices in the world!

I know that misery loves company, but just because your usage is unusually low is not justification for limiting the capacity of Comcast's entire customer base.