In the USA, the only country with such stupidity.. in the rest of the world patents are seen as a way to assure people they need not keep trade secrets.. if someone has already released the secret (by putting it in a product that can be reverse engineered) why would you then give them a patent?

Or, to put it more bluntly, obviously the price is updated every 3 years to keep up with inflation.. compare this to ULA who update their prices every 10 (yes, ten!) years and the only people they'll tell that price are NASA because they're required to by law, and that price remains confidential.

Yeah, it's called "inflation" dumbass.

There's no consideration for a free software license.. therefore it isn't a contract.. in any court. Please, you really should talk to a lawyer sometime as getting your legal advice from the Free Software Foundation is a great way to be steered down the garden path (trust me, I've been misled for about a decade).

As for licenses that do have consideration, the copyright owner is still permitted to terminate them. If you suffer damages you can sue the copyright owner for those damages. That's how civil law works.

Well, seeing as you're the only serious reply, I guess we should have a conversation.

For normal (proprietary) licenses it's already been established that a copyright owner can revoke the license at any time simply by giving notice to the licensee. (Wood v Leadbitter).

They can legally do a bait and switch, handing out permissive licenses, waiting a few years, then revoking all the licenses and demanding payment from anyone who continues to copy or modify the software. This is established law in Australia (Computermate Products v Ozi-Soft), and the only law prohibiting it in the US is UCITA, which thankfully never much made it (as it has much worse effects, namely clickwrap licensing).

Ultimately it would take someone with deep pockets to do this.. and they'd have to be outright malicious towards Free Software (thus, Larry). They'd preferably want a product that was dual licensed in the first place, never really had much of a development community, and had a strict copyright assignment policy for contributors (the two tend to go hand in hand).. that way they can simply declare "the only license available for this software is now [the proprietary license]", and because there was no doubt that they are the sole copyright owner it would be sufficiently ambiguous whether or not they were referring to all versions of the software or just the future versions.

Their sales team would be instructed to inform customers that no, there is no GPL version of the software anymore, and yes, you do have to buy a license to install the software. At that point they're a proprietary software company and they will start treating their customers like proprietary software customers - that is, they'll start showing up at the doorstep to do software audits. That's when they start putting the hard word on customers to "upgrade" to the proprietary licensed software.. if the customers resist *on the grounds that they don't need to pay for old versions*, then the legal fangs come out and we find out if this whole GPL thing has been built on a foundation of sand.

Get off my lawn.

Ok, patents are the biggest threat, but here's another.

Suppose Larry decides he's not happy with just changing the license on one of the dozens of open source products he's acquired and decides to actually start demanding payment for use of earlier versions of the software.. Does a copyright owner have the legal right to retract an issued license? Does that right apply to the GPL? This is a massive blindspot in copyright law.

Patents that are actually developed into something useful in their enforcement lifetime.. sure.. but there's plenty of patents that are simply uneconomical to implement so long as you have to include legal costs into the budget. When the patent expires the cheap operators are free to investigate how to make actual products from it.

Of course, for many industries the cheap operators are in China, and they don't tend to take much notice of patents either way. (god bless em).

Tell that to all the people who decline to buy a Tesla because of what they saw on Top Gear...

wtf is Dish Network? ;)

But seriously, someone should ustream that up.

Terrible article.. what's amazing here is that a whole mess of satellites have been launched to GEO but this is the first time anyone bothered to release photos from the altitude to the public. Isn't it glorious to see the entire Earth in one frame?!

While I accept your point that people like this still do exist, I think it is fair to speak in general terms that this is no longer how the world works.

Similarly, clothes are not made by tailors anymore.. While it's possible to go buy a tailor made suit, in general clothes are made by machines which are tended by technicians.

I hate to once again point out that nerds tend to be unnecessarily pedantic, but we all need to learn how other people talk and learn to live with it.

You have this vision of "a farmer" which barely even exists anymore. Machines make food for us.. those machines are tended by people who work for major corporations - in other words, just cogs in the machine. Those corporations pay the cogs to tend the machines to make the food so the product can be delivered to market and produce profits. They need the profits to entice institutional investors to buy their stock so they can expand their operation. They need to expand their operation to entice the institutional investors to not sell their stock by continually growing the stock price. The institutional investors are interested in stocks that grow because most their capital comes from retirement funds, which have to grow to keep up with inflation. The primary cause of inflation is the continual growth of industry.

It's a giant house of cards which falls down *all the time*. The real wonder is that they manage to keep it going.

This seems relevant: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/8/11/

If you don't understand why: http://webcomicoverlook.com/2010/08/17/penny-arcade-and-jokes-about-rape/

Apparently few made the connection to: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dick%20Wolf

Obeying authority is what some people consider "civilized".

Sad but true.