At what point did the publisher lose the right to make their own product better?
Missing the point. Microsoft didn't just make their product better, they locked up the interface and refused to allow anybody else to interoperate with it. At the point when they gained a market monopoly, they lost the right to refuse to let other people interoperate with their product. That is what antitrust law means. You can make your product as good as you like, but you cannot lock out the third parties. It doesn't matter if you use DRM or TC or whatever, but you must grant people licenses to use it at a reasonable price for any purpose that does not directly compete with your product (and an antivirus package does not directly compete with an operating system).
Re:QoS not needed or wanted on the Internet
on
IPv6 Essentials
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As such, the only usage of prioritization is unfairly biasing some network resources at the expense of others.
This is grossly untrue. If I am downloading a DVD image, and using ssh at the same time, I want to tag the download packets as "low priority" and the ssh packets as "minimum latency". The internet routers can then queue packets according to my wishes, and my service is greatly improved.
Just because it's possible to abuse prioritisation does not mean that it has no valid applications.
It isn't. This is a very old issue (I remember chewing the matter over on debian-legal several years ago) and it covers all the Mozilla foundation projects. The article is just the usual bad reporting we expect from slashdot, that's all.
Did you think there haven't been numerous surveys on this subject in recent years? The public opinion on the subject is well known: keep politics out of the BBC offices. Not even parliament is particularly enthusiastic about the idea of the BBC becoming a branch of the government (which is generally accepted as a requirement for it to become tax-funded). The only serious debate is about whether to keep it as it currently stands, or to cut it loose to operate as a regular advertising-funded company.
The people of Debian are being stupid. The Firefox logo is an important logo and should be kept.
You mean "the people of Mozilla". They're the ones who say it can't be kept.
Debian protects their trademark(s), why shouldn't Mozilla?
Debian deliberately and very carefully does not include the protected logo in the Debian distribution, at all. Everything that is shipped uses the "open use" logo (the swirl), which does not have trademark restrictions on it. This is done so completely that many people don't even realise that the swirl is not restricted. The trademark on the name "Debian" is only restricted in that you cannot call yourself a part of Debian if you aren't, there are no restrictions on releasing modified versions of the distribution other than this one.
Mozilla includes the protected Firefox logo in the Firefox distribution, and says that you cannot ship modified versions with that logo unless the Mozilla foundation pre-approves the modifications. They also say that you can't call it Firefox without that logo. They haven't been very serious about enforcing this in the past (they've tolerated merely post-approving the Debian modifications), so Debian hasn't been in a hurry to do anything about it, but it is a serious problem - Mozilla are claiming that you cannot modify Firefox as it stands without either (a) their approval, or (b) changing the name and logo.
Exactly how is Debian responsible for any of this?
It is not like Mozilla is trying to lock up the code and make everything proprietary.
Restrictions on modification are very much like that.
People who pay more taxes are richer. Richer people get extra votes (the normal one, plus all the politicians they can afford to bribe/lobby). If the BBC was tax-funded then the "no taxation without representation" thing would come in and the politicans would gain direct control over the BBC (which they do not currently have - the BBC operates under an independent charter, which is very difficult to modify).
The British public does not want parliament screwing up the only broadcaster left who actually cares about their viewers, instead of their advertisers. The BBC is the only one where the customer is the person watching TV - for all the others, the customer is an advertising company. The effects are obvious to anybody who has watched TV.
Why should people who want to watch TV, but who do not want to watch the BBC, be obliged by law to fund the BBC in order to be able to watch TV?
I don't know, but they aren't. You only have to pay the license fee if you receive public terrestrial broadcasts (analog or freeview digital). If you don't want that, you can get cable or satellite in most parts of the UK and not pay the license fee (depending on your contract, you may or may not be able to pay to receive the BBC channels over these services).
We can easily predict that the autonomous ICANN would basically do whatever the registies want: granting them perpetual, unregulated monopolies with the ability to raise prices and otherwise screw customers at will. Internet users would have no say at all.
Canon says that each TARDIS represents an independent, self-consistant timeline (which shouldn't be violated because it tends to kill you and anybody in your immediate vicinity, and usually can't be violated because approaching an origin point that lies within your own historic timeline requires infinite energy, although special circumstances can cause weirder stuff to happen) - there is no "global" timeline per se, and the universe as a whole can (and often does) become a tangled inexplicable mess. The new BBC series have been completely ignoring the canon (Doctor Who has always taken canon with a pinch of salt, but they used to try for more consistency than this) and doing whatever they feel like, creating a *stupid* tangled inexplicable mess.
I'm disgusting with Paypal and going through the process of deleting my account. It's not easy, but I'll keep trying. Paypal will always suck in the UK it seems...
They will continue to suck, but you don't have to let them get away with it over here. Unlike in the US, the UK holds Paypal responsible for nonsense like this. Screw their "customer support" lines, go directly to the Financial Ombudsman - Paypal is permitted 8 weeks from the time you initially state your complaint, and then the Ombudsman can take over. This is a tax-funded service that is free to you as a consumer; Paypal is obliged to cooperate with them as a condition of doing business in the UK at all. Any decision made by the Ombudsman is binding on Paypal in the same manner as a court judgement would be.
Having taken care of that, feel free to report the whole affair to the Financial Services Authority. Where the Ombudsman takes care of your case, the FSA shakes the company by the neck until they stop creating more cases. This one in particular:
not allow you to speak to anyone in the dispute or resolution centre, leaving you arguing with sales staff who don't have a clue
is an offence that already carries a hefty fine if proven. A company regulated by the FSA is not allowed to create barriers like this; they are required to have a clear and efficient complaints procedure and follow it precisely.
Lastly, the Office of Fair Trading can also weigh in when any company doing business in the UK fails to handle complaints in a reasonable manner or generally tramples on their customers for profit, in the unlikely event that the FSA is not interested.
This exact point was raised by Masamune Shirow, many years ago (in Ghost in the Shell, I believe). A fully cyborg arm, attached to a test stand, could easily lift a one ton weight - but attached to a human body, attempting to do the same would simply rip the arm out of its shoulder socket. The point was that only total-conversion cyborgs, or near-total-conversion, would gain any significant boosts in ability to beyond the level that could be accomplished by a normal human - limb replacement is good enough in the case of injury, but wouldn't let you do very much that you weren't already able to do.
Presumably a full-coverage powered suit would have a similar effect, compared to limited augmentation of a few joints or limbs. Of course, there is the additional problem that human joints aren't designed to move very fast for a sustained period of time, and driving them at high speed with external actuators may cause injury.
Now, I know they were trying to illustrate that he was a smart kid and all, but you can't fix a computer that was made any time after 1982 with a soldering iron.
I have a computer made in 1985 that I have built parts for using a soldering iron.
'So, just to be clear, you want to punish a Debian developer for their activities outside of Debian? Now that we're in crazy-as-batshit land, who do you want to bring up on charges next?'
Since the story submitter decided to display only one side of the argument here, I should point out that this objection is somewhat irrational. Several Debian developers have been forcibly kicked out of the project for actions that had no direct connection with the project. The details of names and events are usually considered private, but to pick one example that's already public knowledge - at one point a developer was an operator on the Freenode IRC network (then called OPN), abused this privilege in some fairly juvenile prank, and was promptly kicked out of Debian on the basis that they coudn't be trusted.
It is already expected that Debian developers will conduct themselves appropriately in all circumstances, not just ones relating to Debian. This is interpreted fairly liberally (the project doesn't care if you're an arse, it's primarily only interested in abuse of powers), but it is apparent that the current complaint is of this nature. Whether or not it is upheld by the project is for them to decide, but there's plenty of established precedent for this sort of thing. They're currently arguing about whether or not to uphold it; there appears to be little question as to whether developers should be held accountable in this manner.
ObBio: I'm an ex-developer who quit for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the project.
Hero - Used to be someone doing something they weren't expected to do at great personal risk. Now it is applied to everyone ("everyday hero", UGH) or people doing the job they are paid to do (i.e. firemen rescuing people from fires).
They refer to firemen as heroes so that they don't have to pay them (or at least, not as much).
I think your concern is valid though for conduction through the ionoshpere or even on the surface of the nano tube/wire -- what would this huge antenna/conducter do to our atmosphere (if anything)?
Probably nothing very different to a good thunderstorm. High voltage discharges through the atmosphere aren't anything unusual. Might not be a good idea to live next to the thing.
You have to realise that the ionosphere is fundamentally unstable, in the same manner that a waterfall is unstable. It's continually eroding and discharging, and only appears to remain there because it has a continual feed of new energy (from solar radiation). Thunderstorms are the most common way for it to dump excess energy. We could perhaps create a small region in which there is an unusual electric field, but we can't do any real damage any more than you can damage a river by standing in it. It may be assumed that all people and equipment near the top of such an object would have to be shielded in the same manner that all space equipment already has to be (since it operates beyond the ionosphere), so it shouldn't cause any significant problems in that respect. The most likely effect of the thing is to reduce the number of thunderstorms in the immediate area (because there will be less voltage around to cause them).
It should be an interesting experiment to put up a really tall lightning conductor and see what happens.
What's this common dread of "bacteria"? You have to look at the big picture. 97% of bacterial species have not the slightest ability to harm us.
And of the other 3%, most of them we couldn't survive without and the primary way they can harm us is by dying. The human lifeform is symbiotic with a whole bunch of bacterial species, which do everything from cleaning your eyeballs to assisting with digestion. The biosphere relies on bacteria to maintain everything from soil conditions to oxygen levels in the atmosphere.
Killing bacteria to stop infections is like chopping off people's hands to stop shootings - before they happen.
Nearly the entire world would be bombed outright, and the sheer area of the US and Russia alone would create a shitload of radiation.
I've always wondered why people thought it worked like that. Admittedly the dust cloud may have adverse effects on the weather or climate, but the planet wouldn't turn into a glowing green rock like it does in the movies. "Radiation" from the bombs would cause severe damage in the target area, but it would quickly be over (the radiation pulse typically lasts a few seconds, and only reaches to the horizon, which is not very far). The primary long-term threat is from residual radioactive dust, which (as observed in Japan) does not move around a lot on account of being quite heavy - the target areas would be uninhabitable for decades, but the rest of the planet probably wouldn't be seriously affected. There are theories that a sufficiently large number of explosions would behave differently, but they're just speculation - nobody ever nuked a planet to find out what would actually happen, and our climatology modelling isn't good enough to give a meaningful answer yet.
There is no evidence to support the theory that a world without the USA and USSR would be uninhabitable. It smells like something that originated in American hubris.
There's not a clear-cut capitalist/communist distinction anymore.
Ironically enough, that distinction never did exist, except in government propaganda (from both sides).
They're essentially copying the Cell design with large numbers of DSPs each of which has a local store RAM burned onto the main chip. Is this a good idea?
The answer to this is well-known (IBM have been building systems with 64+ cores for years). It's a good idea for scientific work. It can be a good idea for certain classes of games (particularly with respect to physics modelling, which is just another variation on the scientific work). Pointless for web browsing, email, and openoffice. Won't help a bit to stop windows from being a CPU hog.
That is true of anything. The primary features of an "open" project are:
You can contribute even if the creator doesn't want you to
You can observe the development process for yourself
How exactly can we do either of these things for the GPLv3? In particular, where are the public archives of the discussions that led to the development of the current drafts?
Subsidies distort the market, and they don't save you money -- you end up paying for the subsidies through your taxes.
This is very true. Never let it be said that the US farming industry is not a really stupid way to run things.
Our (New Zealand's) farmers are not subsidised, and we seem to survive.
You don't have Wal-Mart in every town, obliterating all the competition. They are quite willing to risk market devastation next year in order to make another dollar this year.
How's the farming industry in the US right now? Most farmers can barely afford to make ends meet
Barely? Most farmers operate at a significantloss, and rely on government subsidies to remain in business (if the government did not subsidise farming, you would not eat). Walmart has been exploiting this for some time - essentially, they're using creative marketing techniques to force the government to spend tax dollars on them. In the past they've been caught paying some employees so little that they're still entitled (and basically have to) draw unemployment benefit, which is another form of the same thing (I don't know if they still do that).
They escape monopoly charges by spending money on political cover.
From a purely technical POV, VoIP is something of a con. It's attractive to end-users because it offers a chance to break free from the telcos.
From a purely technical POV, breaking free of the telcos is the best thing that could ever happen to voice comms. They are primarily responsible for holding the field back decades in order to preserve their monopoly business model.
The big advantage of VoIP, as far as I'm concerned, is flexibility on local networks. Trunk transfer is nowhere near as interesting compared to the massive improvements in PBX systems. Sure, some of the new applications may have poor voice quality, but that's still better than not having them at all.
In both cases, it's just what happens when you have 20-year-old technology from telecomms companies on one hand, who have had little or no interest in improving their products in that time, and on the other hand you have trivial variations on modern computer hardware in a commoditised market. It's not that VoIP itself is technically superior - it's that all the VoIP products are technically superior to the analog products at equivalent price bands. Yes, you can buy analog telephony equipment that doesn't suck, but it costs hundreds or thousands of times more, because telecomms companies haven't spent the last 10 years learning how to mass-produce complicated hardware at high-street prices.
Why does Stallman consider the OSDL patent initiative so bad? If it is unfair because it uses the same legal protections as the corporate trolls, then doesn't the GPL legitimate the unjust system of software licenses in the same way?
Because something like the GPL cannot work for patents. Every time the design is changed, you have to take out a new patent, which costs a large amount of money. In effect, this would be a fee for modifying the software. There is no way to construct such a system that is compatible with the goals of the FSF. Modifying software under this regime would only be possible for corporates and rich people.
Patent law is just too broken to support this kind of thing.
The company I work for has been looking closely at the gumstix line of devices because they offer one thing that almost all the others do not: access to the processor's GPIO pins for bit-banging sensors. Most of the OpenWRT devices *have* GPIO lines, but you can't connect anything to them without modifying the hardware, and that's just not an option for moderately large runs. None of the devices we want to interact with are smart enough to talk RS-232.
Slashdot Mirror
Missing the point. Microsoft didn't just make their product better, they locked up the interface and refused to allow anybody else to interoperate with it. At the point when they gained a market monopoly, they lost the right to refuse to let other people interoperate with their product. That is what antitrust law means. You can make your product as good as you like, but you cannot lock out the third parties. It doesn't matter if you use DRM or TC or whatever, but you must grant people licenses to use it at a reasonable price for any purpose that does not directly compete with your product (and an antivirus package does not directly compete with an operating system).
This is grossly untrue. If I am downloading a DVD image, and using ssh at the same time, I want to tag the download packets as "low priority" and the ssh packets as "minimum latency". The internet routers can then queue packets according to my wishes, and my service is greatly improved.
Just because it's possible to abuse prioritisation does not mean that it has no valid applications.
It isn't. This is a very old issue (I remember chewing the matter over on debian-legal several years ago) and it covers all the Mozilla foundation projects. The article is just the usual bad reporting we expect from slashdot, that's all.
Did you think there haven't been numerous surveys on this subject in recent years? The public opinion on the subject is well known: keep politics out of the BBC offices. Not even parliament is particularly enthusiastic about the idea of the BBC becoming a branch of the government (which is generally accepted as a requirement for it to become tax-funded). The only serious debate is about whether to keep it as it currently stands, or to cut it loose to operate as a regular advertising-funded company.
You mean "the people of Mozilla". They're the ones who say it can't be kept.
Debian deliberately and very carefully does not include the protected logo in the Debian distribution, at all. Everything that is shipped uses the "open use" logo (the swirl), which does not have trademark restrictions on it. This is done so completely that many people don't even realise that the swirl is not restricted. The trademark on the name "Debian" is only restricted in that you cannot call yourself a part of Debian if you aren't, there are no restrictions on releasing modified versions of the distribution other than this one.
Mozilla includes the protected Firefox logo in the Firefox distribution, and says that you cannot ship modified versions with that logo unless the Mozilla foundation pre-approves the modifications. They also say that you can't call it Firefox without that logo. They haven't been very serious about enforcing this in the past (they've tolerated merely post-approving the Debian modifications), so Debian hasn't been in a hurry to do anything about it, but it is a serious problem - Mozilla are claiming that you cannot modify Firefox as it stands without either (a) their approval, or (b) changing the name and logo.
Exactly how is Debian responsible for any of this?
Restrictions on modification are very much like that.
People who pay more taxes are richer. Richer people get extra votes (the normal one, plus all the politicians they can afford to bribe/lobby). If the BBC was tax-funded then the "no taxation without representation" thing would come in and the politicans would gain direct control over the BBC (which they do not currently have - the BBC operates under an independent charter, which is very difficult to modify).
The British public does not want parliament screwing up the only broadcaster left who actually cares about their viewers, instead of their advertisers. The BBC is the only one where the customer is the person watching TV - for all the others, the customer is an advertising company. The effects are obvious to anybody who has watched TV.
I don't know, but they aren't. You only have to pay the license fee if you receive public terrestrial broadcasts (analog or freeview digital). If you don't want that, you can get cable or satellite in most parts of the UK and not pay the license fee (depending on your contract, you may or may not be able to pay to receive the BBC channels over these services).
In other words, basically the same as today.
Canon says that each TARDIS represents an independent, self-consistant timeline (which shouldn't be violated because it tends to kill you and anybody in your immediate vicinity, and usually can't be violated because approaching an origin point that lies within your own historic timeline requires infinite energy, although special circumstances can cause weirder stuff to happen) - there is no "global" timeline per se, and the universe as a whole can (and often does) become a tangled inexplicable mess. The new BBC series have been completely ignoring the canon (Doctor Who has always taken canon with a pinch of salt, but they used to try for more consistency than this) and doing whatever they feel like, creating a *stupid* tangled inexplicable mess.
They will continue to suck, but you don't have to let them get away with it over here. Unlike in the US, the UK holds Paypal responsible for nonsense like this. Screw their "customer support" lines, go directly to the Financial Ombudsman - Paypal is permitted 8 weeks from the time you initially state your complaint, and then the Ombudsman can take over. This is a tax-funded service that is free to you as a consumer; Paypal is obliged to cooperate with them as a condition of doing business in the UK at all. Any decision made by the Ombudsman is binding on Paypal in the same manner as a court judgement would be.
Having taken care of that, feel free to report the whole affair to the Financial Services Authority. Where the Ombudsman takes care of your case, the FSA shakes the company by the neck until they stop creating more cases. This one in particular:
is an offence that already carries a hefty fine if proven. A company regulated by the FSA is not allowed to create barriers like this; they are required to have a clear and efficient complaints procedure and follow it precisely.
Lastly, the Office of Fair Trading can also weigh in when any company doing business in the UK fails to handle complaints in a reasonable manner or generally tramples on their customers for profit, in the unlikely event that the FSA is not interested.
This exact point was raised by Masamune Shirow, many years ago (in Ghost in the Shell, I believe). A fully cyborg arm, attached to a test stand, could easily lift a one ton weight - but attached to a human body, attempting to do the same would simply rip the arm out of its shoulder socket. The point was that only total-conversion cyborgs, or near-total-conversion, would gain any significant boosts in ability to beyond the level that could be accomplished by a normal human - limb replacement is good enough in the case of injury, but wouldn't let you do very much that you weren't already able to do.
Presumably a full-coverage powered suit would have a similar effect, compared to limited augmentation of a few joints or limbs. Of course, there is the additional problem that human joints aren't designed to move very fast for a sustained period of time, and driving them at high speed with external actuators may cause injury.
I have a computer made in 1985 that I have built parts for using a soldering iron.
Since the story submitter decided to display only one side of the argument here, I should point out that this objection is somewhat irrational. Several Debian developers have been forcibly kicked out of the project for actions that had no direct connection with the project. The details of names and events are usually considered private, but to pick one example that's already public knowledge - at one point a developer was an operator on the Freenode IRC network (then called OPN), abused this privilege in some fairly juvenile prank, and was promptly kicked out of Debian on the basis that they coudn't be trusted.
It is already expected that Debian developers will conduct themselves appropriately in all circumstances, not just ones relating to Debian. This is interpreted fairly liberally (the project doesn't care if you're an arse, it's primarily only interested in abuse of powers), but it is apparent that the current complaint is of this nature. Whether or not it is upheld by the project is for them to decide, but there's plenty of established precedent for this sort of thing. They're currently arguing about whether or not to uphold it; there appears to be little question as to whether developers should be held accountable in this manner.
ObBio: I'm an ex-developer who quit for personal reasons that had nothing to do with the project.
They refer to firemen as heroes so that they don't have to pay them (or at least, not as much).
Probably nothing very different to a good thunderstorm. High voltage discharges through the atmosphere aren't anything unusual. Might not be a good idea to live next to the thing.
You have to realise that the ionosphere is fundamentally unstable, in the same manner that a waterfall is unstable. It's continually eroding and discharging, and only appears to remain there because it has a continual feed of new energy (from solar radiation). Thunderstorms are the most common way for it to dump excess energy. We could perhaps create a small region in which there is an unusual electric field, but we can't do any real damage any more than you can damage a river by standing in it. It may be assumed that all people and equipment near the top of such an object would have to be shielded in the same manner that all space equipment already has to be (since it operates beyond the ionosphere), so it shouldn't cause any significant problems in that respect. The most likely effect of the thing is to reduce the number of thunderstorms in the immediate area (because there will be less voltage around to cause them).
It should be an interesting experiment to put up a really tall lightning conductor and see what happens.
And of the other 3%, most of them we couldn't survive without and the primary way they can harm us is by dying. The human lifeform is symbiotic with a whole bunch of bacterial species, which do everything from cleaning your eyeballs to assisting with digestion. The biosphere relies on bacteria to maintain everything from soil conditions to oxygen levels in the atmosphere.
Killing bacteria to stop infections is like chopping off people's hands to stop shootings - before they happen.
I've always wondered why people thought it worked like that. Admittedly the dust cloud may have adverse effects on the weather or climate, but the planet wouldn't turn into a glowing green rock like it does in the movies. "Radiation" from the bombs would cause severe damage in the target area, but it would quickly be over (the radiation pulse typically lasts a few seconds, and only reaches to the horizon, which is not very far). The primary long-term threat is from residual radioactive dust, which (as observed in Japan) does not move around a lot on account of being quite heavy - the target areas would be uninhabitable for decades, but the rest of the planet probably wouldn't be seriously affected. There are theories that a sufficiently large number of explosions would behave differently, but they're just speculation - nobody ever nuked a planet to find out what would actually happen, and our climatology modelling isn't good enough to give a meaningful answer yet.
There is no evidence to support the theory that a world without the USA and USSR would be uninhabitable. It smells like something that originated in American hubris.
Ironically enough, that distinction never did exist, except in government propaganda (from both sides).
The answer to this is well-known (IBM have been building systems with 64+ cores for years). It's a good idea for scientific work. It can be a good idea for certain classes of games (particularly with respect to physics modelling, which is just another variation on the scientific work). Pointless for web browsing, email, and openoffice. Won't help a bit to stop windows from being a CPU hog.
Even that is too complicated. You can do it just with CSS, no server-side intelligence at all.
That is true of anything. The primary features of an "open" project are:
How exactly can we do either of these things for the GPLv3? In particular, where are the public archives of the discussions that led to the development of the current drafts?
This is very true. Never let it be said that the US farming industry is not a really stupid way to run things.
You don't have Wal-Mart in every town, obliterating all the competition. They are quite willing to risk market devastation next year in order to make another dollar this year.
Barely? Most farmers operate at a significantloss, and rely on government subsidies to remain in business (if the government did not subsidise farming, you would not eat). Walmart has been exploiting this for some time - essentially, they're using creative marketing techniques to force the government to spend tax dollars on them. In the past they've been caught paying some employees so little that they're still entitled (and basically have to) draw unemployment benefit, which is another form of the same thing (I don't know if they still do that).
They escape monopoly charges by spending money on political cover.
From a purely technical POV, breaking free of the telcos is the best thing that could ever happen to voice comms. They are primarily responsible for holding the field back decades in order to preserve their monopoly business model.
The big advantage of VoIP, as far as I'm concerned, is flexibility on local networks. Trunk transfer is nowhere near as interesting compared to the massive improvements in PBX systems. Sure, some of the new applications may have poor voice quality, but that's still better than not having them at all.
In both cases, it's just what happens when you have 20-year-old technology from telecomms companies on one hand, who have had little or no interest in improving their products in that time, and on the other hand you have trivial variations on modern computer hardware in a commoditised market. It's not that VoIP itself is technically superior - it's that all the VoIP products are technically superior to the analog products at equivalent price bands. Yes, you can buy analog telephony equipment that doesn't suck, but it costs hundreds or thousands of times more, because telecomms companies haven't spent the last 10 years learning how to mass-produce complicated hardware at high-street prices.
Because something like the GPL cannot work for patents. Every time the design is changed, you have to take out a new patent, which costs a large amount of money. In effect, this would be a fee for modifying the software. There is no way to construct such a system that is compatible with the goals of the FSF. Modifying software under this regime would only be possible for corporates and rich people.
Patent law is just too broken to support this kind of thing.
The company I work for has been looking closely at the gumstix line of devices because they offer one thing that almost all the others do not: access to the processor's GPIO pins for bit-banging sensors. Most of the OpenWRT devices *have* GPIO lines, but you can't connect anything to them without modifying the hardware, and that's just not an option for moderately large runs. None of the devices we want to interact with are smart enough to talk RS-232.