But, the customer is NOT always right. Making the bug submission process easier is great. Dumbing it down to far, however, will simply lower the signal to noise ratio. While your suggestions on how to fix the problem are sound, it sounds to me like it may be a problem that doesn't really need fixing.
Remember, the more time spent fixing Bugzilla, the less time spent fixing Mozilla. Once they get to 1.0, then maybe it's time to start reworking the support tools.
But "piracy" is a direct threat to their business model. The RIAA business model revolves around holding the exclusive rights to a hunk of content, and being the only people allowed to distribute it.
That assertion is pretty questionable. Napster (et al) does encourage piracy for some people. Why by the new 'N Sync record when you know that it's all crap accept that one song...
On the other hand, for many, it actually encourages the purchase of CD's. Napster encourages musical exploration, which leads to buying more music.
And, yes, I know I'm supposed to be boycotting the RIAA. Don't worry, almost everything I buy is on independent labels, before & after Napster.
Actually, the deeper Ivar shelves, when turned to the side, are almost the perfect width for a rack. My rackmount cases will fit between the uprights, but it is a tight fit (a bit of sandpaper would make them ideal). Since I only have two computers to rack, my plan is to pick up one of the 29"h x 16"w x 19"d units (when oriented normally) & use it. If I can shorten it by about 2-3 inches, & put it on casters, it should be an ideal under-desk rack, though the computers will stick out a bit at the back. The whole thing should run under about $70 dollars including 5 shelves, and all hardware.
But it doesn't need to pull the cat 5. Instead, have it pull a light string (fishing line would be great) which could then be used to pull through a heavier string, which could then be used to pull the cable. Pretty slick. Or maybe I sould say pretty sucky.
He tried to distribute and sell a circumvention device at a convention in the United States of America.
No, he didn't. He wrote an algorithm that was used in a program published by his employer. This is like putting my (imaginary) friend Joe in jail since he was involved in writing Windows 95.
Also remember that the program is legal in Russia, and most of the rest of the world. Think of it this way. We have put him in jail for doing something, in his country, what is legal, again in his country. Next, we'll start fining German tourists for speeding, even though the actual infraction happened when they were still in Germany. Or to take it a step further, say you're a German citizen, driving (legally) at 100MPH, and you are in an accident involving an American. You live, the American dies. Based on our current path, you better not ever set foot in America. You'll probably be placed on trial for vehicular manslaughter, even though you did not break any laws in your country.
(BTW, I agree with you point, but it's important to keep these distinctions clear.)
It is also an example of one of the main arguments for such laws as the DMCA, to prevent people from just blatantly making exact digital copies of things.
That's almost correct, but not quite. The DMCA is designed to counter casual copying, not blatant copying. Certain countries are known as blatant copyright violators, but the DMCA does nothing to prevent them from continuing in this practice. Blatant violations-- such as the post in question-- are, and in most cases probably should, be illegal, even without DMCA.
Instead, the DMCA is intended to prevent you from making a copy of a cd (or whatever) that you own, even though the right to copy your own media is legally protected under several different laws (fair use, timeshifting)(though you obviously cannot distribute, loan, etc, your copy). The DMCA is, pure and simple, a way to force the average consumer to buy multiple copies of a CD, etc. It has basically no other practical value, and it does nothing to prevent organized piracy.
From the article:
"We originally got a report of a plane crash and now it seems there were multiple meteors coming down," said Tara Dolzani, a supervisor at the Schuylkill County communications center in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
Have you EVER heard a more transparent cover up? Clearly, this is only the first stage of the invasion, so we better start preparing now! Call your neighbors, let everyone know! Head for the hills!
If artists don't see a dime, we'll have to start flipping dimes into the hats of starving artists all over the world much more often.
Yep. A Dime. That's about what most artists see out of the $18 or so bucks you just spent on that new CD. Actually, it's closer to a buck or so, but still, it's a pittance compared to what the record company gets. MP3 & digital distribution has the potential to fix this by cutting the record company out of the loop. I'd happily pay $3 to $5 for a digital copy of a CD if that money went directly to the artist. I just HATE making Hilary Rosen (& all the rest of the leaches who have never played a note in their lives) richer.
Certainly running your own SMTP server is a great solution for the slashdot crowd. But, cmon, do you really expect the avaerage small (i mean really small) business to have the resources to do this? For many businesses, this will be a MAJOR inconvenience. If you are top small to be able to afford a geek, and you're not technical enough (or to busy to) to run your own server, your screwed. Add to that the chance that Verizon may begin to use other "anti-spam" measures (like blocking port 25), and it rapidly becomes apparent that there is no way the average person can run their own server. And since Verizon is probably the only Broadband available to many of it's subscribers, and this begins to be a significant problem.
And of course this policy almost forces Verizon to begin blocking port 25. Since many people WILL now be running their own SMTP servers, but won't really understand what they are doing, suddenly Verizon will be the home to many, many open relays. So, to prevent the new spam created by their policy, they will have to block port 25. Frankly, this policy makes Earthlink's port blocking seem downright welcome (and certainly a hell of a lot more effective.).
I do not bellieve it is illegal to record a phone call for your own personal use, even in most states where there are two-party consent laws. It IS illegal, however, to share the resulting tape (or a transcript, etc.) with another person. Even if it is illegal, such a law is basically unenforceable. Unless you tell someone you have such a tape, no one will know anyway, so it's kinda hard to enforce. And of course, the resulting tape cannot be used against the uninformed party, in court or otherwise, since that would violate his assumed privacy. (Unless you're a democrat, and the republican party doesn't like you, in which case, all bets are off.)
I think you might be missing the gist of the complaint. How long after the company stops providing the service do you need to wait before you can safely dispose of the doorstop? The poster said he had not had contact for three months. Is that long enough? Six months? Ten years? I think the gist of the objection was the delay involved, not that they wanted the hardware back.
If there was a way to get the price down to 10 cents, more people might use it. At that point, though, you run the risk of alienating people by nickle-and-diminig them to do death. Most people are not going to want to pay 10 cents 3-5 times a week for a web comic. The price really isn't the issue, it's just the inconvienience.
I agree completely, and that was covered, though not specifically, in my original post. First off, the charge has to be cheap enough to not require much thought. If I could donate $.10 with two clicks (first on the link, then a second click at the transaction procesor to verify the transaction) I would do it fairly liberally. Second, for a site such as PA, the donation should be voluntary. If it's cheap & easy enough, many people will donate freely. The numbers I cited assume only 5% of visits (that works out to about 20% of visitors, assuming 4 strips per month) donate a dime. While that's only a guess as to how many would actually donate, I don't think that that is an unreasonable guess.
I think another problem is that there is just a certian amount of content out there that most people find is not worth paying for.
True, but that's another issue entirely. Just like any other commercial media, if the quality is poor enough, they wont survive. Admittedly, though, if the movie, tv & record industries are any indication, it has to be pretty poor before it's 'poor enough'.
I'd definitly be willing to pay for Dilbert (I know it's not an online comic only, but I ready it online). Supposing United Media decided they were going to start charging a small amount for access, I'd probably pay it because I find it pretty consistently funny.
I see your point, but I WOULD NOT pay under these circumstances. The whole point of micropayments is their ability to get rid of the likes of United Media. Why would I want to give a dime to United Media when I know that Scott Adams will only get $.01?
Let's face it, people are not going to pay for something they can get for free somewhere else. People have their favorites of course, but if the average consumer is suddenly faced with the prospect of paying for PA, they'll likely drop it from their bookmarks, and go read PVP, or MegaTokyo, or whatever sites still offer free content.
I don't think so. Imagine a world where you can have a link "Donate $.10 to Penny Arcade". How many people would do it? Certainly not everyone, but a substantial enough portion would to make it worthwhile. His example of PVP says 30,000 regular readers. Based on this number, let's assume a hypothetical web comic reallyfunnywebcomic.com Assuming that there are at least as many irregular readers, it's probably safe to assume that the site gets > 400,000 visits a month (I'm assuming 4 strips per month). If 5% of those visits (20,000) result in donations, the author would be bringing in ~$1800/month ($2000 - 10% transaction fee). And of course, if he no longer needs the day job, he can put more effort into the site which should generate more traffic, therefore generate more revenue...
The problem is, as Scott's articles point out, there is no viable method of donating (or charging) such a small amount. Until their is such a mechanism, we'll never really know for sure how many people will donate, but I'd happily allocate $20 of my budget a month to donate to various quality sites if the donation amount is small enough. The trick is to keep the donation small enough that your readers don't even need to consider whether they can afford to or not.
The same is true of Music. Imagine being able to buy an album in electronic form, directly from the artist, for $3. Not only would this be substantially more money then the average artist get's from a normal cd sale, they would almost certainly sell more cd's. You can then burn the cd yourself & everyone is happy. Will this eliminate piracy? Absolutely not. But, if it's cheap & easy to get a 'legal' copy, I think most people would happily do so.
Unless perhaps he thought better & changed it himself? There is no evidence to support your theory, and considering how frequently people send an email in a fit of rage & promptly wish they could get it back, I see nothing suspicious in the change.
The same is with spammers; they can send out adverts, but not to people who do not want them.
Actually, the spam law doesn't even go that far. You simply can't shoot into people's home's while wearing a mask-- to take your analogy to the next step...
Clearly, YANALTYLTTYA (You are not a lawyer, though you like to think you are). You seem to have no grasp of IP law, nor do you understand the free speech issues.
Based on your repeated arguments, any website hosted on a university website belongs to the university. Hmmm... You might want to let Stanford (or was it berkley?), since they would own Yahoo! based on this reasoning.
The AUP & disclaimer cited by others clearly states that the university does not own, control, or actively monitor the material on student websites. The fact that flikx created this cite as a courtesy to the university community does not mean that he created it for the university. That's like saying that since Taco created slashdot as a service to the Linux community, Linus now owns it.
Obviously, we do not know the whole story here. It's entirely possible that Flikx left out some important details. But, based on what has been said, it sounds like the university is bullying him knowing that he can't really fight to hard-- not with his degree on the line.
Just to clarify, I'm not saying that his "clarification" was wrong, or legally invalid. Just that it probably did more harm then good.
I'm pretty much license agnostic. If you develop a program, license it as you see fit. However, it's important to realize that "natural selection" will occur based on your license choice, so choose carefully. A perfect example of this was cited in a previous discussion-- qmail. A strong case could be made that qmail is the premier MTD around today, yet it's nowhere near as popular as Sendmail. Obviously some of that is simply due to legacy issues. But a larger problem is quite probably the more restrictive license that DJB uses. His restrictions are in place for good reasons, but they do affect it's popularity. Is the trade off worthwhile? I don't know, but I presume that DJB (& Darren Reed) would say so.
If one wants to create a piece of software, and then give it to the open source community, nobody should go to tell him that he should release it under some particular license.
This is a bit if a a simplification of the real issue, unfortunately. The real issue is the perception that he changed the license. I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems like the new wording adds new restrictions contrary to his insistence that it is only intended as a clarification.
I agree that nobody should try to tell a developer what is the "correct" license. But by choosing to use his own license & not have it checked by a lawyer to make sure no later "clarification" was needed, Reed invited the hassles he's facing now.
You almost have it! In many cases, the GPL does "infect any program written on top of it". Of course you still must specifically choose to build your code on top of the GPL'd code, so calling it viral is flawed. I could almost buy calling it "addictive", though. After all, unlike a virus, an addict CHOSE his course of action. But of course, for the FUD monger, addictive doesn't sound as bad, so it clearly won't work for your purposes.
However, if someone has already written a fair chunk of what you want to do under the GPL, and you want to use that code, as it is the best code for the job, you MUST release your program under the GPL, as well. Sure, you COULD write your own code, but that just defeats the purpose of opensource and code sharing in the first place.
Ok, you're right. Tough luck. If Microsoft had already written the same code, you would still have to rewrite it. By this definition, closed source is viral. Obviously that's absurd.
The BSD license isn't "better" or "worse" then the GPL. They each have different, specific advantages. Some authors prefer one, other prefer the other, still others choose the license based on the project. Even closed source has it's advantages, though I personally feel that those advantages are outweighed by it's disadvantages for most types of programs. Regardless, use the license that you like & don't illegally use code that you don't have the rights to. It ain't that tough.
Nobody that is just the price for using GPL software. Anything with a price cannot be considered free.
Wrong. That is the price of redistributing an application based existing code that has been released under the GPL. That's a pretty specific set of circumstances. You must a) develop code, b) redistribute said code, and c) said code must be based on code that was GPL'd. Unless all three conditions are met, no violation has occurred. Since you must specifically choose to use the GPL'd code, calling it "viral" is FUD at it's worst & most obvious.
What a stupid, stupid analogy. I could agree if you had compared it to the engine-- I mean, the OS is arguably the engine of the computer (at least as far as the software side of things). Of course the problem with this analogy is that it counters your point. My neighbor with the 500 horsepower big block 428 (or whatever) likely has higher insurance rates then I do with my 1.9 liter 88 horsepower engine. Does that mean he's a worse driver? No. But statistically, he's more likely to have claims so he gets the higher rates.
One important thing to keep in mind, nowhere in the article did it say that this was the only determining factor. Odds are, this is only one of several questions they ask you in determining your rates. And, I imagine based on your answers, it's possible for someone running Unix to pay more then someone else running NT. The fact that this isn't specifically specified in the article does not mean that it isn't true. This is a general article, not in depth journalism. Understanding the difference between fluff press & in depth reporting is a good skill to have.
Slashdot Mirror
But, the customer is NOT always right. Making the bug submission process easier is great. Dumbing it down to far, however, will simply lower the signal to noise ratio. While your suggestions on how to fix the problem are sound, it sounds to me like it may be a problem that doesn't really need fixing.
Remember, the more time spent fixing Bugzilla, the less time spent fixing Mozilla. Once they get to 1.0, then maybe it's time to start reworking the support tools.
So your nephew is a thirteen year old dog? Is that in dog years or people years?
But "piracy" is a direct threat to their business model. The RIAA business model revolves around holding the exclusive rights to a hunk of content, and being the only people allowed to distribute it.
That assertion is pretty questionable. Napster (et al) does encourage piracy for some people. Why by the new 'N Sync record when you know that it's all crap accept that one song...
On the other hand, for many, it actually encourages the purchase of CD's. Napster encourages musical exploration, which leads to buying more music.
And, yes, I know I'm supposed to be boycotting the RIAA. Don't worry, almost everything I buy is on independent labels, before & after Napster.
Actually, the deeper Ivar shelves, when turned to the side, are almost the perfect width for a rack. My rackmount cases will fit between the uprights, but it is a tight fit (a bit of sandpaper would make them ideal). Since I only have two computers to rack, my plan is to pick up one of the 29"h x 16"w x 19"d units (when oriented normally) & use it. If I can shorten it by about 2-3 inches, & put it on casters, it should be an ideal under-desk rack, though the computers will stick out a bit at the back. The whole thing should run under about $70 dollars including 5 shelves, and all hardware.
But it doesn't need to pull the cat 5. Instead, have it pull a light string (fishing line would be great) which could then be used to pull through a heavier string, which could then be used to pull the cable. Pretty slick. Or maybe I sould say pretty sucky.
He tried to distribute and sell a circumvention device at a convention in the United States of America.
No, he didn't. He wrote an algorithm that was used in a program published by his employer. This is like putting my (imaginary) friend Joe in jail since he was involved in writing Windows 95.
Also remember that the program is legal in Russia, and most of the rest of the world. Think of it this way. We have put him in jail for doing something, in his country, what is legal, again in his country. Next, we'll start fining German tourists for speeding, even though the actual infraction happened when they were still in Germany. Or to take it a step further, say you're a German citizen, driving (legally) at 100MPH, and you are in an accident involving an American. You live, the American dies. Based on our current path, you better not ever set foot in America. You'll probably be placed on trial for vehicular manslaughter, even though you did not break any laws in your country.
(BTW, I agree with you point, but it's important to keep these distinctions clear.)
It is also an example of one of the main arguments for such laws as the DMCA, to prevent people from just blatantly making exact digital copies of things.
That's almost correct, but not quite. The DMCA is designed to counter casual copying, not blatant copying. Certain countries are known as blatant copyright violators, but the DMCA does nothing to prevent them from continuing in this practice. Blatant violations-- such as the post in question-- are, and in most cases probably should, be illegal, even without DMCA.
Instead, the DMCA is intended to prevent you from making a copy of a cd (or whatever) that you own, even though the right to copy your own media is legally protected under several different laws (fair use, timeshifting)(though you obviously cannot distribute, loan, etc, your copy). The DMCA is, pure and simple, a way to force the average consumer to buy multiple copies of a CD, etc. It has basically no other practical value, and it does nothing to prevent organized piracy.
From the article:
"We originally got a report of a plane crash and now it seems there were multiple meteors coming down," said Tara Dolzani, a supervisor at the Schuylkill County communications center in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.
Have you EVER heard a more transparent cover up? Clearly, this is only the first stage of the invasion, so we better start preparing now! Call your neighbors, let everyone know! Head for the hills!
If artists don't see a dime, we'll have to start flipping dimes into the hats of starving artists all over the world much more often.
Yep. A Dime. That's about what most artists see out of the $18 or so bucks you just spent on that new CD. Actually, it's closer to a buck or so, but still, it's a pittance compared to what the record company gets. MP3 & digital distribution has the potential to fix this by cutting the record company out of the loop. I'd happily pay $3 to $5 for a digital copy of a CD if that money went directly to the artist. I just HATE making Hilary Rosen (& all the rest of the leaches who have never played a note in their lives) richer.
Certainly running your own SMTP server is a great solution for the slashdot crowd. But, cmon, do you really expect the avaerage small (i mean really small) business to have the resources to do this? For many businesses, this will be a MAJOR inconvenience. If you are top small to be able to afford a geek, and you're not technical enough (or to busy to) to run your own server, your screwed. Add to that the chance that Verizon may begin to use other "anti-spam" measures (like blocking port 25), and it rapidly becomes apparent that there is no way the average person can run their own server. And since Verizon is probably the only Broadband available to many of it's subscribers, and this begins to be a significant problem.
And of course this policy almost forces Verizon to begin blocking port 25. Since many people WILL now be running their own SMTP servers, but won't really understand what they are doing, suddenly Verizon will be the home to many, many open relays. So, to prevent the new spam created by their policy, they will have to block port 25. Frankly, this policy makes Earthlink's port blocking seem downright welcome (and certainly a hell of a lot more effective.).
I do not bellieve it is illegal to record a phone call for your own personal use, even in most states where there are two-party consent laws. It IS illegal, however, to share the resulting tape (or a transcript, etc.) with another person. Even if it is illegal, such a law is basically unenforceable. Unless you tell someone you have such a tape, no one will know anyway, so it's kinda hard to enforce. And of course, the resulting tape cannot be used against the uninformed party, in court or otherwise, since that would violate his assumed privacy. (Unless you're a democrat, and the republican party doesn't like you, in which case, all bets are off.)
I think you might be missing the gist of the complaint. How long after the company stops providing the service do you need to wait before you can safely dispose of the doorstop? The poster said he had not had contact for three months. Is that long enough? Six months? Ten years? I think the gist of the objection was the delay involved, not that they wanted the hardware back.
If there was a way to get the price down to 10 cents, more people might use it. At that point, though, you run the risk of alienating people by nickle-and-diminig them to do death. Most people are not going to want to pay 10 cents 3-5 times a week for a web comic. The price really isn't the issue, it's just the inconvienience.
I agree completely, and that was covered, though not specifically, in my original post. First off, the charge has to be cheap enough to not require much thought. If I could donate $.10 with two clicks (first on the link, then a second click at the transaction procesor to verify the transaction) I would do it fairly liberally. Second, for a site such as PA, the donation should be voluntary. If it's cheap & easy enough, many people will donate freely. The numbers I cited assume only 5% of visits (that works out to about 20% of visitors, assuming 4 strips per month) donate a dime. While that's only a guess as to how many would actually donate, I don't think that that is an unreasonable guess.
I think another problem is that there is just a certian amount of content out there that most people find is not worth paying for.
True, but that's another issue entirely. Just like any other commercial media, if the quality is poor enough, they wont survive. Admittedly, though, if the movie, tv & record industries are any indication, it has to be pretty poor before it's 'poor enough'.
I'd definitly be willing to pay for Dilbert (I know it's not an online comic only, but I ready it online). Supposing United Media decided they were going to start charging a small amount for access, I'd probably pay it because I find it pretty consistently funny.
I see your point, but I WOULD NOT pay under these circumstances. The whole point of micropayments is their ability to get rid of the likes of United Media. Why would I want to give a dime to United Media when I know that Scott Adams will only get $.01?
Let's face it, people are not going to pay for something they can get for free somewhere else. People have their favorites of course, but if the average consumer is suddenly faced with the prospect of paying for PA, they'll likely drop it from their bookmarks, and go read PVP, or MegaTokyo, or whatever sites still offer free content.
I don't think so. Imagine a world where you can have a link "Donate $.10 to Penny Arcade". How many people would do it? Certainly not everyone, but a substantial enough portion would to make it worthwhile. His example of PVP says 30,000 regular readers. Based on this number, let's assume a hypothetical web comic reallyfunnywebcomic.com Assuming that there are at least as many irregular readers, it's probably safe to assume that the site gets > 400,000 visits a month (I'm assuming 4 strips per month). If 5% of those visits (20,000) result in donations, the author would be bringing in ~$1800/month ($2000 - 10% transaction fee). And of course, if he no longer needs the day job, he can put more effort into the site which should generate more traffic, therefore generate more revenue...
The problem is, as Scott's articles point out, there is no viable method of donating (or charging) such a small amount. Until their is such a mechanism, we'll never really know for sure how many people will donate, but I'd happily allocate $20 of my budget a month to donate to various quality sites if the donation amount is small enough. The trick is to keep the donation small enough that your readers don't even need to consider whether they can afford to or not.
The same is true of Music. Imagine being able to buy an album in electronic form, directly from the artist, for $3. Not only would this be substantially more money then the average artist get's from a normal cd sale, they would almost certainly sell more cd's. You can then burn the cd yourself & everyone is happy. Will this eliminate piracy? Absolutely not. But, if it's cheap & easy to get a 'legal' copy, I think most people would happily do so.
Unless perhaps he thought better & changed it himself? There is no evidence to support your theory, and considering how frequently people send an email in a fit of rage & promptly wish they could get it back, I see nothing suspicious in the change.
Nice, but why no woc.zimwiz.com?
The same is with spammers; they can send out adverts, but not to people who do not want them.
Actually, the spam law doesn't even go that far. You simply can't shoot into people's home's while wearing a mask-- to take your analogy to the next step...
Clearly, YANALTYLTTYA (You are not a lawyer, though you like to think you are). You seem to have no grasp of IP law, nor do you understand the free speech issues.
Based on your repeated arguments, any website hosted on a university website belongs to the university. Hmmm... You might want to let Stanford (or was it berkley?), since they would own Yahoo! based on this reasoning.
The AUP & disclaimer cited by others clearly states that the university does not own, control, or actively monitor the material on student websites. The fact that flikx created this cite as a courtesy to the university community does not mean that he created it for the university. That's like saying that since Taco created slashdot as a service to the Linux community, Linus now owns it.
Obviously, we do not know the whole story here. It's entirely possible that Flikx left out some important details. But, based on what has been said, it sounds like the university is bullying him knowing that he can't really fight to hard-- not with his degree on the line.
And, to be fair, IANAL either.
Just to clarify, I'm not saying that his "clarification" was wrong, or legally invalid. Just that it probably did more harm then good.
I'm pretty much license agnostic. If you develop a program, license it as you see fit. However, it's important to realize that "natural selection" will occur based on your license choice, so choose carefully. A perfect example of this was cited in a previous discussion-- qmail. A strong case could be made that qmail is the premier MTD around today, yet it's nowhere near as popular as Sendmail. Obviously some of that is simply due to legacy issues. But a larger problem is quite probably the more restrictive license that DJB uses. His restrictions are in place for good reasons, but they do affect it's popularity. Is the trade off worthwhile? I don't know, but I presume that DJB (& Darren Reed) would say so.
If one wants to create a piece of software, and then give it to the open source community, nobody should go to tell him that he should release it under some particular license.
This is a bit if a a simplification of the real issue, unfortunately. The real issue is the perception that he changed the license. I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems like the new wording adds new restrictions contrary to his insistence that it is only intended as a clarification.
I agree that nobody should try to tell a developer what is the "correct" license. But by choosing to use his own license & not have it checked by a lawyer to make sure no later "clarification" was needed, Reed invited the hassles he's facing now.
You almost have it! In many cases, the GPL does "infect any program written on top of it". Of course you still must specifically choose to build your code on top of the GPL'd code, so calling it viral is flawed. I could almost buy calling it "addictive", though. After all, unlike a virus, an addict CHOSE his course of action. But of course, for the FUD monger, addictive doesn't sound as bad, so it clearly won't work for your purposes.
However, if someone has already written a fair chunk of what you want to do under the GPL, and you want to use that code, as it is the best code for the job, you MUST release your program under the GPL, as well. Sure, you COULD write your own code, but that just defeats the purpose of opensource and code sharing in the first place.
Ok, you're right. Tough luck. If Microsoft had already written the same code, you would still have to rewrite it. By this definition, closed source is viral. Obviously that's absurd.
The BSD license isn't "better" or "worse" then the GPL. They each have different, specific advantages. Some authors prefer one, other prefer the other, still others choose the license based on the project. Even closed source has it's advantages, though I personally feel that those advantages are outweighed by it's disadvantages for most types of programs. Regardless, use the license that you like & don't illegally use code that you don't have the rights to. It ain't that tough.
Nobody that is just the price for using GPL software. Anything with a price cannot be considered free.
Wrong. That is the price of redistributing an application based existing code that has been released under the GPL. That's a pretty specific set of circumstances. You must a) develop code, b) redistribute said code, and c) said code must be based on code that was GPL'd. Unless all three conditions are met, no violation has occurred. Since you must specifically choose to use the GPL'd code, calling it "viral" is FUD at it's worst & most obvious.
What a stupid, stupid analogy. I could agree if you had compared it to the engine-- I mean, the OS is arguably the engine of the computer (at least as far as the software side of things). Of course the problem with this analogy is that it counters your point. My neighbor with the 500 horsepower big block 428 (or whatever) likely has higher insurance rates then I do with my 1.9 liter 88 horsepower engine. Does that mean he's a worse driver? No. But statistically, he's more likely to have claims so he gets the higher rates.
One important thing to keep in mind, nowhere in the article did it say that this was the only determining factor. Odds are, this is only one of several questions they ask you in determining your rates. And, I imagine based on your answers, it's possible for someone running Unix to pay more then someone else running NT. The fact that this isn't specifically specified in the article does not mean that it isn't true. This is a general article, not in depth journalism. Understanding the difference between fluff press & in depth reporting is a good skill to have.