Does Open-Source Software Make The FCC Irrelevant? (Forbes) [LWN.net]

Forbes looks at Eben Moglen and his efforts to open up the radio spectrum. "Should the FCC try to crack down, the hackers have a powerful weapon: The First Amendment. An offshoot of the Free Software Foundation called GNU Radio is developing a new generation of radios and TV receivers that use software for just about everything except the antenna and the power source. The FCC can prohibit manufacturers from selling radios that transmit on illegal frequencies, but it would have trouble shutting down a Web site distributing software that does the same thing."

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Does Open-Source Software Make The FCC Irrelevant? (Forbes)

Posted Oct 19, 2005 4:16 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Moglen's comments would be easy to dismiss, except for the woe he's already caused the software industry. For nearly a decade, Moglen has been the chief legal officer at the Free Software Foundation, in charge of defending the General Public License, a subversive bit of lawyering that turns property law on its head by prohibiting the users of open-source software from charging money for it.

This is disingenuous and mostly false. I'd have expected better from Forbes.

Does Open-Source Software Make The FCC Irrelevant? (Forbes)

Posted Oct 19, 2005 5:41 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I wouldn't. Extremist ideological maundering is absolutely typical of Forbes. Perhaps you were thinking of some other magazine?

Does Open-Source Software Make The FCC Irrelevant? (Forbes)

Posted Oct 19, 2005 6:26 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Yes but that is extremely bad. I mean they weren't even trying to be sneaky or anything... It's amazingly poor journalism.

It could almost be considured slanderious. (any lawyers around?)

That single paragraph reads like a "Can you count how many things are wrong with this picture?" type game from a children's play-book.

Posted Oct 19, 2005 6:58 UTC (Wed) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

I *have* read some passable business journalism in the magazine...

But I hang out more often with the other sort of "extremist":
http://www.30a.org/

Does Open-Source Software Make The FCC Irrelevant? (Forbes)

Posted Oct 19, 2005 17:05 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

When the whole SCO fiasco started, Forbes had an incredibly foolish article about how SCO, the established player in the field with plenty of money, would easily prevail over the upstart IBM, despite IBM being the top computer company in the Forbes 500 for as long as they have listings available. I'm no longer surprised at anything stupid from Forbes, since their authors can't be bothered to check even their own magazine.

Does Open-Source Software Make The FCC Irrelevant? (Forbes)

Posted Oct 19, 2005 11:32 UTC (Wed) by tjasper (subscriber, #4310) [Link]

Gorklaw has more about the standard of journalism on Forbes. Not having read their articles (don't want to give them the hits), it would seem to me (and therefore my opinion, not fact) that the editors at Forbes are very lax on checking what their journos write. Others have left similar comments on Groklaw. How far can they go before being sued themselves for libel? What are the repercussions for the press on proveably wrong printed statements?

YellowShed

Brand dilution

Posted Oct 19, 2005 14:04 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Forbes is making the same mistake with its brand that GM made with the Cadillac brand in the 1980s -- attaching a high-reputation brand name to a generic product. The print magazine is still good, still has fact checkers and the rest of the professional staff you need, and even put Linus Torvalds on the cover. The web operation is Yet Another Business Web Site, a little lower-quality than most.

Who's going to buy the print magazine at the airport when the "free sample" is lower quality than you get from the average newspaper business section?

Is Forbes a respectable source?

Posted Oct 20, 2005 8:39 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link]

The article's author didn't do his research properly. Any article that characterises the GPL as

"a subversive bit of lawyering that [prohibits] the users of open-source software from charging money for it."

is clearly confused about fundamental issues it wants to report about. I stopped reading the article when it claimed that the Apache web server was written by an oil company called Apache, traded at the NYSE...

where to find GNU Radio info

Posted Oct 20, 2005 14:08 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (subscriber, #7544) [Link]

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/ is the official homepage, and a Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio exists and could use some help.