Lessig has a major point about it when he describes his battle against those extensions in Free Culture. And you have a major point regarding how we can improve the quality of works by getting rid of overprotective laws.

Twitter is not about features, is about lacking them *and* the fact that everybody else is (or seems to be) there. Downtime is a non-issue for anyone but the hardcore twitters, but even those are not willing to change.

The only way I see something gaining critical mass up to a point of menacing twitter would be if it was something bigger, with a good-enough Twitter functionality. Facebook is the obvious candidate right now, but could be Google Wave. Or maybe microblogging losing its lust. Other than that, Twitter is the way to be – sorry, dear.

I responded to your post on Open Source Community and warmly welcome you to join us anytime.

Thanks!
Amy

Also impressed that you caught one of the more subtle restrictions of copyleft software, in that it is not compatible with more permissive open source licenses.

In the past there was a huge outcry when a BSD library (released under the MIT license, IIRC) was ported to linux and released under the GPL. At first it didn’t look like such a big deal, until everyone realized that the GPL kept the changes from that fork from being released upstream to the original developers.

Not only do you need to worry about what license you want to use, you also need to concern yourself with what licenses will be used for software that your software might be interacting with.

It is this complexity that I presume led to the GPL being such a defacto license in the open source world, as you’re under significant pressure to select a compatible license for your software if you’re not living in a vacuum.