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Question for you: Do you think Apple Newton having colourless resolution would have benefited well from multi-touch technology? Even if so, how would they have fit multi-touch capability and the processing to handle it into such as small (tongue in cheek) box at the time? Having been born before the 80s it's weird seeing posts speculating about why a technology was not used for decades. For us having been in the trenches the whole time it's much more obvious.

Seriously, not all of your customers are "stupid" and it's damn right that "because you're stupid" is not a valid reason.

What makes your tables so "precious" anyway? My guess is you have some superior design that you want to keep away from all the "stupid people" (e.g. everyone besides you).

Anyway, you could make a shadow copy of your precious tables and create some views to exclude information that you don't want returned. You know, offer a compromise that allows them to get at most of the data without being able to adversely affect the main database.

Even a stupid guy like me can figure that one out.

Brian Capouch has set up something similar with low-end netgear routers and asterisk in rural Indiana - http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/etel2006/view/e_spkr/2202 He's given several presentations, but I'm not sure what the current status is.

The Ms-PL (and also the other license) are an interesting read. Nearly half of the text is about software patents. First it says:

Let's play out this license in a different setting. What happens if I contribute and Microsoft or a third party like SCO or Novell sues me? In this case the license allows me to withdraw my software patents. But I don't have any software patents! LOL

There is an article about Ms-PL and patents on Oreillynet.com which confirms my concerns. Furthermore the article points out that only contributors have these rights. If you are a user of the software, the license doesn't offer you protection against software patents at all. Well. I certainly prefer the GPL which allows me to withdraw my contribution if patent claims are made by Microsoft or a third party.

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Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0
DoubleClick -> Google AdSense
Ofoto -> Flickr
Akamai -> BitTorrent
mp3.com -> Napster
Britannica Online -> Wikipedia
personal websites -> blogging
evite -> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation -> search engine optimization
page views -> cost per click
screen scraping -> web services
publishing -> participation
content management systems -> wikis
directories (taxonomy) -> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness -> syndication

Agreed; we will fully define the information necessary to implement each compatibility setting which was not previously completely described. ...

Note the future tense.

Maybe, Slashdotters are just slow readers and haven't finished reading the 2293 pages of the Disposition of Comments in the past 3 months :-)

Besides, I'm not sure if it is actually a publically readable document: the version on the SC34 website (document #980) is locked and I'm not authorized to download it: DIS29500-2008-002.pdf

There's some meta-info about the document by Rick Jelliffe here: Interestingly, Jelliffe wrote:

There is a small chunk of comments that are out of scope (typically concerning IPR or procedural comments.) There is a small chunk which the Editor has decided are issues for the maintenance phase, not the fast-track process: these are typically how comments like âoeODF has feature X, why doesnâ(TM)t OOXML support it?â There is another chunk of issues where the Editor disagrees with the substance of the comment, but wants to address the issue by adding clarifying or helpful text to the specification: for example, the issue of bitmasks is handled by giving examplars of how to handle them in XSD, RELAX NG, Schematron, DTLL and XSLT.. And finally, another chunk where the Editor disagrees, and gives the rationale for the disagreement. These are typically where the comments cross ECMAâ(TM)s line in the sand: that no currently valid OOXML document should become invalid.

So I say: go UKUUG! Sue their pants off! (and I'm not even a Brit).

This must be a new state of affairs, then.

What about the Stac Electronics case?
What about the ongoing EU sanctions for not releasing protocol documentation?
What about the falsified videos Microsoft presented to the court regarding the possibility of removing IE from Windows 95?
What about Microsoft's anticompetitive and illegal tactics regarding DR-DOS?

I'm sure I could keep going, but that's just a few highlights. Nothing evil/illegal/immoral going on there, huh? I would probably agree that the rank-n-file is monitored for legality, however, there is quite a bit of evidence that the upper management at your organization has no problem flouting the law.

but the specific complaint about its volatility is at best uninformed.

Is it?

February 2006; Wikipedia under the microscope over accuracy

In January 2007 Blogger Rick Jelliffe reported that Microsoft had offered to pay him to edit Wikipedia's Open Office XML page on their behalf.

Just last week Phorm admitted that it deleted key factual parts of a Wikipedia article about the huge controversy over deals with BT.

Look, Wikipedia is a good resource and one which I use myself; I just don't recommend citing Wikipedia directly while participating in serious discussion, or when publishing, or for one's homework. Wikipedia simply cannot, by its very nature, have the necessary gravitas to be considered a formal resource for facts. It can only help guide one to those resources.

Sorry, but this has already been debunked:

Anti-OOXML guy posting your link and making your "private deal" charge on Rick Jelliffe's blog

Rick Jelliffe debunking the "secret deals" charge

Sorry, but this has already been debunked:

Anti-OOXML guy posting your link and making your "private deal" charge on Rick Jelliffe's blog

Rick Jelliffe debunking the "secret deals" charge

My initial thought (however cynical it may come across?) is: Is this really just another plea of "Hey general public, I'm Obama and unlike the other candidates, I'm hip and in-touch with the current generation! Vote for me!" ?

If you're wondering whether Obama's enthusiasm for the Internet and technology goes beyond "hip and in touch", you might consult Lawrence Lessig's endorsement of him. And after reading Obama's tech paper, I can't say I think any other candidate's compares even in showing awareness of issues.

That said, the fact that I see the net strongly leveraged elsewhere -- including Paul's rather impressive campaign -- makes me *less* jaded about the increasing use of social networking. Nor do I think it's really surprising or affected: to some extent, all politics is (among other things) organizing. Real-world social networks were a huge part of politics before social networks came to the web, it's a completely natural fit now that's here. So to one degree or another, *everybody* is using it. I think part of the reason Paul stands out in his use is his unfortunate and somewhat unfair uphill battle in traditional media -- he really didn't have anywhere else to go.

Now, I'd agree it sometimes seems Obama is using this tool more heavily and talking more about his use of tools than anyone else in the field other than Paul. But I think to the extent that's true, it's largely because up until the last 4 years of his political career, organizing has been a big part of what he does -- his start, for goodness sake, was as a community organizer. It really does appear he has a philosophy that includes bottom-up organization as a component of well-balanced politics. And what the social networking tools do that's new to politics is increase the reach and efficiency of that kind of organizing. They only marginally bolster the traditional political networks, but they're a huge boost at the grassroots level, especially the more you know about grassroots organizing.

I also would agree that not all candidates are created equal on the tech-friendly front, however. In particular, McCain has some issues with not fighting the internet, and while Clinton might have some good progressive impulses regarding it, I don't trust her not to throw it under a bus if some other "expediency" arises.

So while I'm sometimes a bit disappointed we didn't get a race like Obama vs Paul -- one that I think would have essentially signaled a real end to business as usual and a significant shift to digital politics -- I still think Obama stands out as an evolutionary step in the right direction, if not the Paul revolution.

One other thing about a part of the premise of the post ("Hey general public, I'm Obama and unlike the other candidates, I'm hip and in-touch with the current generation! Vote for me!"). This isn't necessarily directed at the poster I'm responding to, but I'm noticing a high degree of frequency in attacks on Obama that are essentially "Sure he SEEMS great, but SEEMING isn't the same things as BEING great and we just don't know what's REALLY behind HIM!" To some extent, I don't blame people for thinking this way. We've been let down pretty severely by quite a bit of our political leadership recently. And it's hard to really know whether what you know about a candidate is image or fact.

But I also think the time for this kind of talk about Obama is past. He's been in the spotlight for a while, there's plenty of material available about him and written by him to get genuinely familiar with the substance of his history and positions. I don't have a problem with people arguing about what they don't like about Obama's stated policies, or a vote he made in the past. But at this point, anybody bringing up this kind of "we don't KNOW" or "he's all STYLE and TALK" rehtoric isn't bringing up an insightful point, they're showing their own need to do homework. Or, in some cases, acting with ulterior motives.

Not to be "that guy", but OS X has had this feature for years: mdfind.

The Ruby syntax tree needs an LL(k) parser. This tighly couples the parser to the lexical analyser which makes any it deeply flawed, buggy and unreliable. Add into the mix that ruby is really a dynamic scripting language and you find an explaination for it's unreliablility.

Dr. Dermot Hogan agrees, he said To my mind, the Ruby parser and syntax is fundamentally flawed.

That's why there are not grand scalable performant systems written in Ruby.

James Gosling said of Ruby it ... just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.

He was proven right by Derek Sivers said after spending two years trying to rewrite a website in Ruby with Jeremy Kemper that it was Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this. In the end he abandoned Ruby and rewote the system in PHP in 2 Months.

If you want to do Dynamic programming, don't be taken in by the hype; learn Python, Smalltalk or the second choice language Schema.

The Ruby syntax tree needs an LL(k) parser. This tighly couples the parser to the lexical analyser which makes any it deeply flawed, buggy and unreliable. Add into the mix that ruby is really a dynamic scripting language and you find an explaination for it's unreliablility.

Dr. Dermot Hogan agrees, he said To my mind, the Ruby parser and syntax is fundamentally flawed.

That's why there are not grand scalable performant systems written in Ruby.

James Gosling said of Ruby it ... just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance problems.

He was proven right by Derek Sivers said after spending two years trying to rewrite a website in Ruby with Jeremy Kemper that it was Like trying to turn a train into a boat. It's do-able with a lot of glue. But it's damn hard. And certainly makes you ask why you're really doing this. In the end he abandoned Ruby and rewote the system in PHP in 2 Months.

If you want to do Dynamic programming, don't be taken in by the hype; learn Python, Smalltalk or the second choice language Schema.

I wouldn't call them "horror stories". They're more like brutally honest, real-world analysis of how well (or poorly, to be more correct) Ruby on Rails tends to fare for larger projects.

Two insightful articles I've seen about this topic are:
7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails
Others are leaving Ruby on Rails, as well. And its not going well.

Couldn't you use SSH tunneling?

Because even Google sometimes drops the ball - redundant storage or not:

http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/12/gmail_disaster_google_confirme.html

In which Google admitted:

"Regretfully, a small number of our users -- around 60 -- lost some or all of their email received prior to December 18th"

I understand you are a developer and a professional, and at a software developer for a company with a large online presence. You may not want to mention at work that you don't understand (or believe in) Web 2.0. You aren't really building credibility by saying "don't try to tell me that I don't know what I am talking about." Trust me when I say that there are people on Slashdot, whose credentials FAR exceed what you describe. And really, open your mind - you may learn something from them!

You should check out the O'Reilly 5-page Article on Web 2.0 to understand it better. Go back to the source (don't rely on consensus definition from your geography). You are correct that I won't agree with people (professionals or not) who haven't taken the time to learn and study the origin and meaning of the term, as I have. The fact that those in the know "get it", and others who haven't done their homework don't "get it" does not invalidate the term.

Once you look into it, I think you'll see that no one is claiming that one day a new version of the web came out. Web 2.0 was a way to classify sites and technologies that stood out from the rest because of something different. Harnessing Collective Intelligence, and Rich User Experiences are a couple of those early memes.

Sure Web 2.0 technologies pre-date the actual term. Maybe that's what you are having difficulty with.

Throughout history, mankind has done this - they notice patterns, label the patterns, and use that knowledge to explain and extend it. Advancements in Mathematics and Science progressed using these same techniques. Look for patterns. Try to explain them. Build models that explain the real world, etc. (Examples: The 4 P's of marketing, or the light as a wave models, or imaginary numbers.) I know when I started my business, I looked around and tried to learn from others. Tried to see what was working. And tried to reduce all the successes that I studied, down to a few key points that I could build upon.

Web 2.0 is just like that. It's an explanation and a categorization. It's a collection of ideas and technologies that separated some sites from others.

I have given this analogy before: When Database technology first came onto the scene, I remember people struggling to get the concept. And many were in denial that this was something new. "Big deal, we have been putting information into files for years, and even indexing the data. This is nothing new." And guess what. They were right. This was nothing new. But somehow, Larry Ellison sits on the Forbes 400 list for starting a little Database company called Oracle. Now how did that happen? He saw a trend, and rode the wave.

Web 2.0 is a trend. Ride it or ignore it. It doesn't really matter what YOU do. But I'll bet that there will be more than a handful of Forbes 400 Richest people in 2015 who make their fortune on Web 2.0.

Well, I've led you to the water.. you can drink if you want. For me, I am going to continue learning. And doing. And Web 2.0 is part of that.

If the data is anonymous, how do you verify its integrity?

If the identifier for a block of data is a hash of the data, you can verify its integrity without knowing a hill of beans about who or where it came from.

If the link pointing to a secured, anonymous site is a hash of the site's public key, you can verify that the site you're talking to can use the corresponding private key, which is the same thing SSL buys you. The high-priced "secure site certificates" just certify that the owner of $DNS_NAME also owns $PUBLIC_KEY; if you got a self-authenticating link from another web site you trust, the level of assurance is comparable.

If the algorithms that underpin this stuff are broken then the whole digital security house of cards is toast, including "High Assurance SSL Certificates" (Now with green pixel paint for your clients' address bars! Sorry, cross-site scripting protection not included.)

Do you get paid by the word or something?

Perhaps - depends on how you look at it. And the way I look at it, anything taco says translates to "help me get money - blockhead".

What I think is funny is how the lingo has gone from "...worth a read", to a supposedly apologetic "...and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat." Oh, 'really neat' - well, in that case... (next time try not dating yourself).

hey, LFTenan' taco: 20 should be twenty, except the whole thing, when it comes down to it, is just another way of pushing the well worn "worth a read". You see, the issue is that you have no idea what others consider worthy of being read, so it is just plain rude (presumptuous). Similar to "you have to admit". Makes you come off as a 2-D shrew.

I live for karma bumps :)

Exactly what they're doing to buy MSOOXML into an ISO standard. In the same article, Groklaw talks about how Microsoft bought Rick Jelliffe to defend their cause (Rick even disclosed that Microsoft paid him to edit MSOOXML entry in Wikipedia!) and how Rick is going to the BRM in Australia's name.

Rick hosts a blog at O'Reilly and poses as an "independent" consultant, until you start to dig and try to trace the money.

The comments on this thread on his blog are hilarious (or, in a way, really sad).

Oh! That's how Microsoft is paying this guy... I was wondering what was his reason to defend that load of crap. Thanks for clarifying that!

Phil

For us ./:ters - read this. http://www.oreillynet.com/wateringhole/blog/ - I'm not advertising but it is the most hilarious for anyone in software business! Really, I'm not a coder (any more) but this hits it!

I think you're forgetting one of the first--LaunchBar for NeXT from 1995, which is now an OS X app.

Bo Cowgill, who wrote the paper on Google's prediction market, will be talking about their project at our Money:Tech conference in New York Feb 6-7. See http://conferences.oreillynet.com/money2008 for details.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about parallels between Web 2.0 and Wall Street. Because of course, the stock market is one of the largest prediction markets of all.

But it doesn't end there. There are lots of fascinating things to learn by studying the parallels, including why Web 2.0 will turn away from aggregating public content to providing new ways for anonymized aggregation, why Google and other search engines will increasingly compete with the sites they index, and why web 2.0 companies might find new markets by providing insight -- or even new kinds of financial futures (see for example weatherbill.com) to financial markets.

Snocap had everything going for them, and could have probably succeeded, but their execution was so bad that it was unbearable.

Check out my What happened with CD Baby and Snocap article, and especially the comments below it, with all these musicians so frustrated that Snocap won't reply to anybody's emails.

The most brilliant idea, with bad execution, is worth nothing.

I'm just a bit tired of hearing people advocating it, when there's still close to nothing to show for it after 7 years of planning and some rudimentary prototyping.

That's nice.

I'm a lot tired of Internet blowhards thinking that they have all of the brilliant answers to the thorny software development problem of "Good, cheap, or fast -- pick two!" when we've already chosen "Good" and we've never not been able to pick "Cheap". I'm sure I don't have to tell you that Microsoft spent more money on paying the salaries of its Vista developers during their coffee breaks for one week than we've spent on Perl 6 in at least the past three years.

If you have a solution, please join one of the IRC channels or one of the mailing lists and enlighten us. "Code faster", "Stop trying," and "Release something that's not what you want to release nor meets your standards of quality or the reason you started this project," are unacceptable solutions. (See Can't You Just...? and Can't You Just...? redux.)

What do you mean by "where"? On the Microsoft Mac Dev Unit Blog, I think. It was widely reported and discussed all over the web, for example here. just fucking google it :-)

...you really should give it back.


The western world's "Intellectual Property" rules are Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. When you've got a couple free hours, watch, listen, or read what Lawrence Lessig says.

If I just set aside whatever I think the IP rules say, and just think about whether it's moral/ethical to utilize example code somebody posted in a public forum, I can't imagine this act hurting anybody at all.

Copying proven technology is what engineers are supposed to do. This copyright hogwash is just a lawyerly game.

I thought the poster exaggerate very much. Come on, I code that much just playing around and I am just a hobbyist. That is until I googled "1,000 lines of code a year" Windows and this shows up:
The ultimate and final monolithic operating system? which points to an ex-Softie's blog.

That puts the number at 1000 lines/yr*1 yr/wk*5 days/wk = 3.85 lines per working day per developer. All I can say is, Holy Cow! No wonder...

Chromatic points out that the whole problem addressed by Ope\ nSocial's API has already been solved:

Over the weekend I encountered a dusty old RFC written in 1982 that might solve this persnickety interoperability problem. Jon Posten's Social Messaging Transport Protocol describes a system that relies on the combination of your unique identifier (username) on a social networking site with a unique identifier (domain name) for such site to produce an Internet-wide addressible identifier uniquely identifying, well, you. Given this unique identifier, any conformant messaging system can use this Messaging protocol to send you, well, a message.

Honestly, I can't understand why Google et al. would ignore this work. If only there were some way of contacting them...

2) The license issues are very serious: the BSD licenses allow developers to build on other's work and proprietize it, the GPL insists that it remain available to all customers. That's a big, big deal with the proprietary information and NDA's on new hardware.

There is nothing new in Leopard that would interest most geeks.

Time Machine? I have had something very similar to it set up since the Panther days (via rsync).

3D interface? According to the ars review, it's not so hot.

I was so hopeful that ZFS would make it to Leopard. It has, but only with read access AFAIK, and certainly not in time machine---ummm, not very useful.

So, lots of eye candy for the casual user. Anyone care to chime in why a geek might want to upgrade?

#1 - Impress. Get the established software vendors to recognize the work done by those who are behind open source.

#2 - Infiltrate. Once the value of open source is seen, have people who are dedicated to it, and who have contributed to it be seen as valuable. Get them into influential positions.

#3 - Once in positions of influence, start flexing that muscle!

[by peter303 wrote:]Six years later the NSF Supercomputer Center freeware release of Mosaic jump-started the application software side of the Net.

Date: Mon, 8 Feb 93 17:23:34 -0800
From: wei (Pei Y. Wei)
Message-Id:
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Subject: stuff in new violaWWW
Cc: wei@xcf.Berkeley.EDU
Status: O

> So what does the new Viola have in it?? Huh huh? Gotta keep up on
> the competition... :-)
>
> Marc

Hello, Marc.
Well, the new violaWWW will support SGML documents. It does one particular DTD now (mine:-), but it's designed to be extensible to other DTDs. So, when the WWW DTD is stablized, I'll add it... Unlike the old HTML widget, the new "widget" can embed bitmaps and viola objects into the document page...

The old HTML widget hasn't changed much, so old HTML will continue to work.

I'm looking to make a GIF widget (or something more compact than XBM/XPM -- got any suggestions?). I'd eventually like to add graphic widgets such as gplot et al, but this is low priority for us (ORA), and I imagine a higher priority for you (NCSA). We're concentrating on text for now.

A significant new capability is to be able to embed any viola objects inside a document. Indeed, an viola application can be considered as a WWW "document". This means that a document can have mucho GUIs in it (ie: entry forms, interactive tutorial GUIs, scripts, etc). Until some common SGML-based GUI DTD (ick!) comes out, using this capability can introduce quite a bit of violaism. But this is no worse than using, say, TeX with the WWW. And it'd make it possible for documents to be very programably interactive (yes, there's a security issue, but I'm going to assume people are nice :-).

BTW, if you're interested, it's a possibility that I will make viola into a library, and into a widget to stick into XMosaic. I noticed that my boss, Dale Dougherty, had wasted no time in passing this idea to you some time ago. We're trying to cooperate with others as much as possible and practically.

The Internet2 project found that the costs and complexities of implementing quality of service guarantees exceeded the benefits. It was more practical to add sufficient bandwidth than it was to prioritize packets. They also predicted - and other research supports - that QoS would encourage ISPs to deliberately downgrade service in order to charge more.

Here's an interview with Derek about his decision to switch to Rails in 2005, read together these two articles make an interesting case study... http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/11/migrating_to_ruby_on_rails_and.html

Well, they could include a proprietary one: http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/07/a_fully_licensed_dmca_complian.html

And I still haven't heard of anything approaching a release candidate for perl6, or ponie, or pynie. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention...

There haven't been any. They're all a ways off; no one's working on any of them full time, which means we're all squeezing one year of work into eight.

Zis Zawodny, zo?

You could start by reading this book for a practical approach:

Zawodny is pretty good...

I never used Claris Works much (or System 7 in general - our school skipped from Apple IIe to PC, and didn't own any Macs), but it was always my mother's favorite program. My dad said she was constantly cursing at MS Office when she eventually had to switch.

I have used Gobe productive which was a works suite designed by many of the original Claris works developers. It was originally made for BeOS, and latter ported to Windows and Linux. Unfortunately, the company went under, and for a while there was talk of it going open source. I really would have liked to see that happen, as it was a far better piece of software than OpenOffice, and even pledged some money towards it (although not much as I was a college student at the time), but alas it was not to be. They sold the product to someone else who has been maintaining just the windows version.

I have friends that automatically bounce emails back for whitelist verification.

I wouldn't brag about having psycopathic friends.

I would be interested in something like that too, since I already know Morse code. I learned that to use with ham radio, although I have not used it very much. I don't know about any specific drivers for any particular cell phone, but here are a couple of links that mention people using Morse Code with a cellphone. It seems to me that someone could probably send CW with something smaller than a traditional telegraph key. I believe there was also once a discussion on Slashdot about that too, but I don't have time to look for the link.

• Back to the Future - Morse Code and Cellular Phones
• Video: Morse coders beating SMSers

Linus's comments about morality being equated to legality are because some people are claiming that the only acceptable moral choice is to adopt GPLv3. Linus rejects this and so do I.

His comments on hypocrisy are about people who claim Linus should not be free to choose to continue using GPLv2. But this is nothing new.

Advocates of the GPL argue that it maximizes freedom by constraining the abilities of software developers to do "bad" things with the code. If a software developer can't do something like change the code without distributing the changes, that's less freedom for the developer, but more freedom for the USERS (some of whom may be developers who want to develop in turn).

Advocates of the BSD claim that it is more free, full stop. Users can do anything, including adding one new secret feature and selling the binary.

But some advocates of the GPL are so sure of their position, they think the GPL is the only acceptable license. And now, I guess they think GPLv3 is the only acceptable license.

About a half dozen years ago, Tim O'Reilly commented that the bedrock freedom upon which the other freedoms build (he called it "Freedom Zero") is the freedom of a software developer to choose which license to use to distribute the software. Richard Stallman bitterly rejected this idea! He characterized it as "Power Play Zero", as in, if the developer chooses the "wrong" license it is imposing power upon the poor helpless users of the software.

Freedom Zero: http://oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/526

Power Play Zero: http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2001/08/ 15/free_software.html

I find it ironic that Richard Stallman, after ranting about the evils of power (imposing things on users by force), has pushed for a license that imposes all sorts of requirements in the name of freedom. "Tivoization"? I don't have a problem with that, and I think it's overreach for a license to try to stamp that out. What's next? "Googleization", where the software runs as a service, and the poor users never get to look at the software? Maybe GPLv4 will try to stamp out "Googleization".

P.S. I wonder if Richard Stallman can own a microwave oven? He has sworn to do his utmost to never use software unless it is free software. Well, microwave ovens have some sort of microcontroller that has some sort of software, and it's closed source proprietary. You never get the source ever. Does RMS lie awake at night worrying about how to solve this problem?

You may think I'm trolling with this comment, but I'm not. Read his comments on the evils of firmware in things like network interface card drivers. It's okay to have a NIC with a ROM, as long as the driver is free software; but a new version of the card that downloads firmware at boot time would be immoral, because the users can't get the source code for the downloadable firmware. I don't get it.

We owe RMS a huge debt for starting the whole free software ball rolling. GPL was awesome and GCC was essential. But it seems to me that RMS is now worried to extremes, and I'm not with him on the new stuff.

If you did your homework, you would have realized there is no legal player for DVD's.

A Fully Licensed, DMCA Compliant DVD Player For Linux".