"The" way it's used in English? I'm afraid you have a very silly idea of how English works. There is no "the way". I just checked two different dictionaries. One had seventeen different definitions for "free", and the other had twenty-four!
The language was not released under the GPL--a particular implementation of the compiler and VM was released under the GPL. The language is an abstract thing that happens to have multiple implementations of varying quality (Kaffe, gcj, etc., etc.). Sun's implementation is the only one that can use the trademarked name "java" (so far), but it's not the only implementation of the language.
Note that Oracle has been trying to confuse the distinction between Java-the-abstract-language and Java-the-virtual-machine since they started this case. This reminds me of the way that SCO tried to confuse the distinction between UNIX, SYSV and Unixware in their case. Of course, the fact that Oracle is using the same lawyers as SCO did may be related....
The GPL prevents distribution through the App store because the binary can not be redistributed.
Hogwash. You can distribute binaries as long as you accompany it with an offer to provide the source to anyone who asks for at least the next three years.
The App store removes licensed software (like VLC) because the license holder requests it.
The license holders only request it because the Apple Store refuses to comply with the license, even though it could do so with no ill effects (since i-devices don't support side-loading in the first place).
1. I'm not sure what you're saying. The 32/24 bpp support has been there since day one. The same maximum depth as my video card, and probably yours as well, It's only 16 bits per channel (128/96 bits per pixel) that isn't supported, and that's mainly an issue for those who work in the dying industry of paper-publishing, and those odd individuals who want to work on "raw" photographic images despite not being able to see the results of their manipulation.
2. Why does a "plugin" need to be "buildt inn"? You're not making any sense here.
3. Why on earth should a UNIX program depend on proprietary Microsoft technologies that aren't available on UNIX? If you want to make a Windows-only fork, feel free.
Sorry, but malware doesn't explain why the Apple Store bans GPL'd software. It's not a threat to users to have source available through other channels.
Well, to be honest, it wasn't the spanking itself that was so memorable; it was the fact that she felt she had to dress up in a skin-tight black leather catsuit with high heels to administer it. Similar to the way that OP felt he had to dress up this relatively trivial fine with dirty robes, a tinfoil hat, and a sandwich board proclaiming "REPENT NOW! The End Is Near!"
Or it will encourage Google to be more cooperative next time, so there won't need to be a fine.
Once, when I was about ten, my mom gave me a light smack on the behind for staying out till midnight without letting her know where I was or what I was doing. Clearly, by your logic, she was just setting me up for arbitrary unjustified beatings later.
Parent is a truly astonishing mix of plain truth, half-truths, and utter BS. Yes, the problem is real, no it's not universal--far from it. So far, parent and I agree 100%. But then parent claims:
This is almost solely an issue with the communities related to web development.
Technically not true at all, but may be based on a limited sampling, so I'll give parent a half point for this one.
Then, however, parent goes completely astray by identifing some technologies that he, personally, doesn't like, pointing out that the problem does occur in the communities associated with those particular three technologies (which may or may not be true, I haven't checked), and then leaps to the preposterous conclusion that bad technologies attract bad people! From three data points, and dubious categorization skills (I don't like it == bad.) There are plenty of communities associated with crappy software where it doesn't arise at all. (I'd argue the reverse, that it sometimes arises in communities associated with good software, but that assumes there is such a thing as good software--a hypothesis I'm not ready to accept.) This is all simply false, bordering on troll territory.
In my experience--and I'm also male and also have been involved in programming and software development for over 30 years--the problem seems to arise in small and/or insular communities. I've heard reports that it's widespread in software communities associated with banking and large financial institutions, which tend to be fairly insular, but are in no way small or (at least as far as technology goes) failed. Note that banking is not a subset of web development.
It doesn't arise in all small communities, but when it does, it can feed back on itself, and become remarkably hard to evict, even as the community grows. People who deny that it happens are either deliberately ignoring it, or have simply never had enough exposure to the communities where it does occur. I managed to get by for nearly ten years as a software developer before I encountered it, which may be in part because I'm male, but once I saw it, it was impossible to deny. It's not as universal as some suggest, but neither is it a non-problem, as others suggest. It's a minor problem except in the communities where it occurs, where it's a major one. None of which has anything to do with whether or not Ruby, JavaScript and NoSQL do or do not suck.
How is three explicit licenses any more prone to forking than one promiscuous license that allows all sorts of sublicensing? I can create a GPL-only fork of ApacheOO just as easily as I can create a GPL-only fork of LO. Your argument makes no sense.
Good news about the Symphony fork I suppose. I wish both projects the best of luck, but my money's still on LO at the moment, and OO is going to have to do some amazing things to change my mind.
Well, C++11 is irrelevant to what I was saying, but after double-checking about C11, you're right. The ISO WG14 home page confused me. It says, "The current C programming language standard ISO/IEC 9899 was adopted by ISO and IEC in 1999. Technical corrigenda TC1, TC2, and TC3 were approved followingly, TC2 in 2004, TC3 in 2007." (Emphasis mine.) Apparently, they need to update that page. 9899:2011 is available from ISO here.
So much for the claim that C is in any way more "last century" than C++. Thanks for the tip.
(Curiously, GCC includes experimental support for C++11, but has almost no mention of C11 anywhere.)
Depends in part on whether you're starting from go-oo or regular OO. Go-oo was a set of patches created by merging all the independent patches created by Novell and Debian, and not accepted by Sun. Most Linux distros offered Go-oo under the name OpenOffice. Go-oo had several features not supported by upstream OO.
LibreOffice started with Go-oo, then undertook a massive code cleanup which resulted in a functionally identical, but much smaller, faster, and easier-to-maintain, code base. Then they started adding more improvements (beyond those offered by Go-oo), some of which have been mentioned by other posters.
Meanwhile, OO got relicensed and dumped into the Apache incubator. It's currently undergoing an audit to make sure that all the components (including third-party libraries and such) are compatible with the Apache license. This may or may not end up in a slight reduction in functionality (I'm not following the development that closely, since I don't care). Once that's complete (if it's not already), they'll still be quite a bit behind where LO started, even if they don't end up removing any functionality, because Go-oo wasn't donated to Apache, and is still under the GPL. So, they'll have something that is much larger, much slower, much harder to maintain, and they'll be way behind on features. At that point, the question becomes can they possibly catch up?
Here's what LO's got: a big head start, a much-improved code-base that provides a much lower barrier for potential new devs, a solid core dev team (there's a big question about how much of the old OO team Oracle will allow to keep working on OO, since it's no longer a Sun/Oracle product) and a much better product, both in terms of features and performance.
Here's what OO's got: name recognition, a license that allows proprietary derivatives, and (as a result of that last) strong support from IBM, who used to have a separate license to the old OO codebase, and doesn't want to dump or GPL Notes.
My money's on LO, but the name recognition and IBM support are nothing to sneeze at, so I'm not making any big bets at this time. But it's probably going to take the OO devs somewhere between one and two years just to catch up with where LO is now, by which time, LO will have added even more.
Frankly, I think you should probably try LO just for the performance improvements, even if you don't use any of the new features. You've got nothing to lose.
TFS didn't say, so I did some back of the envelope calculations. Someone posted that Prius owners make up 58% of all hybrid owners. I didn't check that, nor check to see how the number has changed over time, but assuming it as a constant, I come up with: 48.8% of Prius owners would buy another hybrid. That's less than half, but just barely. And it's nearly twice as many as the 25% for non-Prius owners.
So, instead of spinning that hybrid owners don't like hybrids, we could just as easily spin that hybrids other than the Prius suck. (Which is a closer match to what I've been hearing from people over the last several years.)
There's a lot of other questions left unanswered here (like why?, and is the age and/or efficiency of the hybrid technology--which has reportedly been improving steadily--a factor), but I'll leave those for others to raise.
Um, I don't know what definition of "OSS" you're using, but I'm using the standard definition, and what you describe does not meet that definition. If he "forbids re-distribution" as you suggest, that violates criteria 1, Free Redistribution.
Yeah, he can distribute source without making his code open source (this used to be quite common in the Unix world), but that's not what he asked about.
For a non-USian, it probably is an error--unless it's a (deliberate or inadvertant) Americanism. When writing to people I know to be UKish, I sometimes try to use UKisms ("lorry" instead of "truck", "boot" instead of "trunk", "colour" instead of "color"). Technically, I'm commiting an error in my native language, but I do it in a (probably futile) attempt to surmount the language barrier, and it's (more-or-less) correct for my reader. There are probably people in the UK who do the same in reverse--so before you call it an error, you need to be sure it's not intended as an Americanism.
Otherwise, I think we're basically in agreement, unless you're trying to argue that British English is "real" English, in which case, I consider you a troll. It's not an error in English because American English is a form of English, which was my original point, but it's (probably) an error in most other forms of English.
On the other hand, international communications and the Internet are starting to break down some of the strict barriers between variants of English. Whether you'll still be able to consider it an error even in British English in five--or twenty-- years is unknown. Some people consider this a horror, and want to try to erect strong barriers between English variants, but as a lover of language and the evolution of language, I consider it amazing and fascinating.
I can't think of a way of guaranteeing that you can feed yourself whether or not you open-source your code! Making it as an independent software vendor is hard. Above you, you have big companies who like money and won't hesitate to offer similar software, independently developed, if it looks like you've found a good market. Below you, you have FLOSS developers who won't hestitate to offer similar software for free if it looks like your software offers useful features for users. (In some cases, these groups may overlap.)
That said, you haven't given us anywhere near enough information to answer your question. Are you talking about highly specialized software for a niche market, or general purpose software with a potentially huge market? The edge-effects of open-source development are much more likely to be useful and beneficial to you in the latter case.
What do you get out of open-sourcing your software? Free publicity is almost certainly the biggest factor. How big is your advertising budget? Also, what about distribution channels? Remember, you're competing with big companies and (if you go the non-free route) open-source developers/companies. How are people going to hear about your software, and find it if they do hear about it, and decide if they like it better than other similar software?
Making your code proprietary greatly increases your per-user income, but makes it much more difficult (and expensive) to get new users. Open-sourcing your code makes it much easier to get new users, but greatly reduces your per-user income. Independent comic artist Phil Foglio started putting his Girl Genius comic up as a free webcomic, and said that his readership grew tenfold and his sales quadrupled. But that may or may not be typical.
There's also the possibility of hybrid models, like releasing the core as open source, but charging for add-ons, or, if you think other companies may want to adapt and sell your code, offering a choice between a restrictive free license (e.g. GPL) or a commercial for-pay license. Depending on what your program is and how it works, those may or may not be viable options--you haven't given us enough information to tell.
Bottom line, though: all the cards are stacked against you no matter which way you go. And, while you've given us very little to go on, it's quite likely that even if you gave us ten times the details you have so far, it still wouldn't be enough information to make more than a wild guess. Going it independent is hard and extremely risky. There's a reason that something like 90% of all programmers are employed developing internal software that never gets licensed or distributed outside of a single company--it's one of the few ways to be sure you eat.
Then you may find this article (by Mark Liberman, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, and one of the Gods of computational linguistics) enlightening. He not only quotes chapter and verse from the OED, but debunks the common theory that the phrase originated as sarcasm. (Note: he doesn't claim to prove the theory is false; merely that it's unsupported by any actual evidence.)
And yes, it's primarily an American phrase. The OED lists it as "US colloq. phr.". But before you jump on that word colloq(uial), not that I couldn't care less is also listed as a colloquial phrase. But the OED has never hesitated to document American English, whatever you may believe about how they "use the Queen's English".
That's fine; I and many others, including some of the best linguists in the world, consider people who insist on made-up, bullshit rules about English, as you do, to be drooling idiots. The Language Log site (run by a collection of noted linguists from around the world) has a whole category of articles about making fun of dictatorial, whiny bullshit-prescribers like you.
As for your specific examples ("could care less" and "literally") both are accepted by the OED as valid and correct, despite your pathetic attempt to assert (with no evidence) that they're not.
Yes, I'd love to see the bastards sued over this! And I think the Grateful Dead might be a great organization to launch such a suit. They have a couple of advantages: 1) for their "free" music, they have a license similar to CC-NC, but it predates CC-NC by many years, and explicitly forbids Internet advertising (some people claim that the CC-NC is a little vague about this), and 2) one of their songwriters is a lawyer and, moreover, not just any lawyer--he's one of the founders of the EFF (John Perry Barlow).
The facts are not relevant to the true grammar nazi! It's more important to look smart than to be right. Anyway, the running-dog lackey dictionaries are all in the pay of the evil liberal prescriptivists, and don't follow the proper definitions that I learned from some random guy or mis-educated high-school teacher.
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"The" way it's used in English? I'm afraid you have a very silly idea of how English works. There is no "the way". I just checked two different dictionaries. One had seventeen different definitions for "free", and the other had twenty-four!
So you agree with SCO that anyone who uses Linux should be sued for violating the UNIX copyrights?
Dalvik has no more to do with Java than Linux does with Unix.
(And note that Oracle is using the same lawyers that SCO did.)
The language was not released under the GPL--a particular implementation of the compiler and VM was released under the GPL. The language is an abstract thing that happens to have multiple implementations of varying quality (Kaffe, gcj, etc., etc.). Sun's implementation is the only one that can use the trademarked name "java" (so far), but it's not the only implementation of the language.
Note that Oracle has been trying to confuse the distinction between Java-the-abstract-language and Java-the-virtual-machine since they started this case. This reminds me of the way that SCO tried to confuse the distinction between UNIX, SYSV and Unixware in their case. Of course, the fact that Oracle is using the same lawyers as SCO did may be related....
Damn, my brother just finally got rid of his Apple ][+ last year, or we could have given this a try. :)
The GPL prevents distribution through the App store because the binary can not be redistributed.
Hogwash. You can distribute binaries as long as you accompany it with an offer to provide the source to anyone who asks for at least the next three years.
The App store removes licensed software (like VLC) because the license holder requests it.
The license holders only request it because the Apple Store refuses to comply with the license, even though it could do so with no ill effects (since i-devices don't support side-loading in the first place).
1. I'm not sure what you're saying. The 32/24 bpp support has been there since day one. The same maximum depth as my video card, and probably yours as well, It's only 16 bits per channel (128/96 bits per pixel) that isn't supported, and that's mainly an issue for those who work in the dying industry of paper-publishing, and those odd individuals who want to work on "raw" photographic images despite not being able to see the results of their manipulation.
2. Why does a "plugin" need to be "buildt inn"? You're not making any sense here.
3. Why on earth should a UNIX program depend on proprietary Microsoft technologies that aren't available on UNIX? If you want to make a Windows-only fork, feel free.
4. That's what this article is about, dummy!
Sorry, but malware doesn't explain why the Apple Store bans GPL'd software. It's not a threat to users to have source available through other channels.
Well, to be honest, it wasn't the spanking itself that was so memorable; it was the fact that she felt she had to dress up in a skin-tight black leather catsuit with high heels to administer it. Similar to the way that OP felt he had to dress up this relatively trivial fine with dirty robes, a tinfoil hat, and a sandwich board proclaiming "REPENT NOW! The End Is Near!"
Or it will encourage Google to be more cooperative next time, so there won't need to be a fine.
Once, when I was about ten, my mom gave me a light smack on the behind for staying out till midnight without letting her know where I was or what I was doing. Clearly, by your logic, she was just setting me up for arbitrary unjustified beatings later.
Parent is a truly astonishing mix of plain truth, half-truths, and utter BS. Yes, the problem is real, no it's not universal--far from it. So far, parent and I agree 100%. But then parent claims:
This is almost solely an issue with the communities related to web development.
Technically not true at all, but may be based on a limited sampling, so I'll give parent a half point for this one.
Then, however, parent goes completely astray by identifing some technologies that he, personally, doesn't like, pointing out that the problem does occur in the communities associated with those particular three technologies (which may or may not be true, I haven't checked), and then leaps to the preposterous conclusion that bad technologies attract bad people! From three data points, and dubious categorization skills (I don't like it == bad.) There are plenty of communities associated with crappy software where it doesn't arise at all. (I'd argue the reverse, that it sometimes arises in communities associated with good software, but that assumes there is such a thing as good software--a hypothesis I'm not ready to accept.) This is all simply false, bordering on troll territory.
In my experience--and I'm also male and also have been involved in programming and software development for over 30 years--the problem seems to arise in small and/or insular communities. I've heard reports that it's widespread in software communities associated with banking and large financial institutions, which tend to be fairly insular, but are in no way small or (at least as far as technology goes) failed. Note that banking is not a subset of web development.
It doesn't arise in all small communities, but when it does, it can feed back on itself, and become remarkably hard to evict, even as the community grows. People who deny that it happens are either deliberately ignoring it, or have simply never had enough exposure to the communities where it does occur. I managed to get by for nearly ten years as a software developer before I encountered it, which may be in part because I'm male, but once I saw it, it was impossible to deny. It's not as universal as some suggest, but neither is it a non-problem, as others suggest. It's a minor problem except in the communities where it occurs, where it's a major one. None of which has anything to do with whether or not Ruby, JavaScript and NoSQL do or do not suck.
How is three explicit licenses any more prone to forking than one promiscuous license that allows all sorts of sublicensing? I can create a GPL-only fork of ApacheOO just as easily as I can create a GPL-only fork of LO. Your argument makes no sense.
Good news about the Symphony fork I suppose. I wish both projects the best of luck, but my money's still on LO at the moment, and OO is going to have to do some amazing things to change my mind.
Well, C++11 is irrelevant to what I was saying, but after double-checking about C11, you're right. The ISO WG14 home page confused me. It says, "The current C programming language standard ISO/IEC 9899 was adopted by ISO and IEC in 1999. Technical corrigenda TC1, TC2, and TC3 were approved followingly, TC2 in 2004, TC3 in 2007." (Emphasis mine.) Apparently, they need to update that page. 9899:2011 is available from ISO here.
So much for the claim that C is in any way more "last century" than C++. Thanks for the tip.
(Curiously, GCC includes experimental support for C++11, but has almost no mention of C11 anywhere.)
Depends in part on whether you're starting from go-oo or regular OO. Go-oo was a set of patches created by merging all the independent patches created by Novell and Debian, and not accepted by Sun. Most Linux distros offered Go-oo under the name OpenOffice. Go-oo had several features not supported by upstream OO.
LibreOffice started with Go-oo, then undertook a massive code cleanup which resulted in a functionally identical, but much smaller, faster, and easier-to-maintain, code base. Then they started adding more improvements (beyond those offered by Go-oo), some of which have been mentioned by other posters.
Meanwhile, OO got relicensed and dumped into the Apache incubator. It's currently undergoing an audit to make sure that all the components (including third-party libraries and such) are compatible with the Apache license. This may or may not end up in a slight reduction in functionality (I'm not following the development that closely, since I don't care). Once that's complete (if it's not already), they'll still be quite a bit behind where LO started, even if they don't end up removing any functionality, because Go-oo wasn't donated to Apache, and is still under the GPL. So, they'll have something that is much larger, much slower, much harder to maintain, and they'll be way behind on features. At that point, the question becomes can they possibly catch up?
Here's what LO's got: a big head start, a much-improved code-base that provides a much lower barrier for potential new devs, a solid core dev team (there's a big question about how much of the old OO team Oracle will allow to keep working on OO, since it's no longer a Sun/Oracle product) and a much better product, both in terms of features and performance.
Here's what OO's got: name recognition, a license that allows proprietary derivatives, and (as a result of that last) strong support from IBM, who used to have a separate license to the old OO codebase, and doesn't want to dump or GPL Notes.
My money's on LO, but the name recognition and IBM support are nothing to sneeze at, so I'm not making any big bets at this time. But it's probably going to take the OO devs somewhere between one and two years just to catch up with where LO is now, by which time, LO will have added even more.
Frankly, I think you should probably try LO just for the performance improvements, even if you don't use any of the new features. You've got nothing to lose.
C99 was most recently updated in 2007 (technical corrigenda, but still...). And C1x may not be a completed standard yet, but it's getting close.
TFS didn't say, so I did some back of the envelope calculations. Someone posted that Prius owners make up 58% of all hybrid owners. I didn't check that, nor check to see how the number has changed over time, but assuming it as a constant, I come up with: 48.8% of Prius owners would buy another hybrid. That's less than half, but just barely. And it's nearly twice as many as the 25% for non-Prius owners.
So, instead of spinning that hybrid owners don't like hybrids, we could just as easily spin that hybrids other than the Prius suck. (Which is a closer match to what I've been hearing from people over the last several years.)
There's a lot of other questions left unanswered here (like why?, and is the age and/or efficiency of the hybrid technology--which has reportedly been improving steadily--a factor), but I'll leave those for others to raise.
Um, I don't know what definition of "OSS" you're using, but I'm using the standard definition, and what you describe does not meet that definition. If he "forbids re-distribution" as you suggest, that violates criteria 1, Free Redistribution.
Yeah, he can distribute source without making his code open source (this used to be quite common in the Unix world), but that's not what he asked about.
For a non-USian, it probably is an error--unless it's a (deliberate or inadvertant) Americanism. When writing to people I know to be UKish, I sometimes try to use UKisms ("lorry" instead of "truck", "boot" instead of "trunk", "colour" instead of "color"). Technically, I'm commiting an error in my native language, but I do it in a (probably futile) attempt to surmount the language barrier, and it's (more-or-less) correct for my reader. There are probably people in the UK who do the same in reverse--so before you call it an error, you need to be sure it's not intended as an Americanism.
Otherwise, I think we're basically in agreement, unless you're trying to argue that British English is "real" English, in which case, I consider you a troll. It's not an error in English because American English is a form of English, which was my original point, but it's (probably) an error in most other forms of English.
On the other hand, international communications and the Internet are starting to break down some of the strict barriers between variants of English. Whether you'll still be able to consider it an error even in British English in five--or twenty-- years is unknown. Some people consider this a horror, and want to try to erect strong barriers between English variants, but as a lover of language and the evolution of language, I consider it amazing and fascinating.
I can't think of a way of guaranteeing that you can feed yourself whether or not you open-source your code! Making it as an independent software vendor is hard. Above you, you have big companies who like money and won't hesitate to offer similar software, independently developed, if it looks like you've found a good market. Below you, you have FLOSS developers who won't hestitate to offer similar software for free if it looks like your software offers useful features for users. (In some cases, these groups may overlap.)
That said, you haven't given us anywhere near enough information to answer your question. Are you talking about highly specialized software for a niche market, or general purpose software with a potentially huge market? The edge-effects of open-source development are much more likely to be useful and beneficial to you in the latter case.
What do you get out of open-sourcing your software? Free publicity is almost certainly the biggest factor. How big is your advertising budget? Also, what about distribution channels? Remember, you're competing with big companies and (if you go the non-free route) open-source developers/companies. How are people going to hear about your software, and find it if they do hear about it, and decide if they like it better than other similar software?
Making your code proprietary greatly increases your per-user income, but makes it much more difficult (and expensive) to get new users. Open-sourcing your code makes it much easier to get new users, but greatly reduces your per-user income. Independent comic artist Phil Foglio started putting his Girl Genius comic up as a free webcomic, and said that his readership grew tenfold and his sales quadrupled. But that may or may not be typical.
There's also the possibility of hybrid models, like releasing the core as open source, but charging for add-ons, or, if you think other companies may want to adapt and sell your code, offering a choice between a restrictive free license (e.g. GPL) or a commercial for-pay license. Depending on what your program is and how it works, those may or may not be viable options--you haven't given us enough information to tell.
Bottom line, though: all the cards are stacked against you no matter which way you go. And, while you've given us very little to go on, it's quite likely that even if you gave us ten times the details you have so far, it still wouldn't be enough information to make more than a wild guess. Going it independent is hard and extremely risky. There's a reason that something like 90% of all programmers are employed developing internal software that never gets licensed or distributed outside of a single company--it's one of the few ways to be sure you eat.
Then you may find this article (by Mark Liberman, Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science, and one of the Gods of computational linguistics) enlightening. He not only quotes chapter and verse from the OED, but debunks the common theory that the phrase originated as sarcasm. (Note: he doesn't claim to prove the theory is false; merely that it's unsupported by any actual evidence.)
And yes, it's primarily an American phrase. The OED lists it as "US colloq. phr.". But before you jump on that word colloq(uial), not that I couldn't care less is also listed as a colloquial phrase. But the OED has never hesitated to document American English, whatever you may believe about how they "use the Queen's English".
That's fine; I and many others, including some of the best linguists in the world, consider people who insist on made-up, bullshit rules about English, as you do, to be drooling idiots. The Language Log site (run by a collection of noted linguists from around the world) has a whole category of articles about making fun of dictatorial, whiny bullshit-prescribers like you.
As for your specific examples ("could care less" and "literally") both are accepted by the OED as valid and correct, despite your pathetic attempt to assert (with no evidence) that they're not.
Yes, I'd love to see the bastards sued over this! And I think the Grateful Dead might be a great organization to launch such a suit. They have a couple of advantages: 1) for their "free" music, they have a license similar to CC-NC, but it predates CC-NC by many years, and explicitly forbids Internet advertising (some people claim that the CC-NC is a little vague about this), and 2) one of their songwriters is a lawyer and, moreover, not just any lawyer--he's one of the founders of the EFF (John Perry Barlow).
Time-travelling rabbits.
The facts are not relevant to the true grammar nazi! It's more important to look smart than to be right. Anyway, the running-dog lackey dictionaries are all in the pay of the evil liberal prescriptivists, and don't follow the proper definitions that I learned from some random guy or mis-educated high-school teacher.
Heh-heh, you said "private members"! Oh, and BTW, your post is now banned in the UK. :)
Not to mention written pornography and uuencoded images.