UPFRONT

I would point out that linked lists, mark-and-copy garbage collection, and the Tab key are all patented too. Somebody who always carefully checked first for software patents would never write anything at all.

—Martin Pool, in the rsync FAQ

VANTEC does offer a limited warranty but as a practical matter that warranty is seldom applicable to competitive and particularly destructive robot contests.

—Vantec.com web site

The public interest in public-domain intellectual property freezes dead with the humble birth of a cartoon mouse on a tabletop in Kansas City. The Mouse is flash-frozen in legal ice. He's unrotting. He's undying. He's cryogenically preserved....In ancient Rome, folks thought it was pretty decadent when the Emperor Caligula made his horse a Senator. But in the modern US Senate, there's a Senator who's a cartoon mouse!

—Bruce Sterling

Don't be fooled. The BPDG standard is not about stopping “piracy”. It's about Hollywood regaining some measure of control over what you can and can't do with television. It's about cramming the VCR genie back in the bottle and giving Hollywood the power to bring new technologies to heel before they can deliver new capabilities to consumers.

—Fred von Lohmann

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

—Samuel Adams

We're moving towards a “Creole” of technological concepts. The idea comes from language theory, specifically Steven Pinker's work where adults come together in an area with lots of different languages and end up coming up with a broken, lumpy language that is put together as a pidgin language. When the next generation comes along, however, it becomes more sophisticated and develops into a real language, then called a Creole. You only have to watch kids today using technology to realize the similarities, and that we adults are very much the pidgins.

—Douglas Adams