Thomas Shaddack wrote on April 15th, 2003 at 23:30:57 +0200:
On 14 Apr 2003, Tom Veil wrote:
If I want to keep secret the details of something I make, it is my right to do so.
Then I have the right to appropriately dislike you, and to reverse-engineer the "product", which is so shoddy that you are ashamed of documenting its internals, and to publish it.
I've never said that people should be legally punished for tinkering with the stuff they've bought, nor do I think they should. (snipped)
Don't like it? Don't fucking buy it.
THERE IS NO CHOICE!
Well I guess that's tough, isn't it? There simply isn't much of a market for open, fully-documented products. Of course, you are free to make your own fully-documented, open-source products, or encourage those companies to make documentation available to implementers and administrators.
Any communist maggots that murder, or attempt to murder people for merely keeping secret the details of the stuff they make and sell should be bound, gagged, tortured, then taken out back to have their skulls crushed with a sledgehammer until their brains start oozing out their ears.
...and after you kill off all the technicians with a peeve against the money-hungry corporations (read: everyone who ever tried to do some real work on a budget), you will pay through your nose for every hiccup, and not only in money, but also in time loss and in being whined at for not being able to do something immediately.
I didn't say anything about killing technicians. I _did_ say things about killing people who would murder others for keeping secrets.
I could talk for long about "intellectual property", my pet peeve, but one paragraph will do. There was no such concept for millenia.
While protecting IP is a duly authorized power of the US government, the way it extends protection for periods of time sometimes spanning the entire course of an average human lifespan, is far beyond any reasonable interpretation of the "limited Times" proviso in Article I, Section 8, and such excessively long periods of protection should be ruled unconstitutional. As for the DMCA, it is simply an atrocity. Obviously unconstitutional.
And then you come and have the balls to defend the "right" of the vendors to not reveal how crappy and unfinished is what they dare to call a "product".)
I defend the right of EVERYONE to try and keep stuff secret that they want to keep secret. Of course, tough shit if somebody discovers this secret in a non-coercive fashion.
Vendors, who keep crucial informations away from the customers, should be shot.
If you attempt to shoot people for the "crime" of keeping something secret, I will ally with them in efforts to liquidate you.
The ones, who try to sue the reverse engineers, should be boiled in oil before being shot.
This may be acceptable. Actually, the members of Congress who enabled these sorts of lawsuits should be liquidated. -- Tom Veil