April 27, 2010

Episode 0x26: How Evil is Evil?

Summary

Bradley and Karen discuss whether or not proprietary software is “evil”, mention the new documentary film about patents, and discuss briefly new non-profit filing requirements.

This show was released on Tuesday 27 April 2010; its running time is 00:49:56.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:31)

• Bradley tends to use the greeting “ahoy hoy” rather than “hello”, because Thomas Edison promulgated the word “hello”, whereas Bell preferred “ahoy hoy”. Most people know the phrase “ahoy hoy” from its use by the Montgomery Burns on the Simpsons. Bradley failed to mention his reason he thinks they didn't do enough research: Burns clearly would prefer the patent-monger Edison to the more scientifically focused Bell, and therefore would say “hello”. While both Bell and Edison did seek patents on their inventions, Edison institutionalized corporate control of patents. (00:42, 01:30)
• Edison also created one of the earliest End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs). (01:30)
• I say, Foghorn Leghorn is, I say, an anthropomorphized rooster from, I say, them there Warner Brothers cartoons. (04:12)
• Bradley was on a panel entitled Web Services, The Desktop and Free Software at the Linux Collaboration Summit 2010, where he used the words “evil” and “insidious”, which seemed to upset some attendees. (06:30)
• Bradley raised the issue on the panel that Canonical, Ltd. keeps the server side of UbuntuOne as proprietary software. (07:57)
• Bradley believes in Kantian ethics and categorical imperatives rather than utilitarianism or Randian “philosophy”. (08:59, 09:13, 09:32)
• Karen caused an early invocation of Godwin's law in the discussion (09:40).
• Karen explains that the term “ethics&rdquo has a specific meaning in the context of legal ethics. 16:39
• Ben Franklin made a daily score card to catalog his virtues and offenses against these virtues. (22:45)
• Bradley mentioned his old speeches that cover his experiences with the “evils” of proprietary software, and Karen mentioned these were also covered on Episode 0x00 (33:10, 33:47)
• Karen mentioned a rather troubling study on medical devices (35:40)

Segment 1 (41:12)

• Karen appears in the new documentary, Patent Absurdity. (41:40)
• Organizations that taken in less than USD$25,000 must file a 990-N (aka the “990 e-postcard”). (45:22)

Tags: bkuhn, karen, evil