SJP Lists <[email protected]> wrote: > Since the IP suite was born out of the Defense Advanced Research > Projects Agency, does this mean you will be refraining from using the > Internet also? Please? Please gain some perspective.
I've addressed this in my previous post, paraphrasing The Art of War - "it is strategically beneficial to eat your enemy's lunch, just as long as it isn't poisoned". (Again, disclaimer: I call government force the enemy, not anyone here.) Propaganda can be a part of the poison. If the Internet had been called GovNet, then I would have had similar objections to that name as well. The "only Mommy Government can make the Internet work" bull has been debunked many times on many appropriate forums, and this isn't the place for this discussion. The government actually delayed many telecommunications technologies in the middle of the 20th century by trying to use regulation to solve all problems (ex. the FCC). It then stole massive amounts of money from the private sector, and used that money to jump in front of the technological parade and take all the credit. Government-imposed centralization is the current Internet's biggest weakness, which is why we libertarians are now working on something better. Gaining some perspective is precisely what the Berkeley worshipers need to do. Think about what fraction of today's BSD actually came about as the result of Berkeley, and think about the benefits and drawbacks of clinging to that name for all eternity. A lot of advances in early rocketry and aeronautics were make in socialist (Nazi) Germany and then in socialist (Soviet) Russia - does that mean we have to Heil Hitler or Khrushchev every time we look at the stars?! Individual scientists and engineers, and not coercive institutions, should get proper credit for their accomplishments. In conclusion to what hopefully will be my last post on this issue, I'd just like to say that I'm a proud user of Theo's OS, and that I love most things about it, but I cannot love something without also being its harshest critic. If someone has to be the bad guy for bringing this up, it might as well be me, so no one else will have to. It is my hope that at least someone here will be able to take this criticism constructively. As for the rest of you: shut up and code. ;-)
