If this report is accurate, this treaty would be the biggest threat to the startup business that I've seen.

How can we tell if it's accurate?

Joel is definitely talking about Atlassian in this article. In particular, one of their products, jira, goes head-head with FogBugz. Joel has actually referred to them in previous articles, in terms of customers threatening to go to the "Australians" if he didn't implement such-such a feature. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/07/20.html)

Atlassian is really the Major Grower in this space - good sized developer community, and "App Store" equivalent (Plugin Exchange ) - They have about 50,000 plugins a month downloaded from a library of 400 - 130 of which are for Jira.

The latest rev of their product, Jira 4.0, has one major feature - a SQL like query engine, they call it "JQL" - Jira Query Language - which allows you to do everything you might expect/imagine. Their searching was _already_ better than FogBugz, but JQL makes you not even not want to compare the two.

Interesting Notes:

Google for "Bug Tracking Software" doesn't bring up FogCreek, but does bring up Atlassian.

Atlassian is like the "Anti-Fog Creek" in terms of it's thoughts around office. I've been to their San Francisco Offices (which are supposedly like their Sydney) - One Big Wide Open Space. No Cubicles. No Offices. Nothing - just pure Agile openness.

Go to Atlassian.com - you are 4 Clicks away from having the software on your computer, and it takes about as many seconds. And it figures out whether you want OS X stuff, linux files, etc...

Go to FogCreek.com - 30 seconds later I _still_ couldn't figure out where to click to try their stuff - and when I do, I finally land on a page where I need to start providing Email Addresses, Phone Numbers, accepting terms of services. It's almost like they are _daring_ you to try the competition.

What's cool, is that _both_ Fog Creek and Atlassian are the ultimate results of Startups going head-head. Someone will have to write a book about these two companies.

http://www.atlassian.com/about/history.jsp Atlassian: "In 2002, fresh out of university, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, With total start up costs of $10,000 charged to a Visa card, they built JIRA, a professional bug and issue tracker, and Atlassian was born. By 2004 the company had grown to six developers."

http://fogcreek.com/About.html Michael Pryor founded Fog Creek Software with Joel in September 2000.

Fog Creek's Major Problem, and the reason why I suspect Atlassian is going to wipe them out if they don't get their Act Together, is that Fog Creek has, to my knowledge, three products:

  o Bug/Project Management/Software Project Tracker (fogbuz)
  o VNC Hosting Service for Tech Support (Copilot)
  o Forums for Software Developers/SysAdmins StackOverflow/ServerFault
  o 25 Employees

Atlassian, on the other hand, has:

  o Issue Tracking Software (jira)
  o Wiki (confluence)
  o Source Code Reviewer (fisheye)
  o Code Review (crucible)
  o Continuous Integration (bamboo)
  o Code Coverage (clover)
  o Identity Management (Crowd)
  o 200 Employees
  o 15,000 Customers
  http://www.atlassian.com/about/customers.jsp

I don't want to come off sounding like an Atlassian fan-boy, particularly as I love reading Joel's articles, and I don't think I've ever read anything, ever, out of Atlassian that caught my attention - but he has his work cut out for him. Of course, maybe Joel needs someone like Atlassian to shake him up and get him going...

I'm sorry, but I vehemently disagree. I depend for my livelihood on my -- aboveboard! -- Internet connection. Yet I also expect to be permitted to express a dissenting political opinion. This type of treaty gives authorities and anyone with a large legal team the instant ability not just to shut me up simply by accusing me of copyright violation - with no burden of proof - but to ruin me financially as well.

That is not democracy. Not even close.

Political dissent is not just something done by free Tibetans way off in the distance, and it's not the exclusive purview of dedicated activists who have the time to set up darknets. Political dissent is everybody feeling free enough to disagree with the powers that be. This really and truly endangers that, and it's incredibly, incredibly stupid for the American government even to consider it. That the Obama Administration is not only considering it, but actively supporting it by keeping the process secret for as long as humanly possible is profoundly disappointing.

Jeez, everything is a conspiracy on Hacker News. How about I wrote it because I'm a columnist at Inc and I have to turn in one article a month? And how about, they hired me because they like columnists who are actively running businesses to write about the issues they face? (c.f. Norm Brodsky, the other columnist, who has some kind of a box storage business).

None of the plumbers and dog shampoo-vendors who read Inc. do software project management. The number of leads I get from Inc readers is laughable.

Also, you're confusing sales and marketing. They're different things. We're pretty good at marketing for a company our size. We're absolutely bad at sales.

The problem is not companies that are "profit mongering" (whatever that means). It's companies with obsolete business models that are willing to destroy the more dynamic parts of the economy in their fall.

Last week MI5 in the UK argued against the 3-strikes filesharing laws as they would encourage private citizens to use cryptography better in their filesharing efforts.

If this treaty goes through it very well could be the harbinger of the widespread adoption of darknets, better censorship-resistant networks, and even more creative use of cryptography and networking technologies.

Rather than trying to affect legislative change (which is a viable strategy too), some may wish to consider disruptive technologies which will render treaties such as this irrelevant.

the EFF seems to think so, that's scary enough for me