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Like, there's only one Linux kernel, only one C compiler, only one bash shell.. only one Perl, only one Java...

You are correct that there are only one Linux kernel, but there are other free UNIX kernels you could use instead. When it comes to compilers both LLVM and GCC are widely used. (LLVM is used in Gallum3D, the new acceleration architecture for X, and in Shark, a CPU agnostic JIT for OpenJDK. A C frontend not based on GCC is in development) There are many shells. Ubuntu, a quite popular Linux distro, actually uses dash as default /bin/sh. While it's true that only OpenJDK (if I recall correctly) passes the TCK for Java you also have competing implementations like Harmony, what Google uses on Android. You have more competition on the parts of the Java stack that takes less time to implement.

You are saying that the userland should "comply with" GPLv2, implying that the kernel license and the userland license have something to do with one another.

Yes, this is my exact position. Android is a whole made up of parts. It wouldn't be functional without the kernel. When you choose the GPL for parts, you have to make the whole GPL. If you don't understand this then you don't understand the GPL, though that is not surprising as there is an urban myth that GPL only comes into play when explicitly linking. Note that the GPL wisely never talks about anything as specific as linking.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

(Any bold was added by me.)

"You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."

"These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it."

See gnash. Flash is actually an open standard.

After the demise of SGI, one has to wonder about the future of traditional Unix.

Sun is going the way of SGI because of traditional Unix!

But the parent (who I assume is also my sibling) is more than correct. Many of us post to slashdot anonymously because we refuse to use cookies. Since slashdot uses something non-standard (invented by netscape) intead of the standard way to log in, it is all but impossible for the principled to post on this website with an account.

A lot of people on Slashdot talk the talk about web standards and the importance of adhering to them, but few walk the walk. And by walking the walk, not just talking, we get punished and ridiculed!

The parent is right. Streetviewer is nothing but marketing hype just like Vortals, Portals and e-tailors. The web is for serving hyperlinked text--he is only wrong in one aspect, the images (hopefully PNG) he downloads should be done using SFTP (hopefully using GNUTLS, not the non-free OpenSSL based variants).

If the grandparent really was a true, real nerd, he would be outraged at how badly Google has abused the standards!

The Open Source Initiative defines "open source" here: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd. The Free Software Foundation defines "free" software here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

"Free" software does not give me the freedom that I most want -- to incorporate available technology into non-GPL applications. "Open source" software often does, depending on the details of the license.

The FSF believes it's only "free" if you use their license.

read the FSF's actual published opinion about licenses other than the GPL and then mod the parent "trolling for sanity" (as in screwing for virginity).

Stallman didn't like the cloud because it changes the way people use computers and will require a new version of the GPL.

Dammit people! We finally have a stable version of GNU/Hurd but it could have been out years ago if you didn't insist on forcing web technologies on the world requiring RMS to spend more time with lawyers than emacs.

Ellison was able to turn him around durring a joy ride in one of his fighter jets. Apparently RMS doesn't like barrel rolls.

I've never understood something, which is how information in the public domain is compatible with the GFDL.

The GFDL is compatible with any strictly more lenient terms. If you create a derivative of a GFDL work, it prohibits you from imposing further restrictions on it, but doesn't require you to impose that "viral" aspect of parts of the work that weren't already subject to it. If I combine a GFDL work with a public-domain work and license the result under the GFDL, then anyone can use it under the terms of the GFDL, so that's fine. Nobody said parts of it can't be usable under more generous terms as well. The viral part only says you can't add extra restrictions to the derivative work.

This is covered in the GPL FAQ, although not very explicitly AFAICT.

Wow, this is a (symbolic) victory for Free Software, and GNU.
Wikipedia was originally conceived as GNUpedia, then Wales made Wikipedia and it was decided to merge them onto Wikipedia.

Many people, including Eric S. Raymond, said it would fail.
But it has worked excellently. +1 for communal development.

For those interested here is Richard Stallman's original proposal which led to GNUpedia and eventually Wikipedia.

This is why the Wikimedia Foundation has been in talks with the FSF, which resulted in a new version of the GFDL that allows dual licensing with CC-BY-SA. A proposal is now underway to make such dual licensing mandatory for all new content on Wikimedia projects.

Stallman's argument has been that one should distribute the source if one distributes the binary.

It's amazing that such half-assed commentary gets modded "insightful".

The source code is virtually useless without the rights to use it.

If I don't know for sure that a piece of code is under a specfic license, I have to assume the worst. That means no derivative works, no distribution, no looking at it sideways, etc. You should try actually reading what Stallman wants. Having source code availible without a proper license doesn't grant any of the four freedoms he lists.

Stallman has never been so worried about free software as he has been about promoting business models which suit his political philosophy.

I'd love to see your citation for that piece of tripe. In fact, I double dog dare you to name one person who has done more to advance the cause of free (as in freedom) software.

GPL is certainly not the only free license. And what about people that go the "GPL\0for files in the \"GPL\" directory" way?

Well for the latter, obviously we'd fix the bug that allows poison null bytes to break a string, since that's a pretty serious security vulnerability in a web browser.

For the former, all of the following are valid in both HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0:

<link rel="copyright" href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html" />

<link rel="copyright" href="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php" />

<link rel="copyright" href="http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/licenses.mspx#Ms-PL" />

And all of the following work in any included ECMAScript file:

// License: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

// License: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

// License: http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/licenses.mspx#Ms-PL

You certainly have the freedom to alter your user agent to require any set of licenses you're comfortable with.

I have mod points right now but your post was so misguided that I feel obligated to post here instead of using them...

He goes so far in the article to try to confuse the meaning of 'free' versus 'open', implying they are essentially the same thing. They aren't, and never will be.

The only person confusing 'free' and 'open' here is you. TFA contains only a single occurrence of the word 'open' and then only in relation to standards, not software. RMS has never been a proponent of 'open source' software per se, and takes every opportunity he gets to distinguish the difference between the OSS movement and the free software movement.

Now that OSS has become even slightly accepted his usefulness as a supporter of OSS is diminished, so he's taking it to the next level and trying to say all non-free software is bad. Read that carefully, 'non-free'. Not open. In this article he in a round about way attacks 'open' standards that are not 'free' by his definition.

He was never a supporter of OSS, he is a supporter of "free software". Nor is he now "taking it to the next level"; he has been at that same level for longer than many of the people reading this have been alive. He has always said that all non-free software is a bad thing. His goals have been clearly stated since the original announcement of the GNU project in 1983. The only reason the attacks on standards that are 'open' but not 'free' are roundabout in this article is that it is a minor side issue to his main point about web applications; if he were writing about standards I expect he would be quite direct on his opposition to any standard that is 'non-free'.

If anyone is the unclear on what the difference between 'free' and 'open' is in this context, I suggest reading 'Why âoeOpen Sourceâ misses the point of Free Software'.

All of that having been said, I do not personally agree with RMS about the inherent wrongness of using or working on 'non-free' software. In fact I have made my living working on a commercial web application for the last several years. Despite this, I fully support his idea of making it easy to know how the software you run is licensed (even in the browser) and giving users the choice of whether or not to allow software licensed in a way they do not appove of to be run on their machines. With regard to the idea of allowing modified Javascript code to be used, I like the idea in principle, but having worked on a large web app and having had to debug issues caused by cached obsolete Javascript, I have concerns about the practicality of ever using such a feature.

Finally, I think you are a jerk and a troll. Comparing RMS to the Church of Scientology? Really? Get a life.

He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia.

Sure, there's basically no way that kind of absurdity would be tolerated sufficiently for it to get that far.

Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property?

That's just the more general issue of special interests intruding and making a mess of things. Don't they do similar things with cosmology and historical biology and sex ed? That's also what I understand gender studies (is it still called that) and the like are, which I think have also reached grade school now.

Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated?

No. I think it's called something like "substantial noninfringing uses".

People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers?

That's not what that is. There are some theoretical bad uses, but somehow those don't seem to have materialized... probably because people aren't stupid.

And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell!

Funny thing is, things are actually going in the opposite direction. iTunes has non-DRM tracks now, there are other online music stores popping up that sell ordinary MP3 files, there are various Open Textbook projects, research seems to be moving to open access publishing instead of / in addition to the old closed journals, etc.

That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.

Yep. Visions of dystopia can make the slope look very slippery and very scary, but time tends to show that things don't actually end up going that way. And it isn't even copyleft that prevents it, it's people saying "wtf this makes no sense" and going elsewhere.

RMS intentionally confuses the terms free and open, because in his mind it isn't free until it's open; to him, free means freedom. The classic example is always "free" as in "free beer" vs "free" as in "free speech"; same word, different meaning.

He is not confused at all, but you seem to be. Try reading Why "Open Source" misses the point of Free Software.

:~ rms$ wget http://www.gnu.org/index.html | emacs

He's been crazy for years. My first exposure to his loony ideas was in that old story of his, "The Right To Read". He wrote that when I'd just entered college and just started using this "GNU" stuff, and I remember being being stunned by his paranoia. Grade schools wasting time preaching about intellectual property? Software being outlawed for being able to edit RAM that someone else's program allocated? People who didn't have the root passwords for their own computers? And then there's the central point of the story, that eventually people would be stuck with books they couldn't lend or resell! That Stallman guy was clearly a nutjob.

Complete system sources will be available to everyone. As a result, a user who needs changes in the system will always be free to make them himself, or hire any available programmer or company to make them for him. Users will no longer be at the mercy of one programmer or company which owns the sources and is in sole position to make changes.

from "Why all computer users will benefit", among other things.

"from the beware-hidden-dollarsign dept"

I would think slashdot would know better what Stallman means by when he says free or non-free software. Generally these webapps area available at no cost anyway, and obviously that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the classic ideas of free software, not whether or not it is okay to sell software. I just think that should be clear here.

Anyway, if we do argue that applications are moving into the web sphere, (which most web 2.0 advocates of course do,) then this is indeed something important to think about within the domain of free software.

"from the beware-hidden-dollarsign dept"

I would think slashdot would know better what Stallman means by when he says free or non-free software. Generally these webapps area available at no cost anyway, and obviously that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about the classic ideas of free software, not whether or not it is okay to sell software. I just think that should be clear here.

Anyway, if we do argue that applications are moving into the web sphere, (which most web 2.0 advocates of course do,) then this is indeed something important to think about within the domain of free software.

I see lots of other places around the world where folks insist on segregating themselves by ethnicity and/or religion.

Yeah, I can't think of any fanatic groups of people who cling to various beliefs like so many religions, segregating themselves from others.

Excuse me while I go sacrifice a goat to Larry Wall.

Or is that a senseless question anyway since it runs under Windows?

To answer the rhetorical question, yes it is a senseless question and the software is not really free. Here's an article on such a situation http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

And GCJ is still a piece of shit.

Or is that a senseless question anyway since it runs under Windows?

To answer the rhetorical question, yes it is a senseless question and the software is not really free. Here's an article on such a situation http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.html

I am willing to bet that the question of whether it is linked dynamically to the software or communicates through sockets will have very little bearing on whether it is a derivative work.

Courts take the intent of the parties into account when interpreting licenses or other legal documents. For GNU software, this intent would include philosophy documents published by the FSF such as its GPL FAQ, which states that a program that communicates over a documented socket interface is less likely to be considered "combined".

I didn't say that should have GPL'ed it. I only said they intentional avoided anything GPL compatiable because of Linux.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

They didn't have to give anything to open source. The fact that they did help prolong their existence. Sun had great technologies, but the rest of the world not only caught them, but surpassed them any many technologies. Where they didn't, commodity hardware and software did them in. They still wanted the big bucks from before the dot.com bust.

Sun had the chance to change with the times, but it chose not to. Thats all I'm saying. Sun was on top of the world with some of the best technologies in the business, then selfishness toppled them.

They still use die area,

Yes, I said that. I also said that compared to die area spent on lots of other things in a modern microprocessor/SoC (cache, memory controllers, point-to-point coherent and IO links, buffers everywhere), it's probably minor.

they still can't be turned off (to save power),

You would be surprised what intelligent clock gating can do. Clock gating can't reduce leakage but it does reduce dynamic switching power.

and they still introduce defects (what cache almost doesn't do).

That's another side effect of them taking up die area. You said it three times in your post; I've acknowledged it but asserted that the die area is small compared to other things. I bet defects in cache arrays are WAY more likely to cause a chip to be scrapped or sold as a lower-performing part.

It doesn't matter (except for the die area, number of defects and not being able to turn offf), the compiler won't use it, unless you are compiling your own binaries to your own machine.

I don't believe you, and in fact for one case I can prove you wrong. I can't speak for every software distributor that ships binaries, but since every single 64-bit x86 processor has support for both SSE and SSE2, gcc, by default, uses them when it's compiling code for an x86-64 target (look under the fpmath section): http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/i386-and-x86_002d64-Options.html

RISC machines used to give you 32 register of each kind, by the time they were 32 bits.

RISC machines are a pure Load/Store architecture and don't (or didn't) have the notion of load-execute or load-execute-store instructions. That necessitates more temp registers for doing operations to avoid too many loads/stores to stack-local variables. Ld-ex and Ld-ex-st help to reduce your need for registers in some cases. I would be interested to see register utilization and stack spills for a RISC machine vs. an x86-64 machine, but I haven't seen any data about it.

One of the problems the compact instruction set gives you is that once you use all the instructions, you can't address more registers, that is why x86 is stuck at 16 of them.

The extension from 8 to 16 used an instruction prefix which added an extra bit onto the register address fields in the sources and dest of the instruction. There's nothing stopping AMD or Intel from adding another prefix to add yet another register bit to those fields if anyone ever wanted to go to 32.

I graduated with a CS bachelors a few years ago thinking I would have a good shot at doing some compiler design or maybe kernel hacking..

You do have a shot:

• Contributing to GCC
• The Linux Kernel Janitor Project

If you do a good job at one of those for a while, I think there's a decent chance of turning it into a paying job eventually.

Setting aside the idiocy in assuming that the patents are valid after being rejected twice by the USPTO before finally being revalidated and ...

GPL V2 Terms and Conditions

11. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Library at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Library by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Library.

Microsoft does have the presidence in their favor due to the final decision of the USPTO and forcing Lexar to pay them off for their lame patents, but only a fool would simply give in to extortion.

Most likely the "cap" only applies to TomTom, not other 'licensees' of the software. For example, if TomTom sold a program to another company that relies on FAT technology, and the other company develops a different product based on the same kernel, Microsoft (if they follow common practice) would require the second company to license the FAT technology, to ship a product based on it.

Unless their standard agreement would allow TomTom to sublicense the technology, and include an unlimited royalty-free license when they distribute the Linux source code that corresponds to the software they are shipping in binary form, then the "capped" license still violates the GPL.

The GPL doesn't say you can distribute software under the GPL with capped royalties.

The only way this works is if TomTom pays the full $250,000, and gets unlimited licensing for them and all recipients of the software from them.

TomTom cannot require people who receive source code under GPL terms to report when they redistribute, in order for TomTom to pay for another license. The reporting requirement would be in violation of the GPL.

See the GPL version 2 (which applies to the Linux kernel), these are some quotes from the License:

We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.

...

For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.

...

And I get to carry my entire library with me.

Cool. Can a friend of yours borrow one of your books? http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

No, users still win. Flash isn't a magical locked-down proprietary fairyland. There's no way for an application written in Flash to ensure it's being run on Adobe Flash and not, say, an improved and hacked-up Gnash.

It's called GNU IceCat. They just started so they're keeping it parallel to Mozilla Firefox. But what makes them different from Iceweasel is that they apply their own changes to Firefox apart from the branding.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

It started when I reformatted my drive and started using Linux exclusively and gave up TV about 10 years ago. Up until then, I used to buy games and had game consoles around. I last remember playing Metal Gear Solid like a man obsessed and getting a sound beating or two playing Starcraft online.

On Linux, there were plenty of games - GNU Chess, Same Gnome and so forth. There was no buying any games for Linux at that time, so I learned to like these games a lot. I imagine people must have had a similar experience with Microsoft's Solitaire.

When I got married, my wife needed a Windows machine to access work applications, so we had a Windows machine and I could purchase games again if I were inclined. But, it just didn't occur to me to buy games anymore. I found free games to be more interesting in some respects because they didn't have money for graphics, so they focused more on other things. This isn't knocking professionally created games. In my experience they're great, I just wasn't looking for them at this point.

I tried playing games that won The Interactive Fiction Competition because I remember playing Zork back when I was young. I couldn't get into text adventures anymore, but I think it is worth exploring.

I had played Civilization before too. So, I tried freeciv, which led to other free turn-based games like Battle for Wesnoth and even returning to older games like Nethack.

I then went on to try independent games that you had to pay a small amount for, like those made by Positech.

I also tried Second Life and similar and found them to be glorified IRC chat rooms.

I'm getting into this history because I think it raises an interesting question. Why would anyone buy Halo III when they have never played the the first one? Particularly, if someone can buy the earlier editions for a fraction of their original cost now, and they would likely enjoy them as much as most people did the first time they played them, why not start there?

You may not be as extreme an example as I am, but I bet there are older games, free games or low-priced independent games that you have never played and would like. So, why are you buying the newest WOW expansion set (and paying the subscription fees) or HALO 3 - as soon as it comes out? Is it that you are so involved in these games? I can understand that because the one game I have purchased was Sid Meyer's Pirates - again, partially because I had played it before and liked it a lot. But, I don't want to assume that is true of everyone.

What about a new game? It's one thing to get the new Grand Theft Auto. It's another to get a totally new game. How do you decide to go with something just released - rather than buy something older that you haven't played before? Is it about having the newest and greatest in graphical features? What's the appeal?

Maybe you are such a hard core gamer that you've played most new games. But given the amount of time they require - is this really so? Maybe it is playing with friends, a la Quake. Maybe it's checking the review on Gamespot or Slashdot. Since I don't play them, I don't know. So was wondering if someone can offer a clue.

I guess part of my question is that I am looking at new things to try. I know there are a lot of good games out there that I haven't played. So, why would I be interested in these new models of game production or even new games? What do you suggest? What games do you think everyone should know? Is there a great game out there that you think most gamers have missed?

For example, I remember reading about one game in Slashdot where you are a pencil or something and you role around and things stick to you - something from Japan. I've also heard someone that taught fo

>> Speed is everything,

ORLY? http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

If you want multiple connections, try axel.

PGP keys only help with email.

Far better to move the entire web to ONLY ssl based servers, (after fixing ssl of course).

And the way to fix SSL, is to switch to using PGP keys.

There isn't an issue with copyright. The GPL is copyright, but that's great. The issue is with restrictive copyright licenses that do not benefit the public (the initial aim of copyright).

Please read Misintepreting Copyright

If you want a printed licence for your free software, you go to http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html and press Ctrl-P.

If you buy and download your non-free software online as a lot of people do, you aren't going to get anything more than that anyway.

They're both based on "intellectual property".

Which you surely put in quotes for a reason (as in the words of Richard M. Stallman):

The term "intellectual property" [...] leads to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form that these disparate laws have - that they create artificial privileges for certain parties - and to disregard the details which form their substance: the specific restrictions each law places on the public, and the consequences that result. This simplistic focus on the form encourages an "economistic" approach to all these issues.
[...]
Thus, any opinions about "the issue of intellectual property" and any generalizations about this supposed category are almost surely foolish. If you think all those laws are one issue, you will tend to choose your opinions from a selection of sweeping overgeneralizations, none of which is any good.

How would I know if the company you work for is not your own company? Incorporation is easy to do and consultancies exist. Just more reason for us not to assume we understand the entire situation for every individual even if we understand the situation for most people.

I oppose the RIAA's efforts because I don't think they approach copyright infringement wisely or in a manner that is socially defensible. I will not assist the RIAA in propagating the language of "piracy" nor conflating copyright infringement with theft.

It is good to boycott all the RIAA labels and artists to help send the right message. But we don't know what the grandparent poster really buys. But we do know that even if the grandparent poster is being hypocritical here they don't have anywhere near the publicity or market power Metallica does. It isn't news to learn that some otherwise unknown /. poster isn't acting in accordance with their stated dislike. It's quite a convenient PR blow to learn that a long-standing opponent of file sharing has likely committed copyright infringement. That admission poses a threat to the image record labels try to perpetuate when they have artists like Ulrich tell their tales of woe to the US Congress, the public, or continue to engage in propagandistic hyperbole like calling file sharers "pirates".

I'd rather give my money to distributors that treat their customers and the artists well. So I do just that.

Two instructions per cycle if the planets are aligned. The core has the same limitations the Pentium core had with pairing, notably:

* Only a subset of instructions can be executed simultaneously.

* If there is any dependency between the two instructions, they cannot be executed simultaneously.

Yes, the hardware has two integer pipelines, but the benchmarks are somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 instructions per clock with unoptimized code. That number can get larger, but requires an optimized compiler. In the Windows world, that means years. In the Linux world, that means waiting on gcc.

actually, greed is good. it's the great motivator. really, it's the only motivator.

Seriously? You think greed is the only motivator? As far as I understand the word, even loose definitions of greed only apply to the desire to acquire external rewards. So, you could be greedy for money, greedy for food, greedy for power, even greedy for praise -- though I think that last would be stretching it as far as most people are concerned. In the end though, those are all forms of extrinsic motivation. There is also intrinsic motivation, and I can't fathom applying the word "greed" to that.

Maybe you were saying that you don't think intrinsic motivation is effective. The interesting thing is that extrinsic motivation has been found to be weaker than intrinsic motivation in terms of producing results, while at the same time stifling a person's ability to be motivated intrinsically. This means that someone who grows up in a society filled with extrinsic motivators will have much, much weaker intrinsic motivation. In those circumstances, it would be easy for someone to mistakenly assume that greed is an inherent characteristic of human nature, since the person feels it as well as sees it in everyone else -- but that doesn't mean intrinsic motivation can't be just as strong or stronger. There's a reprint of an article from the Boston Globe about that topic here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html

This should be illegal.
It is discrimination towards deaf people or people with dyslexia.

This is scarily much like the short story 'The Right to Read' by Richard Stallman.
* http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Hint.

I can't judge because my experience with ICC is minimal. GCC is constantly improving, but I feel it concentrates more on platform support than performance. The GCC team has to work on ARM/MIPS/SPARC/whatever while ICC only need to work on x86.

So I'm not surprised to see GCC falling behind Intel in x86 performance. In fact, only recently did GCC began to support local variable alignment on the stack, which I think is a basic optimization technique. (See the 4.4 pre-release notes http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.4/changes.html, search for the phrase "align the stack" in that page)

Well, I'm not a lawyer, but the GPL affiliates anyone who uses it with the FSF and the GNU project. But that's only my opinion, and as a developer using that license, I don't care about it.

What if they offered Linus Torvalds a billion dollars for the trademark and the copyright to his code?

The Linux kernel is only a part of a GNU/Linux system. Almost everything, including the kernel, has been published under the GNU General Public License (cf. GNU).

Linus Torvalds is still the figurehead of Linux kernel development, but even if Microsoft would manage to purchase all rights to the Linux kernel, that would have little impact, because the Linux kernel has already been published under the GPL, which makes it legal to modify it and keep it under the GPL forever, no matter if there also would be a proprietary version.

The GNU project (which contains all free Linux software including the Linux kernel) also develops their own Mach-based kernel, called "Hurd" (the OS would be called GNU/Hurd then).

Even if Microsoft would manage to purchase Richard Stallman, the head of GNU, it would have little impact on free software development, since all code that already exists can be forked away before any proprietary branches would emerge.

That's up there with Richard Stallman's song:
http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html

Wish I could rid my memory of him singing "Join us now and share the software; You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free."

Debian's branch of Firefox is Iceweasel, not "Icecat"

IceCat