Settle down, tiger, and give that straw man a rest. I was responding to a post that made the absurd claim that a license that allowed covered code to be made less free ("closed" was, I think, the word used) was actually a more "free" license than one which required the code to remain free/open. This was so close to a restatement of Orwell's paradigmatic slogan of linguistic nihilism -- "Freedom is Slavery" -- that I thought it bore comment. The "freedom" to discard your own freedom -- or that of others -- is no freedom at all.

You've imputed to me a bunch of weird stuff about business models, equating software licenses with human slavery, and so on. I suggest that this is your baggage, not mine, being inappropriately drawn into the conversation.

Um... the Apache license is MUCH more free than the GPL in that you can do anything you want with it, including closing it if you are so inclined.

Yeah, just like America was a much freer place in 1750 because you were free to own slaves or to sell yourself into indentured servitude.

Until AT&T and Comcast de-settlement-free-peer any large ISP that doesn't join the gang.

Or, even more likely, RIAA will sign on about 75% of the ISP market, then start a vindictive, focused litigation campaign against the customers of the last 25%. The relatively lighter treatment given to AT&T and Comcast customers will drive customers from the 25% stalwarts to the 75% sell-outs. This divide-and-conquer strategy works pretty much all the time, as long as consumers keep buying with their short-term, rather than long-term, interests in mind. Just look at laid-off Wal-mart employees who continue to shop at Wal-mart.

Speaking as an American expat now living in Canada, crap like this is a big cause of the accelerating brain drain of educated, talented people (gay and otherwise) moving north to find civilization. In a few decades, you can expect the US to be even more dominated by the Sarah Palin crowd, with Canada having swiped a significant chunk of the US's triple-digit-IQ population.

And that is why Google is concerned. They're not sure how much innovation they'll be able to maintain when their head of R&D is Joe the Plumber.

From the article:

In their licensing terms, the EULA people agree to, they would say "in addition, we get to install any other software we feel like putting on." Of course, nobody reads EULAs, so a lot of people agreed to that. If they had, say, 4 million machines, which was a pretty good sized adware network, they would just go up to every other adware distributor and say "Hey! I've got 4 million machines. Do you want to pay 20 cents a machine? I'll put you on all of them." At the time there was basically no law around this. EULAs were recognized as contracts and all, so that's pretty much how distribution happened.

Um, no. Unconscionability is a pretty ancient principle of contract law. People joke about signing away their first-born child in an unread EULA, but they understand that it's a joke: that term would never be enforced by a court, because allowing contracts of adhesion (like EULAs) signed by non-lawyers in casual circumstances to extract those kinds of concessions from the parties would result in the complete breakdown of society.

So when this guy (and his bosses) talk about how there was "no law around this", they're not fooling anyone, least of all themselves. If I buy a bus ticket and on the back there's some fine print stating that by riding the bus I've agreed to let the driver break into my house and take anything he wants, guess where the bus driver ends up if he tried to exercise his contractual "rights"? In prison. Which is where this guy belongs.

Your figures are a bit on the extreme end, I think, but I agree that MIT had (at least in the 90s) a drastically high dropout/delayed graduation rate compared to any peer institution (e.g. the Ivy League). Getting into MIT was just the beginning; actually making it through chewed up a lot of undergrads compared to places like Harvard and Yale.

That was not, as I recall, the stated intent of the MIT HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) requirement. But you're not the first MIT grad (or undergrad) I've heard make this bizarre conflation of "the humanities" with "social skills". Indeed, even the acronym HASS, encompassing as it does more or less every academic field outside of the physical sciences and engineering, is probably responsible for a large part of this misconception: it suggested to MIT students that there was the academic study of science/technology (category 1), which should necessarily be the core of one's existence, and then there was everything else in the universe human beings devote their time and energy to (category 2), which should be given a token glance every now and again. I have to admit that it resulted in some pretty impressive academics and engineers (see the./ article earlier today on my buddy Carl Dietrich and his flying car), but it also contributed to the exceptionally unhealthy atmosphere of the place that ruined more promising young lives than I like to remember due to their distorted values and priorities. (I'm not being hyperbolic; the suicide rate there in the late 90s and early 2000s was shameful.)

The article linked here is the only place on the web that makes the peculiar, and false, claim that Marlin is "open source". Marlin's own creators make no such claim; they only claim that it operates on "open standards", which is quite a different can of worms.

No story here, just one careless reporter and one careless ./ submitter.