How exactly will ethanol involve trading the one for the other? We don't have closed-cycle ethanol production yet, but that's because this kind of mass-scale ethanol production is still being developed. There's absolutely no reason at all to think that cellulosic ethanol can't be produced entirely using energy from the feedstock, and maybe electricity produced using solar, wind, nuclear, or hydroelectric power.
I wasn't talking about using oil to product ethanol. Re-read my message.
Who said anything about trying to increase carbon capture? The goal is to create a mobile energy source for vehicles that is carbon-neutral. Not carbon negative, just carbon neutral.
But what about global warming? Aren't bio-fuels the holy solution to that big problem created by those evil Bush voters? Isn't that what "you people" have been preaching all those years while talking about bio-fuels?
No, you're a proud retard. I've met real conservatives and talked to them about these issues. They're not like you. They try to actually understand science, rather than just going around whining about how the hippies want to take away their SUVs.
You're just making shit out. I didn't even mentioned SUVs or talked about hippies. You really suck.
They also don't use retard terms like "right-wing".
When you used the retarded "communist" term, I assumed that you're a fan of old-fashioned, polarized terms, so I just followed your trend. I was just using normal retard-speak, as my audience (you) doesn't seems to be very smart or polite.
You don't know jack-shit about how the carbon cycle works.
No, you don't are the one that doesn't know shit about it. Youre whole theory about ethanol depends on growing sugar cane or corn on top of concrete or at the bottom of the ocean, because replacing forests or other crops with sugar cane does not help at all with the global warming CO2 issue.
Because the user owns the phone and should have the right to run any software he wants to on his property?
That's the phone owner's fight, not mine. If you want to fight the lack of control the consumer has over its own devices, that's fine, but don't infect important public licenses with your political agenda.
Because GPL software authors may not want to cooperate with vendors trying to take away that freedom from the user?
It's not about software authors, but license authors. What's next, license authors don't want the software to be used by republicans? By americans? By blacks? Asians?
What are you now, language-pedantic slashbot? A group, some, a fraction, whatever, those are just ways of citing unknown quantities. Is it more than 1%? Who knows? What are you, the environmental activist census director?
I believe they're even more than 10% of the whole activist "market". Lots of people turn to the environment cause just because they need a reason to live, because they can't seem to fit anywhere else and they hijack a very important cause just to fill a void.
You do realize that a oil wells, pipelines, refineries and all the other related infrastructure is going to destroy a lot more natural plant life than a farm, right?
No, you're wrong. Oil infrastructure is measured in thousands of square foot, instead of ACRES, like farms. It sure sucks to have an industrial city, filled with refineries, but they're not that big and a few hundred thousand sq ft worth of refineries can be enough for an entire state, while a few hundred thousand sq ft worth of farm will not be able to provide fuel even for a small city.
And since lots of US farmland is actually fallow to keep food prices up, using that land for fuel crops would probably be a good idea.
Economy-wise? Sure? But it will have a net effect of 0% on the environment.
Why clear rainforest when we've got lots of good, unused farmland here?
Well, not in Brazil. In the name of "sustainable energy" and "saving the environment from petroleum", they're destroying a lot of the amazon forest, just to sell ethanol to the US.
And here you completely fail to understand the difference between fossil fuels and biofuels. Burning ethanol and biodiesel releases CO2 that was just recently fixed by a plant. Let's say you burn 1 gallon of ethanol in your car. Now consider the CO2 level over a year-long timeframe: the CO2 level is the same.
There is no such difference. Let's think about two parts of the carbon "cycle", ok? The first part is the emission of carbon: here both kinds of fuel have the same effect. The second part is the absorption of Carbon: dino-fuel certainly doesn't help here, but bio-fuels aren't helping either. To grow sugar cane or corn, you'll have to remove whatever was occupying that land before you came, and even "unused" land contains a lot of plants. So you have a zero increase in your absorption capacity, as you're just replacing one plant for another one.
So we have a zero decrease in emissions and a zero increase in absorption: there ya go, no such thing as carbon neutral. You're releasing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while you're not doing anything to improve the planet's CO2 absorption capacity. That's not helping at all.
It's one thing to think the environmentalists are wrong, but to attribute ulterior, nefarious motives to their actions is borderline insane. Please re-read what you posted, and if you still think it's rational, see a professional.
I was talking about SOME environmentalists. Re-read my message. And next time be more polite.
The same thing goes to people who think that Bush is *trying* to destroy America (or the rest of the World), to people who think ExxonMobil is *trying* to destroy the environment, etc. They may be *doing* these things, but those are side-effects and are not their primary motivation.
Except that some enviro-nuts are actually motivated to destroy oil companies. They're watermellon militants and they don't give a crap about the environmental issue.
Might there be a very small percentage of environmentalists who want "revenge" on big oil companies? I suppose anything is possible
Then you answered my message, in a very non-polite way, just because you're not able to read properly. Congratulations.
I just had to laugh when I saw this, given that Shell in particular is investing in both ethanol and biodiesel.
Except that they're doing it for money. They need a plan-B in case their conventional oil operations gets fscked up, as they don't give a crap if they're making money selling oil, coal or magic fuel. They're in the business of making money delivering plastics (a considerable share of their profits) and gas/liquid-state (they're fixed at that because of all investiments on ducts and filling stations) energy.
I hate to toss around insults, but what a fucking retard you are!! Ethanol is the darling of farmers who want to make money because they're capitalists. See how that works? They turn corn husks and straw into ethanol, sell the ethanol, and make money. Of course, they could just keep living off of government bailouts the way they do right now... but I thought we were trying to get away from that kind of shit.
Sure, we have farmers trying to get money from ethanol. Except that they were not the subject, I was talking about the motivations of a specific group of enviro-nutjobs.
Biodiesel, meanwhile, is the darling of big industrial companies, who want to use the technologies that they developed for oil refining to turn cheap feedstocks -- like the offal from slaughterhouses, waste plastics, and so on -- into oil. They want to take cheap stuff, turn it into more valuable stuff, and sell it for money because they're capitalists. See how that works?
Same thing. You completely failed to get the specific context of that discussion. You're just throwing aroud random, unrelated facts.
You communist types make me sick. You think that everyone on earth just goes around subscribing to your stupid little ideologies. Sorry, it's not the case. Most of us are a bit more pragmatic, and would like to make some money rather than your solution of just weeping like a spanked child everytime everytime you gas up your hummer and while paying the Islamic fundamentalist oil-masters.
I'm not a communist, retard, I'm a conservative. Not far right, but a proud right-wing person. You're talking about Islamic oil: that's one reason to run away from oil, ok. But I was not talking about that, I was talking about the environment, about the whole "using biodiesel helps the environment" shit-talk.
Oh, and where do you think that the carbon in plants COMES from? That's right -- the air. It's called a cycle -- the carbon cycle. Plants consume CO2, plants die, plants rot / burn, CO2 gets released. Seriously, you ARE a retard. Possibly an inbred one, but there's no way to be sure. How do you not KNOW these things?!?
YOU are a retard. The cycle is irrelevant if you're removing one plant to grow another one. You're not increasing the carbon-capture effect, as you're removing ONE KIND of plant (sometimes natural forest) for ANOTHER one, giving you an extra 0% worth of carbon-absorption capacity. At the same time, you're trading ONE source of carbon (dino-fuel) for ANOTHER one, giving you a whole 0% worth of carbon emission savings.
The existence of advocacy for both cellulosic ethanol and algae-derived biodiesel shoots your ridiculous envirowhackery full of holes.
The existence of "advocacy for both cellulosic ethanol and algae-derived biodiesel" shoots my argumentation about the reason behind some of this advocacy? Are you nuts? My whole argument is about the advocacy you just mentioned.
Some people are bio-diesel advocates because they want to make money, some are because of other reasons, and some are because they just hate oil companies.
Biodiesel is not a carbon SOURCE. Petrodiesel is a carbon source in that it takes carbon that was NOT part of the biospheric carbon cycle before and MAKES it part of the carbon cycle.
Sugar Cane and Corn are not carbon neutral. Unless you're removing houses and buildings to replace them with sugar cane, you're not helping the environment at all. Is doesn't matter that sugar cane will get CO2 from the atmosphere, because anything growing at the same spot will achieve the same effect.
By replacing dino-fuel with ethanol, we're throwing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while the fact that growing the fuel "captures" CO2 is irrelevant because some other plant was already doing that before you removed it to plant sugar cane. So the NET EFFECT of using bio-fuels is ZERO. In fact, it's even worse, because removing natural forests to plant sugar cane is just stupid.
In theory, the CO2 that is released from burning the ethanol is reabsorbed by the plants used to make the ethanol, so there's no net CO2
In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground.
This is why ethanol and biodiesel fuels are the darlings of many environmentalists.
No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others (*). They don't give a crap about the environment and they would gladly defend taking out a lot of the amazon forest just to grow sugar cane and replace those big corporations. They are the same ones who complain about global warming while they protest against nuclear (emission free) and try to convince us that replacing dinodiesel for biodiesel is good, while it's just about trading one CO2 source for another one.
(*) Why? Because back in the 70's, when global warming was not a hot agenda yet and they were "fighting" oil spills, made by the big oil companies, both sides got excessive and people died, got bankrupt, jailed, fired, etc. That's their motivation: plain old revenge. They spent decades braiwashing the alternative youth against those companies and now their political system reached the self-sustaining state.
It is just a bunch of people who think that the best way to spread computer knowledge for the betterment of mankind is to turn software into a free commodity.
The "betterment of mankind"? Why does every politicized person describes his cause as the "betterment of mankind"?
It's not the "betterment of mankind" you, the Democrats, the Republicans, Greenpeace, PETA, Shell, or anyone else is looking for. What "you people" are looking for is the ultimate victory of "your" ideologies and interests.
Stop pretending you're doing it to save the world, just be honest: you're doing it for yourself, because you're commited to this ideology. You can try to say that you're saving the world, but until you prove that by showing some results or using some very good logic, you're just another politicized dude talking about .
It's not FUD. If your company holds a lot of patents and starts to use (meaning, for some: internally distribute) GPLv3-licensed software or, even worse, starts using L/GPLv3 libraries, you don't have any choice but to give up litigation rights or stop using the software.
If your company depends on GPL'd software, it's even worse, as you'll need a lot of investment (and time) to make the transition to another software set.
After the SECOND time he and his wife were threatened with knives and beaten, (in the centre of a major city each time), he replaced it with something rather more modest.
How can one demand license fees for something they don't have the right to license in the first place (in case of Mac OS X, which AFAIK does not allow redistribution)?
It's a per-machine distribution, as others already mentioned. The thing is, they will give you an extra discount on every single license, for two reasons:
You're buying more of the same item. Even if you're not using, you're still buying it.
You're lowering their licensing audit costs, as all they need to do is count the machines instead of inspecting their contents.
The thing is, once you reject their per-machine licensing scheme, their audits will ve very pedantic and will cost you a lot of money if any employee/student messed up and installed illegal copies of anything. And government contracts usually allow routine audits and accept full responsibility over contract breaches such as installing illegal copies.
Microsoft entered this Novell deal knowing that GPL3 would have patent clauses similar to the ASF license. Additionally the FSF has approached them and told them they consider vouchers to be indirect distribution and that GPL3 would contain language to address this. Microsoft entered into this deal of their own free will and opted for continued distribution of vouchers even with access to the text of the GPL3 drafting process. The fact MS were trying to be cute and break the GPL isn't relevant, nobody forced them to do anything.
Try again, I was talking about other companies. Take MS out of your mind.
> Even companies selling Linux boxes will not need to comply with the patent nonsense.
You can't infringe a patent by distributing code in object or source code form - see Microsoft v AT&T.
But it's not about that. It's about being forced to license their patents for free community use just because they sold a PC with Linux bundled on it or because you installed it on a client's server. It's a very dangerous licensing term that would keep most companies away from even using free software.
GPL3 requires MS to sub-license their patents, they can either cease distribution or abide by the license. Contrary to what you're saying a court will not look favorably on them litigating for patent infringement when they are knowingly conveying software under a license that requires they sub-license their patent claims to everyone.
You're just forgetting the fact that:
You can't just write any clause at all in your license and expect it to be valid under the law. So "GPL requires" is not and End-Of-Conversation-style argument.
Microsoft is not distributing and will not distribute the software directly. It really doesn't matter if GPLv3 covers indirect distribution, because copyright law does not. You don't need an mp3 decoder license to sell even mp3 chips (the original manufacturer does), even worse for selling end products. The law has a very clear definition of who's responsible for a product and "gift card"-like Novell coupons does not bind Microsoft to any term at all, Novell is the one responsible for the product.
Just like 2, even companies selling Linux boxes will not need to comply with the patent nonsense.
This kind of line of thought is very dangerous: no one will be willing to sell or use anything open-source related if that means giving up patents.
> In fact, all they need to do is cease using GPL'd software.
> No matter what is written on the GPL, the law is still the same.
Rubbish. If I distribute a movie from my website without the copyright holders permission, the remedy is not for me to stop watching it - personal viewing (or use) is not even an infringement! Come back when you have attained a basic understanding of copyright law.
Sorry, but I mentioned paying up on my other messages. In fact, you missed the entire point, read the full conversation.
My point was always that the only issue here is copyright law, that all other clauses about losing litigation rights and stuff are null. So copyright applies to GPL'd code, but some clauses are utopic. So FSF can sue Microsoft for using the software while not obeying to the license, but can't do shit about their litigation rights. Only people who live in a playground world thinks that one-sided licenses work like "AHA!!! you touched my file, you can't sue me now". If that was possibile, we would not need to sign NDAs, as just a simple license on top of the file would be enough.
Anyway, I won't repeat everything again, so a unpolite slashbot can just ignore what I say again and keep bitching. A even worse fact about your message is that unlicensed personal use of software is an infringement.
> Nobody will ever lose their right to sue for patent infringement
> because of this kind of one-sided agreement.
Microsoft themselves use these clauses, check out their original senderID license where licensee agrees never to pursue patent infringement claims against licensor. The courts can't interpret the GPL patent provisions as invalid without it having knock-on effects for all cross licensing deals.
To use the license, a signed agreement with MSFT is required. That's different from one-sided "touch this software and lose rights" licenses.
> It should read "You cannot use this software" instead of
> "You cannot sue for patent infringement".
The GPL is a copyright license, only distribution is covered. If they continue distribution they can only do so in accord with the provisions of the license. The wording for GPL3 has been tightened specifically to counter Microsofts argument that vouchers are not indirect distribution. The choice for Microsoft is clear, comply with the GPL (by licensing their patents) or cease conveying GPL'd software.
In fact, all they need to do is cease using GPL'd software. No matter what is written on the GPL, the law is still the same. You can't expect a retailer or distributor to comply with words written inside product boxes or inside the product code or definition. It's like asking akamai to give up all its patents just because they're hosting a GPL'd file. The FSF definition of distribution is very weak (I'm talking about the law), just like their abusive use of the "freedom" word.
The choice for Microsoft is very simple: don't sign anything and comply with copyright law. Means that they just need to avoid using products whose license they're not obeying. The rest is all junk. The fact that GPLv3 is a copyright license that tries to reach beyond copyright law is a GPL defect, not something for Microsoft to worry about.
You can't expect people to lose rights just because you included some text file inside the product. The Slashdot crowd is very hypocrite about this because people are always bitching about EULAs while at the same time they praise those aspects of the GPL. The only legal strenght GPL stands upon is based on copyright law, all other stuff needs a signed deal to be worth something.
When they begin conveying GPL3 software, they do so under the terms of the license either by knowingly infringing the copyrights of hundreds of GPL protected programs or by licensing their patents.
That's exactly the point: copyright infringement. It's not about losing the rights to patents but about infringing the license. All FSF can do is ask for MS to stop distributing GPLv3 software and also ask for some money for their infringement. But that's all. Nobody will ever lose their right to sue for patent infringement because of this kind of one-sided agreement.
The GPLv3 wording is utopic. It should read "You cannot use this software" instead of "You cannot sue for patent infringement".
Yes, you can. It's Fry's responsibility to make sure that you can get the source code for any GPL'ed software they have on their shelves (usually fulfilled with a download site that's on the software package).
No he can't. Fry is not distributing software, it's distributing a physical media. You people are all insane if you think that software licensing terms can be applied to retail stores. They're in the business of selling boxes, not in the software licensing market.
Anyone with half a brain already knows that Fry's will never have anything to do with whatever wording is written in the box or inside the box. From a retail store (legal) perspective, it's just a box with someone else's product inside.
What's next? Nerds writing "if you distribute this product you're allowing me to buy anything for free" inside their submissions, so they can get free stuff at Fry's?
Even the patent clause, it's weaker than most EULAs. In fact, stuff needs to have little strenght at all to be weak, so that makes the patent clause null instead of just weak. Expecting a judge to drop patent litigation rights because of product distribution is beyond stupid.
...weaker (considering the law) than "give me your first born" EULA clauses. Expecting any court in the planet to drop patent rights of a company (in relation to suing the project) because of GPLv3 is more than utopic, it's just plain stupid.
This kind of one-sided agreement never had the judicial strenght to intefere with other questions beside permission to use of the said product. This means that all OSS folks can do about Microsoft is forbid them from using GPLv3-licensed products, in case they sue someone because of said patents. The only thing the FSF can ask in court is keep Microsoft away from using the product while violating the license.
Anyone thinking that GPLv3 cute wording of what constitutional rights you're going to lose is valid, is out of his mind. Without an official signed agreement, you can't take make people abandon a specific set of their rights. It's like having a sign "by entering this house, you're allowing me to kill you" and expecting a judge to free your sorry ass when you kill a friend that was just visiting you.
Apparently, Microsoft isn't aware of the full-featured web browser that will allow the use of online office applications.
Yeah, because everyone loves pay-for-use applications. Well, I know, you'll tell me that Google's solution is free, but you probably forgot that cellphone internet connectivity is not. In fact, it's extremely expensive.
If the iPhone functionality is based on rape-me-in-the-ass internet charges, then I guess that MS dude is pretty much right: paying a high price for a phone that needs even more money to work is simply insane when you can buy a full-featured Smartphone for 1/3 of the price.
In a truly free market, so-called "intellectual property" would not exist. Everyone would be free to make whatever widgets they wanted, without having to worry about whether some whiny ass claimed to think of the idea first. That's a "free market!"
Bullshit. The economical definition of free market has nothing to do with anarchy / lack of laws. It's not about a market free of rules, but free of government intervention. A free market lacks the government as a market player, acting only as a neutral "referee".
Slashdot Mirror
EOD.
But what about global warming? Aren't bio-fuels the holy solution to that big problem created by those evil Bush voters? Isn't that what "you people" have been preaching all those years while talking about bio-fuels?
You're just making shit out. I didn't even mentioned SUVs or talked about hippies. You really suck. When you used the retarded "communist" term, I assumed that you're a fan of old-fashioned, polarized terms, so I just followed your trend. I was just using normal retard-speak, as my audience (you) doesn't seems to be very smart or polite.
No, you don't are the one that doesn't know shit about it. Youre whole theory about ethanol depends on growing sugar cane or corn on top of concrete or at the bottom of the ocean, because replacing forests or other crops with sugar cane does not help at all with the global warming CO2 issue.
It's not about software authors, but license authors. What's next, license authors don't want the software to be used by republicans? By americans? By blacks? Asians?
What are you now, language-pedantic slashbot? A group, some, a fraction, whatever, those are just ways of citing unknown quantities. Is it more than 1%? Who knows? What are you, the environmental activist census director?
I believe they're even more than 10% of the whole activist "market". Lots of people turn to the environment cause just because they need a reason to live, because they can't seem to fit anywhere else and they hijack a very important cause just to fill a void.
Economy-wise? Sure? But it will have a net effect of 0% on the environment.
Well, not in Brazil. In the name of "sustainable energy" and "saving the environment from petroleum", they're destroying a lot of the amazon forest, just to sell ethanol to the US.
There is no such difference. Let's think about two parts of the carbon "cycle", ok? The first part is the emission of carbon: here both kinds of fuel have the same effect. The second part is the absorption of Carbon: dino-fuel certainly doesn't help here, but bio-fuels aren't helping either. To grow sugar cane or corn, you'll have to remove whatever was occupying that land before you came, and even "unused" land contains a lot of plants. So you have a zero increase in your absorption capacity, as you're just replacing one plant for another one.
So we have a zero decrease in emissions and a zero increase in absorption: there ya go, no such thing as carbon neutral. You're releasing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while you're not doing anything to improve the planet's CO2 absorption capacity. That's not helping at all.
Except that some enviro-nuts are actually motivated to destroy oil companies. They're watermellon militants and they don't give a crap about the environmental issue.
Then you answered my message, in a very non-polite way, just because you're not able to read properly. Congratulations.
Sure, we have farmers trying to get money from ethanol. Except that they were not the subject, I was talking about the motivations of a specific group of enviro-nutjobs.
Same thing. You completely failed to get the specific context of that discussion. You're just throwing aroud random, unrelated facts.
I'm not a communist, retard, I'm a conservative. Not far right, but a proud right-wing person. You're talking about Islamic oil: that's one reason to run away from oil, ok. But I was not talking about that, I was talking about the environment, about the whole "using biodiesel helps the environment" shit-talk.
YOU are a retard. The cycle is irrelevant if you're removing one plant to grow another one. You're not increasing the carbon-capture effect, as you're removing ONE KIND of plant (sometimes natural forest) for ANOTHER one, giving you an extra 0% worth of carbon-absorption capacity. At the same time, you're trading ONE source of carbon (dino-fuel) for ANOTHER one, giving you a whole 0% worth of carbon emission savings.
Some people are bio-diesel advocates because they want to make money, some are because of other reasons, and some are because they just hate oil companies.
Sugar Cane and Corn are not carbon neutral. Unless you're removing houses and buildings to replace them with sugar cane, you're not helping the environment at all. Is doesn't matter that sugar cane will get CO2 from the atmosphere, because anything growing at the same spot will achieve the same effect.
By replacing dino-fuel with ethanol, we're throwing the same amount of CO2 onto the atmosphere, while the fact that growing the fuel "captures" CO2 is irrelevant because some other plant was already doing that before you removed it to plant sugar cane. So the NET EFFECT of using bio-fuels is ZERO. In fact, it's even worse, because removing natural forests to plant sugar cane is just stupid.
No, ethanol and biodiesel are the darlings of a group of environmentalists whose cause is just about trying to destroy Exxon, Shell and others (*). They don't give a crap about the environment and they would gladly defend taking out a lot of the amazon forest just to grow sugar cane and replace those big corporations. They are the same ones who complain about global warming while they protest against nuclear (emission free) and try to convince us that replacing dinodiesel for biodiesel is good, while it's just about trading one CO2 source for another one.
(*) Why? Because back in the 70's, when global warming was not a hot agenda yet and they were "fighting" oil spills, made by the big oil companies, both sides got excessive and people died, got bankrupt, jailed, fired, etc. That's their motivation: plain old revenge. They spent decades braiwashing the alternative youth against those companies and now their political system reached the self-sustaining state.
It's not the "betterment of mankind" you, the Democrats, the Republicans, Greenpeace, PETA, Shell, or anyone else is looking for. What "you people" are looking for is the ultimate victory of "your" ideologies and interests.
Stop pretending you're doing it to save the world, just be honest: you're doing it for yourself, because you're commited to this ideology. You can try to say that you're saving the world, but until you prove that by showing some results or using some very good logic, you're just another politicized dude talking about .
If your company depends on GPL'd software, it's even worse, as you'll need a lot of investment (and time) to make the transition to another software set.
- You're buying more of the same item. Even if you're not using, you're still buying it.
- You're lowering their licensing audit costs, as all they need to do is count the machines instead of inspecting their contents.
The thing is, once you reject their per-machine licensing scheme, their audits will ve very pedantic and will cost you a lot of money if any employee/student messed up and installed illegal copies of anything. And government contracts usually allow routine audits and accept full responsibility over contract breaches such as installing illegal copies.About the rest, agreeing to disagree, ok.
My point was always that the only issue here is copyright law, that all other clauses about losing litigation rights and stuff are null. So copyright applies to GPL'd code, but some clauses are utopic. So FSF can sue Microsoft for using the software while not obeying to the license, but can't do shit about their litigation rights. Only people who live in a playground world thinks that one-sided licenses work like "AHA!!! you touched my file, you can't sue me now". If that was possibile, we would not need to sign NDAs, as just a simple license on top of the file would be enough.
Anyway, I won't repeat everything again, so a unpolite slashbot can just ignore what I say again and keep bitching. A even worse fact about your message is that unlicensed personal use of software is an infringement.
Come back when you stop being an ass.
In fact, all they need to do is cease using GPL'd software. No matter what is written on the GPL, the law is still the same. You can't expect a retailer or distributor to comply with words written inside product boxes or inside the product code or definition. It's like asking akamai to give up all its patents just because they're hosting a GPL'd file. The FSF definition of distribution is very weak (I'm talking about the law), just like their abusive use of the "freedom" word.
The choice for Microsoft is very simple: don't sign anything and comply with copyright law. Means that they just need to avoid using products whose license they're not obeying. The rest is all junk. The fact that GPLv3 is a copyright license that tries to reach beyond copyright law is a GPL defect, not something for Microsoft to worry about.
You can't expect people to lose rights just because you included some text file inside the product. The Slashdot crowd is very hypocrite about this because people are always bitching about EULAs while at the same time they praise those aspects of the GPL. The only legal strenght GPL stands upon is based on copyright law, all other stuff needs a signed deal to be worth something.
The GPLv3 wording is utopic. It should read "You cannot use this software" instead of "You cannot sue for patent infringement".
Anyone with half a brain already knows that Fry's will never have anything to do with whatever wording is written in the box or inside the box. From a retail store (legal) perspective, it's just a box with someone else's product inside.
What's next? Nerds writing "if you distribute this product you're allowing me to buy anything for free" inside their submissions, so they can get free stuff at Fry's?
Even the patent clause, it's weaker than most EULAs. In fact, stuff needs to have little strenght at all to be weak, so that makes the patent clause null instead of just weak. Expecting a judge to drop patent litigation rights because of product distribution is beyond stupid.
...weaker (considering the law) than "give me your first born" EULA clauses. Expecting any court in the planet to drop patent rights of a company (in relation to suing the project) because of GPLv3 is more than utopic, it's just plain stupid.
This kind of one-sided agreement never had the judicial strenght to intefere with other questions beside permission to use of the said product. This means that all OSS folks can do about Microsoft is forbid them from using GPLv3-licensed products, in case they sue someone because of said patents. The only thing the FSF can ask in court is keep Microsoft away from using the product while violating the license.
Anyone thinking that GPLv3 cute wording of what constitutional rights you're going to lose is valid, is out of his mind. Without an official signed agreement, you can't take make people abandon a specific set of their rights. It's like having a sign "by entering this house, you're allowing me to kill you" and expecting a judge to free your sorry ass when you kill a friend that was just visiting you.
If the iPhone functionality is based on rape-me-in-the-ass internet charges, then I guess that MS dude is pretty much right: paying a high price for a phone that needs even more money to work is simply insane when you can buy a full-featured Smartphone for 1/3 of the price.