That was one of the factors I posted in my other comment.

How does this square with the article summary:

How would they prevent two people from playing at the same time without it requiring an internet connection? Or is this just bad summary writing? The linked press release never actually says that. You can understand why many slashdotters would be a bit confused trying to reconcile such statements, I hope.

Oh Gravity Probe B, why can't you be more like Gravity Probe A?

As I clarified later, I'm speaking only to applications in which both the client and server are provided by the same company.

Also, the discussion isn't really about "free as in beer"; it's about "free as in speech." As is any discussion around RMS' comments, really.

Well then I guess "Serenity" is right out. Who knows what awful sequel or remake will come out down the road.

But how do you know which ones are timeless? By continually evaluating them and deciding if it makes sense in the current times or not. If it always makes sense in the current times, it's timeless.

Shockingly enough, I'm not anti-gun rights. I come from a rural background and have a decent amount of experience with them. I never was all that interested in hunting, but I do enjoy knocking down some cans or shooting some skeet. I even own an NRA-licensed collectors item, though I admit it was a present. When I visit with my brothers and father, half of the conversation is about old guns, rebuilding them, showing each other what they've picked up recently, etc. Again, I'm not a collector so a lot of it is lost on me. But it's the culture I come from and I understand it well.

You'll see that I have never said a single anti-gun rights word in any of my posts. People seem to attack me because they have a kneejerk reaction when I question authority. I don't like the argument that I should just agree because someone who is Very Important and a Deep Thinker says I should agree.

The funny thing is if I'd prefaced my posts with the background I gave above, I probably would have had a lot fewer detractors because I would have been seen as "one of us." But I'd also rather my own arguments stand not on the basis of who I am, but on the argument itself.

This statement is meaningless and definitely explains a lot of your other posts on the subject. If you're ignoring legalities, what's the point of even talking about free or non-free? Those terms simply don't have any definition behind them without considering the legal consequences.

No, sometimes I think he's actually nuts.

Yeah, I should have specifically put in a bit where each piece is made by a different company/person. I'd say that yes, that makes it free. In that the people providing the software are in no way selling it to you. This is the case the most closely parallels the question of if Firefox is free because you use it with non-free websites.

Making something open source does not make it lose it's copyright status. You can't just rip off someone's javascript and claim they were "handing you the code." You can get away with it for minor stuff, but I'd love to see you try to do that with something like gmail.

While I frequently think RMS takes good philosophy and generates stupid conclusion, I actually think your example proves him right. Imagine MS SQL ships you SQL server with all the source code Query Analyzer and the DB access libraries open sourced and GPL. But they continue to distribute the SQL server engine as closed source and with the current license. Does that make SQL server free or not free?

Your browser example just doesn't work because the browser can access a whole host of other information and isn't built only for talking to that one server. Your other example program could be used to talk to any number of database servers instead of MSSQL. As long as it was a free, open source app and didn't use some incredibly henious MS-specific SQL, you could point it at another DB.

Now imagine something even more symbiotic than Query Analyzer and MSSQL. Something where there really is no practical use for the client except to talk to that server. For AJAX apps, it's more of a parallel to say the Javascript is just the top layer GUI on the behind-the-scenes application. That's what we're talking about here. The client is only half of the application, the server is the other half. An application can't be "half-free."

And I genuinely thank you for the correction.

The only thing I can think of that might be relevant is the non-obsfucation clause. That might sound like it would address this in theory, making it easier to spot buried stuff like this. But to be honest, I doubt anyone would catch it in either case until they saw it happen on their screen and dug through the code for it. And once they reporting it to Blizzard and they found the trigger phrases, they would grep through their chat logs (they do actually keep them) and mass ban all the accounts who have ever said them as well as probably put some kind of trigger on the phrases to auto-ban anyone who says it in the future. Seems like a lot more trouble than it's worth for someone writing the phishing code.

I apologize, I was wrong on the hidden chat message point. Either it wasn't like that when I used to program addons years ago, or (more likely), I'm just remembering wrong. I tried to google around before and check the docs on what you can and can't do, but I couldn't find a cohesive listing. So obviously once you can do that the likeliness of the phishing scenario is much greater.

However, I do stick by my original point that this policy has zero to do with such a case. Such an addon would have already been flagrantly violating even the most basic pre-existing rules. It's silly to think someone creating rogue password stealing addons would be bothered by a few words in a posted policy document.

I think the idea would be to phish for the password by popping up an official looking dialog box that says something like "Please verify your password" with account name and password boxes. Then that a hidden chat message is sent to another toon telling them the information. This is possible (my mistake on not being able to do hidden chat), but probably not effective given some factors I'll post in my response to the OP.

An opinion that seems to have little to do with the facts of this particular change. One of the things they require is that you can't obsfucate your code. That would make it easier for them to copy your code. Secondly, just because you don't charge for something does not mean you lose copyright. There is nothing in this change that says your code is uncopyrightable.

Your opinion might be more plausible if anything they did actually made it less likely that the situation you present could actually happen. If they could get away with saying "your code is not copyrightable", they would likely have already done that.