Open source is not a set of rules…

Open source is not a set of rules waiting to be gamed by corporate lawyers and lobbyists. It’s the pragmatic embodiment of an ideal called software freedom, based on the understanding that the flexibility to use, study, improve and share software is the essential dynamic of the new meshed society.

— Simon Phipps in an article on the incompatibility of FRAND patent licenses and F/LOSS. Not the core point of the article at all, but I think this bit nicely captures the fundamental synergy and compatibility between free/libre and open source software.

Technology and law

That said, these were all (foreign) policy experts, not technologists. They all seemed to take it for granted that you could draw a line between “bad” products and acceptable / dual-use products. I tried to hold back from saying “every time you people try to come up with legal phrasings about what technologies are ok, you end up putting tools like mine on the wrong side of the line.” In retrospect, I should have said it more loudly.

— Tor project’s German Foreign Office trip report. There is a strong impedance mismatch between technology and law, that crops up everywhere from patents to copyright enforcement to law enforcement vs. dissent.

On Rule of Law

War on Useful Language

But this is a language game, and I am playing the role of the futile prescriptivist holding the line against a huge tide of people who would prefer that “terrorism” simply be a synonym for “doubleplus-ungood”. A perfectly accurate phrase like “heinous criminal violence” is simply not enough for these people: they demand that the T-word be deployed. And in the end, descriptivism is the correct school of linguistics, and thus in the long run I will inevitably be wrong. Eventually, terrorism will be a synonym for “doubleplus-ungood” and a useful tool of thought will have been blunted into uselessness, like a scalpel bashed repeatedly against a brick wall.

This reminds me of how we now call everything “war” — war on drugs, war on poverty, war on women, war on Christmas — except when we pay our armed forces to shoot at another nation’s people, in which case we call it “kinetic military action” or whatever.

— Are “lone gunman” school shootings terrorism? — if they are, “terrorism” is useless as a concept.

Headbrick

Look, we can’t just change the whole system every single time someone’s mommy says “brain damage.” And for lots of poor kids, getting bashed in the face for the amusement of wealthy alumni is the only path to college success.

— Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s incisive analysis of college football. See also Pro Football’s Violent Toll. I am increasingly skeptical of college sports in general, and football in particular.