I have a couple of nice bridges for sale: One in Brooklyn (a neo-Gothic style bridge; it's a suspension/cable-stay hybrid bridge with granite pillars), and another one in San Francisco (a classical steel suspension bridge from 1933, painted a bright orange, and inspiration for many later bridges). The former has *no road tolls* applied, and the latter has low tolls (down to $3). These can be raised, and there's a nice income opportunity. The bridges are also designated as historical landmarks, so you have a separate income stream available by charging tourists for pictures and guided tours.

Of course, given the above descriptions you could easily copy them yourselves without having to invent anything, but I know that since you got the descriptions from me, you'd never do that.

What's your best offer?

Eivind.

It's not entirely clear that they're good for whoever holds them. IBM is the largest patent holder in the world; a statistical sample all by itself. One of the high up guys in IBM[1] claimed patents where 10x more valuable to IBM as defense against other companies suing them compared to licensing revenues. Another way to look at this is that if 10% of patents transfer to non-practicing entities (patent trolls), then patents are a net negative for IBM.

And this ignore all indirect costs of patents on society that hit IBM indirectly.

[1] Lead patent attorney or CFO or similar; it was credited when I originally read about this, but I don't remember the name or exact source.

I disagree with that. If the work has influence on a person, that person has a moral interest in it.

Let's start with a simple ethical hypothetical, just to demonstrate that there exists situations where your dictum fails completely:

Postulate a religion based on an obscure science fiction book; say, Roger MacBride Allen's Torch of Honor. (We've already got that kind of thing going on with Scientology.) Say they consider the book so important that they will kill those that can't answer questions about it - and their families. Say this religion gets significant in an area. Say Rober MacBride Allen choose to raise the price of a copy of the book from $8 to $200000 because he finds that's the price that's likely to make him the most money.

I postulate that it would ethical for a parent to get hold of a pirate copy of the book to protect their children.

"But that's completely made up!" I hear you say. Yes. That's not at issue. The issue is that we can construct situations where it is ethical to use a work in violation of the terms a copyright owners wants to dictate, because the copyright holder is behaving unreasonably.

So the question up for debate is "What are these situations, and does any of the common pirate copying fit with such a situation?"

I usually have a computer for 3 to 5 years; let's say four years on average. That's less than 70 cents a day. I use it for a fair bit of time every day, and I immediately appreciate a better trackpad (and regularly appreciate slot loading as opposed to tray loading DVD; forgot that annoyance point). I also am more likely to move to a better spot (more ergonomically wise) if there's no hassle with the power supply cord, and I'm less likely to get the machine damaged or trip from the power supply cord with the better connection.

All in all, it's worth 70 cents a day to me. If I was extremely money constrained in general, it might not be - but I have a comfortable income and having the computer I spend a lot of time on be comfortable to me is worth it.

I know a bunch of people that has these, all of which can deal with networks fairly well (including one who wrote one of the first major books on IPv6, almost a decade ago.)

They've got different priorities than you and me, but they clearly know what they are getting and do a conscious choice around it. My laptops are a MacBook Pro for work and a Lenovo for home use; I prefer the increased memory and screen size on the MacBook Pro compared to the easier-to-carry form factor of the ultralights. I'll probably switch from the Lenovo to a Mac Book Pro for my next home machine; the ergonomics of the hardware on the Lenovo is a bit clunky compared to the MacBook Pro. For what I need, I'm probably going to install Unix (FreeBSD or Linux) on it and be paying an extra $1000 or so primarily for a better trackpad and an easier to connect/disconnect power supply chord - and that is worth it to me. (I'm happy that it looks a less clunky as well, but that's not something I'd pay extra for, or I'd not have gotten the Lenovo in the first place.)

Apple chose to invest in the BSD codebase because they could do this, and would likely otherwise have gone a completely different route (e.g, licensing vxWorks as a base.) So having Apple contribute all changes back was not in the cards.

Apart from that, I'm fairly sure FreeBSD was offered re-licensing on most Apple code for integration back into FreeBSD if we were interested (mail to a private mailing list); lack of takeup on this seemed to be that nobody on the FreeBSD side had the spare capacity to deal with all of this rather than Apple not being willing to give us code.

There was and is a ton of merge work that could be done for FreeBSD; NetBSD and OpenBSD had lots of worthwhile changes at the time, and nobody really bothered to merge most of those either. I did some effort on NetBSD/OpenBSD merging, and wrote some infrastructure, but never actually submitted much based on it. Darwin just showed up as one more source of changes to merge; one that had about as many worthwhile changes, but a bit more hassle license wise (need to send an email to get a license release to avoid contaminating.)

So, this is mostly boils down to infrastructure, code/project organization, and manpower - there's no grand licensing issue involved.

This is based on assumptions that don't hold water.

In particular, the primary assumption is that a significant fraction of contributions to GPLed projects come from companies that are forced to give these contributions, and that would not give these contributions if they could avoid it (as in BSD).

My impression (from having participated in BSD development and followed Linux development) is that contributions in this area is actually a larger fraction of development on the BSD side of the fence: Embedded systems companies take the BSD codebase and develop something proprietary with it, and give back the parts that aren't crucial. And logically, it would make sense: If a company feels they need to have proprietary parts, they don't touch the GPLed codebase at all; they just use either BSD or one of the proprietary microkernels.

What *does* affect contributions to BSDs is this myth of exploitation. The GPL has a very effective propaganda preface about "preserving freedom of users", incidentally ignoring that part of this preservation of users' freedom comes by denying some of those that could be users of the codebase the ability to become users. (Look at all the BSD users through Mac OS X.) This myth and propaganda clearly influence some developers.

Yes.

However, the success of Linux has other possible sources than the license:

• The source code control system and project management led to "distributions", which allows rapid parallel experimentation.
• Distributions lead to more source code flow back and forth than different operating systems with distinct version control systems
• The Linux project structure made the project have a much more softly sloping "insider/outsider" distinction; the BSD structure with core team / committers / general public makes it harder to involve people, on a psychological level. (Everybody thinks things are the responsibility of the next inner circle, and then the core team think development is the responsibility of the community at large.) This led to easier recruiting on the Linux side.
• There are inherent size limits for communities at particular engagement levels (email overload); having multiple communities, in the form of multiple distributions, alleviate this.
• The initial bad support for low end hardware in the BSDs set a disparity in the numbers of users, and there are first mover advantages. People especially select relatively similar operating systems based on whether the operating systems run on the hardware they have, and with more people more drivers get written.
• Linux started with a reliance on binary packages for upgrades, while the BSDs started with a reliance on the ports system and building from source for upgrades. While source is better for some types of power users on servers, it is arguably worse for most desktop users and non-power-users on servers.
• BSD has a more complicated partitioning scheme, and a system that's a bit further from the DOS/Windows world. This may have made it harder to get users to transition there compared to to Linux.
• Less cool name and story
• BSD was in limbo for a crucial year during AT&T litigation
• BSD users self-identify mostly as "Unix users" and have no problem trying some Linux distribution as one more Unix; Linux users self-identify mostly as Linux users, and are not afraid of trying "another Linux", but feel other Unixes as very different. In random movement of users, this probably leads to some extra flow from BSD to Linux compared to vice versa.

The license may or may not be a factor; but there are clearly so many other differences that may be factors that it is hard to identify how important each of them are. I think this is a question that will never be answered; it would need lots of research, and I think the time when that research could be done is now gone.

I have a different opinion on what's a betrayal.

When I vote for a politician, I'm electing somebody to represent me - to hopefully vote the way I would have voted if I'd been perfectly informed and perfectly ethical. I hope the representative will vote *better* than I would, and that they will follow their own conscience. I feel it more of a betrayal if they vote to please me than if they vote different with what I believe.

Add PS3 Other OS removal. In my opinion, that was effectively theft - they advertised Other OS and then removed it. I'm boycotting Sony on the basis of this; the rest are not really malicious (the CD/DRM issue is bad, butthere was not intentional and deliberate harm, just intentional and deliberate intrusion and risk addition.)

The PS3 Other OS removal, on the other hand, is clearly, intentionally malicious. I did not get hurt by it - but I still boycott. I refuse to do business with a company that intentionally hurt their customers.

I use a duvet (comforter in US English, I think) or a plain blanket, depending on what climate and time of year it is; so my view of "made properly" is probably different than yours. It's basically an organized way of putting the duvet/blanket. I find it annoying when I come to hotels and have to rip it all up.

What I wanted to communicate was that it isn't necessarily a waste to tidy even if you're not having guests over - some of us like to have things tidy because we find it pleasant in itself, not to demonstrate to others. (And I'm not claiming that I always have it tidy even if I'd like to - I would prefer to have it tidy without having to make it tidy ;)

Eivind.

I like having things look tidy at home. It makes it easier to find things when I need to, and overall is more mentally relaxing.

I'm not the original poster, but let me try a rephrase of it:

Between the rights that are eroding due to *AA attempting to protect copyrighted mass distributed entertainment, and the production of new copyrighted mass distributed entertainment, I'd rather give up the production of new entertainment than the rights.

Does that make more sense to you?

Eivind.

By a problem in the design of the US election system combined with having a large country. The primary problem in the design is that there's a first-past-the-post election system combined with simple plurality voting. This leads to very heavy strategic voting ("Don't vote for a third party or your vote is wasted") locking in a bi-partisan situation (and, through "Attitudes follows behavior", mentality). A secondary problem is the use of campaign contributions for the main thrust of political campaigning; this leads to politicians being dependent on contributors to make the cut.

This means that for areas where people do not strongly care, the parties will not risk offending the contributors, as that may lead to the loss of the next election.

Having a large country strongly compounds that. If you have a country of three million people, an industry can spend 2 million in lobbying to do something that takes one dollar from each citizen, and make a million - 50% return on investment. In a country with 300 million, they can spend 200 million for the same law and get the same return on investment.

An individual citizen's relative voice scales the opposite way.

This makes a 100x difference in size into a 10,000x difference in relative influence. There's a couple of factors that bring these relative factors back a little bit - primarily, the time of politicians are limited, so you can't apply 100x more lobbying expense effectively in convincing people, and people get demotivated by being such a small cog, so the people that *do* have motivation have more access than they proportionally should. Also, much of the money goes to advertising, and that has some proportionality to the number of people reached; though there is a large fixed base.

But overall, these things taken together makes it hard to get influence. Things have to really enrage people to get them blocked if there's "bipartisan support".

People didn't care because they feel like they have no chance of actually changing things - and unless there's work to fix the system, they're often right.

I try to convince people that they need to hit the hydra at the base: Election reform. By informing people about it. (I can't vote in the US, and my care for the US internal politics is to a large degree compassion - I think the US people deserve a system of government that isn't unduly influenced by corporations.)

They should care about your product because they take pride in their work, because they have personal integrity around the things they have taken on. This is a product of your selection of partners.

They should care about your product because you've communicated to them in a way that show that they're important and you care and your product is important - building loyalty to both you and the product. This is a product of your communication after you've hired them.

I'd guess most of the western world, and possibly some of the non-western world. On the intentional homicides per capita list on Wikipedia, US is on the 26th place of 59 entries. Compared to population, there's 8.5x more homicides in the US than in Austria. However, the numbers are likely worse when it comes to billionaire risk: In Norway (where I'm originally from, 2nd spot on the list), almost all homicides are crimes of passion inside family; in the US, there's more criminally related homicides, a risk I'd expect to be increased for billionaires.