Possibly OT :-) New Canadian Voice in Digital Rights Issues

[Peter]

>  Disney, and various other interests would love to see the personal
> computer as we know it outlawed, or at least castrated to being nothing
> more than a WEB-TV dumb terminal.  Seeing the success that du Pont and
> Hearst had with outlawing hemp in the 1930's, I am fearful of the same
> happening to linux today.

I think that the open source movement cannot follow that avenue because 
it already *is* the result of, or more precisely the reaction to, 
attempted 'castration' of unfettered access to computer software and 
hardware. Think of this in the light of the birth of the *nix based open 
source movement, when the power that be (or was) tried to do the 'all 
your base is mine' trick with several dozen universities in at least a 
dozen countries who had based their OS and programming courses on what 
had been, for ten years, an open (or at least published) sourced OS, and 
had built a body of knowledge, a following, and millions of lines of 
application and system source code whose momentum simply wiped that lame 
attempt out, even if it took another almost ten years to materialize 
into solutions usable by everyone.

Peter
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