The UK government stated:
If Mozilla permit the sale of copied versions of its software, it makes it virtually impossible for us, from a practical point of view, to enforce UK anti-piracy legislation
It seems they really don’t understand the whole open source thing do they? You can’t pirate open source software, you can however sell it however you like. Most companies just charge a nominal fee to cover the cost of the CD and the postage.
I can’t believe that your company would allow people to make money from something that you allow people to have free access to. Is this really the case?
The contact from Mozilla licensing actually responded back attempting to explain the situation.
I wrote back, politely explaining the principles of copyleft & that the software was free, both as in speech and as in price, and that people copying and redistributing it was a feature, not a bug. I said that selling verbatim copies of Firefox on physical media was absolutely fine with us, and we would like her to return any confiscated CDs and allow us to continue with our plan for world domination (or words to that effect).
Source: Slashdot – Times Online
Governments need to back off the internet, because they will never be able to catch up with technology or computer culture.
Governments need to be taught in the ways of the GPL, seems a lot of problems arise out of mere ignorance. And instead of consulting someone knowledgeable they burp out some nonsense. They will persist in mingling with the internet whether you like it or not.
Well, the US military (and universities) did develop the internet originally as a way to keep communications secure and available in the event of nuclear fallout / war, but hey – if there was an intent to make it a type of NWO-style-nightmare-conspiracy-theory trap so’s they could better take a census of every person and what they are up to, then it serves them right anyway that it’d get taken over as a civil communications tool.
Since it’s their fault there even are nukes.
@Zupakomputer
True DARPA started out as a redundant way of comm’s network. the Uni’s quickly understood it’s potential and started using it to transfer research results (I use it on a daily basis, PubMed and such).
Thing is, you could abuse any object you could think about, even a simple ‘biro’ (ballpoint) can be used to kill a grown man. Knowledge doesn’t kill, malicious use of knowledge can (the stuff we have in our work environment and the biochemical knowledge in my head are good enough to prepare something evil, but I choose not to .
Too bad the nukes where deviced out of pure fear that the ‘other’ side would have them before ‘we’ would. After the sad Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing we now know the axis force where far from producing a nuclear weapon.