Politics (was Re: [PD-dev] Re: [PD-announce] Pd-0.38.4-extended-RC7)

[David Plans Casal]

On 26 Jan 2006, at 16:22, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> Actually, the military was definitely involved in UNIX, but not  
> necessarily always directly.  Instead, the U.S. military funded  
> these computer research programs heavily, from Bell Labs to UC  
> Berkeley.  For example, MULTICS was a DARPA project, (meaning  U.S.  
> military).

Just to note, wikipedia isn't always half-right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Where DARPA's funding of the ARPAnet is explained within the 3- 
terminal (MULTICS included) origin.

Incidentally, I know guys working on Semantic Web projects at MIT's  
W3C headquarters who -still- receive grants from DARPA to fund their  
W3C activities, some of which include working on RDF.

Not only is the US military behind most of the original project that  
contributed to later arpa/internet and semweb research, but the slack  
that was supposed to be picked up by the National Science Foundation  
after the Mansfield Amendment of 1973 (which expressly limited  
appropriations for defense research to projects with direct military  
application) was never picked up. This means people are still left  
with little option but to be funded by them, i.e. -find- military  
applications of their research.

d

--
David Plans Casal
Researcher, UEA Studios
d.casal at uea dot ac dot uk
http://www.davidcasal.com