I don't know where OSI would stand on this merger, but Richard Stallman appears to be categorically opposed to the movement, as he thinks it is based on wrong values, among other things.

Instead of protecting the consumer by outlawing every evil feature a computer might possibly have, they should simply mandate free and open source software in all consumer electronics. It will make all software cheaper, spur the competition, and provide adequate protection from all evil features, even the ones we can't imagine today.

You want network transparency? Why does the display server have to provide you with it? You want to drag networking, authentication, and encryption code/hooks into the display server. So much for the UNIX philosophy. There is already a "network transparency" protocol which your applications can use: https+xhtml+javascript. Fire up the transmission Web server/client to see a stellar example. You will never, never, never obtain the efficiency and the responsiveness of a Web app through the display server. A cutting-edge Web app can do real-time 3d-rendering, for chrissake, and anything with just forms and dialogs will fly like a jet. So if supporting old X applications is not a problem, then there is no problem. The X's approach to gaining network transparency is just plain wrong, and I say it as a user. Using X's "network transparency" to run a GTK or QT app across the Internet is every bit as annoying as running it over VNC, and is often slower. I hope to god Wayland will take off and GUI app developers will become aware that they are in the best position to provide network transparency. It's easier for them, as writing Web interfaces is arguably easier than using a toolkit, and it's obviously better for users.

And if you are stuck with the software that (1) has no shell interface and (2) insists on using a modern toolkit such as QT for rendering 3D widgets to a local screen, then you are stuck with an application which is not intended by the authors to be network-transparent, and Wayland isn't designed to solve this problem. Wayland is for drawing pixels to a local screen. Give it the right kind of app, and it will render it a browser window with 3D shadows, animations, and anything you bloody want, with no tearing, no flicker, no lag of any kind.

You are almost certainly right, about the motives as well as about the likely effect.

To this I may add, the submitter's bias (or complete lack of effort to present the NPoV) is clear in the blurb. Patent trolls are "disrupting competition"? Really? The whole point of the patent system is to disrupt the competition, by giving out almost life-time exclusive rights for implementing ideas. Yet patent lovers keep repeating the same nonsense: in their world, monopolies spur the competition.

Another piece of nonsense which is not in the blurb, but certainly is in TFA, is the assumption that patents improve innovation. How can they possibly do that? A patented thing can only be improved by the rights holder, usually a very small entity, of which the R&D team is again a tiny fraction. Libre things can be improved and brought to the market by researchers, engineers, and manufacturers anywhere in the world. Even a dummy can understand that the only serious incentive provided by the patent system is to misappropriate as many broad ideas as possible, so that no one can even sneeze without paying royalties.

Wake me up when they start tearing down this house. This law is almost certainly another step backwards for the consumer and the small inventor.

I hope you are paying royalties to the guy who patented a line, since you used two of them.

GNU is considerably larger than Linux. My paper napkin calculations show the entire kernel to be roughly half the size of gcc. No, not including g++, just gcc. So if a distro is built and distributed with gcc as the default compiler, then it's already more like GNU/Linux. Most Linux-based distros, though, easily come with 10 times as much GNU.

Hehehe. I, for one, don't understand for the life of me why it is OK to share videos of soldiers shooting at children with automatic weapons, for real. Or what Lucas did with kids in the prequels. How is that OK, and a depiction of a fictional sex abuse act is not OK? I think children involved in actual acts would strongly agree with me, too.

Or what about any movie where a super-villain is trying to destroy the world? Why are we OK with looking at that imagery? Isn't that the worst fucking thing that one can try to do? Why do people get gold prizes for depicting this, and prison time for monkeys with no clothes on?

This. I think there is a fundamental limitation on passwords: human brains suck at remembering good ones. This excuse will make a ton of sense in the future world, where digital security is taken seriously. At least as seriously as locking doors today.

Even though I would love to see every racketeer prosecuted to the full extent of the law, a more useful approach would be to end the war on sharing. Only legalizing non-commercial file-sharing will protect the public from these sharks.

And don't forget about the Human horn!

Look at the patent, which, by the way, has 1 content-free claim (you didn't know that?), and a few crude pictures. I remember drawing things like that in high school. All I claim is that it's been thought of before, but nice trolling.

So his argument is flawed because he didn't chew it up for you like I did? Try again.

It's worse than that. Patents don't deny access to information, but they curtail our freedom to help each other. And those who register patents almost never think of it first. Did Apple think first of a rectangular device with rounded corners?

As usual, Richard Stallman has a great solution:

This will work because a very similar law already works in the medical field. Just like surgeons, who can safely ignore procedural patents to save lives, programmers and distributors of free software deserve complete patent immunity because their work is entirely gratis, and benefits the whole world.

Wired article (gods help you if you don't use adblock and noscript).

Don't bother.