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RE: [ba-unrev-talk] Fwd: Re: A few here may have an opinion on this


As a resident of Washington State, I was immediately interested in who this
U.S. Senator might be, but this is not an action by any U.S. Senator.  (The
junior Senator from Washington State is Maria Cantwell, a former Real
Networks executive.  I would have been surprised for her to take this
position.)    (01)

The proponents of this approach are in the House, and Adam Smith is from the
9th Congressional District in Washington State.  The district includes an
area directly on the South of Seattle and extending down along the Puget
Sound and widening into rural areas of the state.  The city of Renton is
included, but not the cities of Tacoma and Olympia, the state capitol.  If
you want to think of large, influential "constituents," it would be the
Boeing Company, the U.S. Department of Defense, and maybe public employees
as a class.  (Looking at the redistricting of the state, I can see that
computer technology has allowed us to take gerrymandering to a new level of
art.)    (02)

Redmond is to the East of Seattle, and appears to be in the 8th C.D., not
that that matters particularly.    (03)

	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-    (04)

The argument given in the congressional letter, apart from selective
spinning of information relative to a position, is the premise that it
requires an *exclusive* property-right incentive for commercial firms to
engage in commercial risk, and that the GPL denies commercial firms that
exclusionary avenue.  This is the same argument that was used to defend the
necessity of things like the copyright term extension act that is being
reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.    (05)

On October 9 the attorney for the U.S. Justice Department argued that
extension of copyright limits well beyond the lifetime of original authors
was necessary to incent distribution of extant works, not just creation of
new works (which doesn't seem to apply to deceased authors!).    (06)

There's some wonderful treatment of this on Larry Lessig's blog,
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/    (07)

and I am particularly taken with the links on the Brewster Kahle Bookmobile.
This one    (08)

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000650    (09)

had my wife and I moved to tears when I told her about it.    (010)

-- orcmid    (011)

------------------
Dennis E. Hamilton
http://NuovoDoc.com/
mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org
tel. +1-206-932-6970
cell +1-206-779-9430
     The Miser Project: http://miser-theory.info/
     AIIM DMware: http://DMware.info/    (012)

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org
[mailto:owner-ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org]On Behalf Of Jack Park
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 11:12
To: ba-unrev-talk@bootstrap.org
Subject: [ba-unrev-talk] Fwd: Re: A few here may have an opinion on this    (013)



>From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net>
>
>On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Benjamin J. Tilly  wrote:
> > http://newsvac.newsforge.com/newsvac/02/10/23/1247236.shtml?tid=4
> >
> > A Washington State senator is trying to make it government
> > policy to not support research that produces GPLed
> > software because the GPL is a license that "would prevent
> > or discourage commercial adoption" of technologies.
> >
> > Yeah, right.
>
>Everyone knows my biases, but I think there's a pretty reasonable point
>here.  A "university" license would, in my opinion, be the most
>appropriate license for government-funded software to be released under.
>Simply by virtue of being compatible with all other existing licenses,
>Open Source or not, it makes the software more widely usable, and thus
>more valuable to society as a whole.  Since a properly-formed university
>license is compatible with the GPL, it would also not prevent government
>funds from going to funds that are based on GPL software, for example the
>Linux kernel.  If I were a senator I'd be tempted to sign onto such
>legislation.  I'd look very closely, though, for any easter eggs left by
>software vendors from Washington State.
>
>         Brian    (014)

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http://www.nexist.org/wiki/User0Blog    (016)