Bill Falls Down the FSF Hole

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Fri, 23 Feb 2001 13:00:00 GMT
I'm planning on spending the next two nights in a motel room in Vermont while Karla attends the Wilderness Society's National Forest Activist Training. Likely no updates until Sunday night or Monday. I'm the baby and dog sitter.

Clyde Wilson at LewRockwell.com - The Lincoln War Crimes Trial: A History Lesson: What if the right side had won the War on Northern Agression? [lew]

"Honest Abe" was a name given to Lincoln by his early associates and later political enemies, for the same reason that the biggest boy in a class is called "Tiny.")

...

Needless to say, the successful establishment of independence by the seceding States had far-reaching consequences, not only in North America, but throughout the world. The great American principle that governments rest upon the consent of the governed had been conspicuously vindicated.

There are two new articles in The Libertarian series by Vin Suprynowicz:

  • Teachers unions won't say where tax loot would go - Nevada is on the verge of instituting a corporate income tax. The teachers unions are busy planning how to spend the plunder, though they won't tell anyone the details of their plans.
  • A victory in Elko - The Bush administration may be good news for users of the Jarbidge River Road. Shunning of the ferals appears to have been successful in Nevada.
    "I learned that in Nevada, as a federal employee, you have no right to speak, no right to do your job and certainly no right to be treated with respect," said Ms. Flora in her November, 1999 resignation letter ... though ironically, she resigned rather than respond under oath to skeptical subcommittee questioning by U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth Hage, R-Idaho -- a rare chance for the bureaucrat to speak out to her heart's content.

Declan McCullagh at Politechbot - AOL-TW tries to grab 15-year old girl's Harry Potter fan site: AOL is attempting to shut down harrypotterguide.co.uk, a fan site maintained by Claire Field, a 15-year-old in West Yorkshire, England. [grabbe]

Andrew Orlowski at The Register - IBM withdraws CPRM for hard drives proposal: due to popular demand, namely a boycott threat, IBM no longer plans to put copy protection in its hard drives. Yay! ["pournell"]

RMS at ejournal - Richard Stallman on the Allchin Controversy: RMS comments on Jim Allchin's remarks that the GPL is against the American Way by reminding us once again of the difference between free software and open source. He also takes a well-deserved stab at Microsoft's business practices. I'm no fan of the GPL. It is a virus. If I use a single tiny piece of GPL'd software in my code, I have to GPL the whole thing. [/.]

Microsoft uses an anticompetitive strategy called "embrace and extend". This means they start with the technology others are using, add a minor wrinkle which is secret so that nobody else can imitate it, then use that secret wrinkle so that only Microsoft software can communicate with other Microsoft software. In some cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program when others you work with use a Microsoft program. In other cases, this makes it hard for you to use a non-Microsoft program for job A if you use a Microsoft program for job B. Either way, "embrace and extend" magnifies the effect of Microsoft's market power.
And there are plenty of Slashdot comments, including:
Microsoft: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US !!
RMS: What the f**k? What the hell are you talking about?
Microsoft: YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO SURVIVE MAKE YOUR TIME.
RMS: What!? That doesn't make any f**king sense!
Microsoft: HA HA HA HA...
RMS: Whoah. Man, you are messed.
and this:
START CONVERSATION

Microsoft: We'd like to embrace and extend GPL software but the GPL prevents this.

RMS: That's the point.

END CONVERSATION.

And don't forget:
Can someone reboot RMS, it just crashed again!
by pinkpineapple

I believe that the RMS human being has disappeared from the real world for about 6 years now, around the same time the Linux OS was gaining popularity. Instead of a being, you get a Vax computer running VMS compiled with gcc running some AI program written in LISP. This mainframe is attached to the Internet and every time an article with the name Richard Stallman is published on the web, the software spits out the same type of rethoric: "Free software under GPL is not the same as Open Source, that the Free in free software doesn't have anything to do with money, and a bunch of crap like that. Then it goes on to say that Linux is more popular than GNU but HURD is coming out soon to kick your ass, please wait and see. Blablablablablaaa." Ahhh Shuuuuut up RMS would you please?

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