@p >This book, which everyone loved, and which was used in offices and classrooms, was killed by AT&T because it violated their copyright on the Unix source code.
As far as I can tell, the book was originally legal to distribute and then suddenly a court decided that software fell under copyright and then the book became proprietary and then AT&T demanded it stop being distributed.

>rejecting the existence of a body of law.
Imaginary property does not exist as a body of law no matter what conmen lawyers say or how many fanfictions they write - there are specific laws that were written separately, which are all completely different and have no legitimate points of comparison other that how each curtails freedom.

>I am a pirate.
You do not have a boat that you use to commit theft and murder with the help of, therefore you are not a pirate.

>Would you commit to eating something and all later versions of it, as decided by a committee that you have no control of? If I say I'll eat a burger, that's fine: I know what I am eating. If some day the committee decides that ketchup must be added, I hate ketchup, I'll be upset.
Now that is American.

I would commit to eating something and potentially later versions of it if the committee was *the* freedom burger committee and I wasn't forced to eat the later burger if I didn't want to.

If you hate ketchup, you can demand that the ketchup not be added during the license draft stage.

If the burger somehow is clearly going to, or ends up with ketchup in it anyway, you can just go and re-license to Burgerv3-only and stop distributing the Burgerv3-or-later version - you aren't forced to eat it after all.

>Jim Salter appears to be on their side
As far as I can tell, he is merely a associate member, who can only vote once and doesn't get any final say and it appears that he is planning on ending his associate membership (giving him no ability to vote).

It wouldn't surprise me that a proprietary software lover would be on their side.

>I am giving proper weight to licensing: "I'll agree to this and will not agree to write a blank check" and until there is new information, that's the decision.
Then you want a proxy, who can decide if later versions of the license are acceptable when published, without having to go and ask every single copyright holder to relicense.

>Linux was delegated to a foundation, so that businesses could be comfortable using Linux, Linux acquired the ability to be coopted, taken from its creator.
Linux had no "creator" - Linus announced the project, but many programmers wrote it.

Proprietary software being added into Linux as well as a CoC wasn't a co-opt - Linus agreed to such.

>GNU projects typically (though not necessarily) assign copyright to the FSF, the FSF can take things away.
The FSF cannot take things away, all GNU licenses are written to be irrevocable if followed and the FSF only has permission to relicense for the benefit free software.