Nimmer is the real deal. He wrote the definitive treatise on copyright law. It is cited in more judicial opinions than any other scholarly work on the subject. That doesn't mean Google is necessarily screwed, but it certainly means this is a serious matter.

Despite the persistent belief that copyleft and the GPL are antithetical to copyright law, nothing could be further from the truth. The GPL relies on copyright law; without copyright there could be no GPL. Google's attitude seems to be that copyright is merely a hassle, an obstacle to be routed around. Even if they are not found to be legally in violation of the GPL, they obviously Bionic with the deliberate intent of routing around it.

If openness is a virtue, what is sort-of-openness?

OMG! It's like these people in government are human beings with nuanced opinions and conflicting constituencies!

I thought the discussion was about mainstream adoption of open source software.

... writing silly GUIs for things that don't need it and others like you that insist on having everything done for you tells me you'd rather be having a different discussion altogether. OSS will continue to be marvelous for geeks and ignored by end users if you believe you're building the software solely for yourself. It's perfectly valid to build software for yourself and for those like you, but you can't expect that people unlike you will start using OSS.

Yeah, the title reads like "Adolf Hitler On Tolerance and Equal Opportunities".

Yes, because Microsoft is killing millions and MdI is collaborating with them on a nuclear weapon. This is not a discussion about different approaches to creating and distributing software.

Anything that helps make detecting cancer cheaper, easier, and faster is good in my book.

From the press release for the study:

OpenLogic found that among the applications that use the Apache or GPL/LGPL licenses, the compliance rate was only 29%. Android compliance was 27% and iPhone/iOS compliance was 32%. Overall compliance of Android applications using the GPL/LGPL was 0%.

Experts come up with stupid ideas all the time.

Agreed. But what I find most interesting about this discussion is that the article is thin on facts, so most of us are basing our alternative plans on only the sparsest information. Also, the strong thread of mistrusting government is bleeding over into what is essentially a technical discussion. The merits of compensating the owners or not has nothing to do with the technical solution of how to most safely and efficiently dispose of the explosives. You can say what you want about Homeland Security dipshits, but law enforcement demolitions experts have been doing this sort of work for a long time, and they have demonstrated technical competence. Mistrusting them because they work for government is just as stupid as trusting them merely because they work for the government.

From TFA: "It may be seen as a historic shift, but it is one that tells more about the creation of a new market, mobile and tablet computing, than the decline of an older one, the PC. Shipments of personal computers will continue to increase even as they are surpassed by other devices."

Everyone is an expert.

In spite of the fact that "some 40 experts on bombs and hazardous materials from across the country and at least eight national laboratories..." have decided on this course of action, all of us World of Warcraft players and PHP developers have concluded it's a bad idea to handle it this way.

• I don't want my kid to grow up sucking at the teat of the TV.
• I don't have the time to watch sports any more, which is the only reason to have realtime broadcast.
• There is television content I like, but I don't feel the imperative to see it right away, which is why I use Netflix, iTunes, etc.
• I don't own a game console.
• I don't want to screw around with the madness of HDTV. If I want to spend my time hardware hacking, I'd rather it be with a device I enjoy more.
• Instead of a monster sized TV screen and monthly cable TV bills, I'd rather spend my money on mobile devices and other goodies.
• The nature of broadcast TV is inherently distracting. For me the challenge of living in the age of ubiquitous media is to gain some measure of control over how and what I consume. TV takes control away from me. Having a TV in the house is like a alcoholic keeping a jug of whiskey in the kitchen.

We live in an age in which it is more important to entertain than to inform.

Do you think this is different than in any other age?

Actually, yes, I do. It is different. Before the mainstream news media became centralized and under the control of a handful of conglomerates, it was different. The differences in television news in particular are striking; look at newscasts from 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 and the descent into infotainment is quite clear.

I have no real issue buying a wii and an xbox; but I'm not going to carry around multiple phones.

You seem to be saying that it's not really a matter of whether there's a monopoly or not; your primary interest is in being able to buy whatever apps you want for your phone. At the same time you are not so interested in being able to buy whatever games you want for your game console.

Is Microsoft exercising a legally recognizable monopoly when it limits what games can be developed for XBox? Is Sony exercising a legal monopoly when it does the same for PlayStation? Is every hardware vendor that restricts software development on its platform exercising a legal monopoly?