Re: Terrorism from a Mouse

[Jon 'maddog' Hall, Executive Director, Linux International]

Bryan,

I have had more than one reference to this bill, from more than one person.
I must admit that the inference about Disney paying Hollings money came from
just the Linux Journal article, but whether the mouse paid anything or not is
not the issue.  The issue is that the proposed legislation is intollerable.
So even leaving out the Mickey Mouse part, we should start to campaign against
bills like this.

So far the people that have mentioned this particular bill to me are:

        o Richard Stallman
        o Linux Journal
        o Bob Young of Red Hat

So perhaps the bill is not completely formulated yet, but to wait until it
is introduced and passed is not the most prudent thing to do at this time.
After all, that is how we got DMCA.  This bill is just the next step of
DMCA, and companies that would benefit from this one are bigger than even
Mr. Mouse.

Know that the companies behind things like DMCA are big ones with big bucks.
And (quite frankly) they are very convincing that their arguments are valid
ones to protect intellectual property and US companies' profits.  These are
things that the congress relates to, not issues such as "Open Source software".
Even companies that might be behind Open Source software tend to go along with
these types of bills because their business "partners" want them to.  And they
trade favors.  So even if a large company like Compaq might not like one bill,
they go along with it (or at least do not object to it) so when their turn
comes (say software patents) that companies who pushed DMCA will go along with
them.

There has been some discussion about whether this bill is just a "first pass" with
a deliberate attempt to make it so bad that a major re-write will look like
a "compromise" and get the basic part through.  That may be true, and is why
it has not been formally introduced.

Bottom line, we can not let one communities fear of losing some profits
run over another community's right to have open source.

And if that was not bad enough, the Nashua Telegraph reported today that
US Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) is sponsoring (have a backdoor to
all operating systems and software to allow US to de-encrypt any encrypted
messages) is the one that deals with security. Both laws have the same
side-effect of not allowing open source operating systems, since there would
be a way around both of them using Open source methods.

To quote another email sent today:

   "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."
                                                 -- Ed Crowley

We have to get congress to understand that.  And waiting until the laws pass
is too late.

md
-- 
=============================================================================
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux(R) International
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
WWW: http://www.li.org

Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

(R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries.


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