I think the store was clearly wrong not to return the drive upon demand as the customer paid full price. From other posts Apple has a policy to handle this situation some PHB at the counter wasn't willing to pull out the right "contract" and make the customer's request right.
the key to the comparison is that it's still your CHOICE to return the part or not.. and lose the core deposit refund.
In this case Apple is simply charging for the full cost of out-of-warranty replacement part.. there is no "core charge" here. While it's good to recycle, Apple isn't really using that excuse. They're more than likely returning the part for warranty. After all, to offer Applecare warranty they probably demand a 3-5 year warranty even though they only pass on one to the end users... This is probably simple double-dipping, charging YOU for the full cost, and then getting warranty claim as well. Nothing to see here... move on.
In my opinion, that's the main reason to be pro-GPL versus BSD. If the big players want extreme-IP then we might as well benefit as a community by the increased strictness!! it's sort of using their own rules against them. Companies like Microsoft or the RIAA can't propose to "lessen" licenses like GPL because their own rules are so much less fair.
they want total information control. Their news and only their news... all the time. Cracking down under the name of "copyright" makes it less "negative" to the western cultures... gotta be lawful and all. It also has lots of American companies willing to jump right in and build better filters in hopes they can sell them in the USA too.
What they want is people "watching the watchers" and reporting to them if the watchers "miss" anything... Total control. The idea of personal freedom as absolute is a unique American ideal... and even most American's don't really believe in it.. witness all the anti-gay, anti-abortion.. that still goes on trying to run people's bedroom time. Other countries have no concept of "personal opinion" if you're saying wrong, you're thinking wrong and need fixed.. period. In Europe its and "illness" in Asia and Africa "criminal". Either way they'd like to know who's "ill" and it's important for all companies to help those people.
but the issue is dealing with those pesky zero-day exploits.. the ones you don't know about yet. If you have all Windows there are zero-day attacks that work on EVERY released version after XP... a kid with idle time can just run the same attack over and over thru your whole chain. If you have multiple systems, then the attack stops somewhere and they have to be good enough to build bridges between targets, installing software and reconfiguring... There's some parts of each OS that are near bulletproof, if you have to get thru the best parts of multiple OSes you're not going to be doing cracking for a living. those skills knock the pool of successful attackers way down.
Look at it this way, put in a Cisco firewall and block all the known-attacked ports at the router. That turns away the easy kiddies. Behind that put something like Mac, BSD, or Linux just to answer the needed services and packet forward from your actual workhorse servers... Give each server precisely one unique task so cross-application attacks don't work. You've isolated your weaker windows machines, but not limited their performance in anyway.. they don't have to put up with random internet attacks. You've limited your hacker to only being able to access one kind of data at a time, if they do break in. Once they realize they're not going to get anything useful, they'll move on. Add some active intrusion detection and it it's easy to pick out who's "trying the doors" quickly.
security thru variation!! if you vary the outward facing machines then one "magic" script kiddie won't get thru all the security. If you make Mac the outside firewall/service provider then fewer attacks will be attempted as fewer people know how to attack macs... then they'll get to the next level and have to hack Win 2003, etc. If you make clever use of security layers you can stagger your vulnerabilities so no one hacker will see the whole security stack at once. It's not PERFECT security, but it's good enough to know when people are trying to go where they're not supposed to.
no, this is less evil than that. The Chinese internet "security" market colluded with the copyright lobby to get this new law passed as it will require MORE spending on the "great firewall of china". Next article will be the Chinese court requiring Yahoo to pony up huge amounts for software and hardware to "protect copyrights".
These are US companies doing the lobbying... China is the prototype for what the US "security"/"morality" market wants the US govt to pass into law.
the problem artists have is they aren't told up front how much getting that one hit will cost. The labels pay for NOTHING out of their pockets... they recoup it all, much like Amway or Avon that gets moms to "sell" for them. Usually, the "payola" comes from the ARTISTS budget, any demo tracks, like free iTunes are comped at full royalties to the other royalty getters from the artist's CD profits... Concert promotion is paid up front from the Artist's account. The instruments, studio, manager, janitor.. all comped by the artist, and chosen by the label-supported manager.
Any artist that won't "pay to play" won't get a contract, and won't get good players... that's how the industry works. If you're a manager, studio player, engineer, set maker's unions etc. they get reasonable money, like average IT workers ($75-$100k).... but from the backs of these overcharged new artists. In the industry it's seen as "dues" by those that have crawled out from under it... but can't actually record because they still "owe" the label, so they work studios for cheap.
That's how it works now. The record labels don't "make" artists take big advances or use the most expensive studio.. of course the label backed Manager does, because it lines their pockets. When the dust settles THEN artists find out the money they spend on recording, guitars, videos, etc was really coming out of THEIR pay... Labels conveniently don't tell artist the truth when spending their money and management is often in on the swindle. Artists don't see the "standard terms" until the money's spent and they owe the label.. and the IRS taxes.
If entertainment was held to GAAP accounting like every other business with proper approvals, signatures, and reciepts, this would be more apparent, but they get huge tax breaks, deferments, and labor regulation favors in the name of "starving" artists and producers.
back to the usual copyright inflation tricks. we got this better law passed in some second class country so to be fair you should do it too... look how that's working in Canada or Sweden trying to get a DMCA, or in Britian to extend Beatles rights because "other countries" already have.
these new royalties wouldn't be in the contract so the artists get NONE of this. just like Ringtones. The law states radio companies pay Soundforge that pays record companies.. artists cleverly aren't mentioned directly,.
no it won't. This is a law for ALL music played.. and ALL the royalties go thru SoundForge. Even if you make a song and hand it to them, radio still has to pay the royalties... so for small people the answer is "who are you" and "we can't find your name in the computer" they can't pay you so they can't play you. Isn't federal law great!
D) people are hoarding Wii base systems to ebay them and not play them. Nintendo is making balanced shipments based on the titles they know are selling, say, 2 extra wiimotes per system. Extras are on the shelf because Wiis are not being bought by players. Note in the early days, separate Wiimotes went about as fast as Wiis as most people bought a Wii then went back a few days later for the extra remotes. I'd doubt Nintendo is making MORE than 4:1 extra wiimotes.
there's more reasons to keep this stuff for civil suits than criminal suits anyway.
Many business are conducting business via email (or worse IM) Think not about "executives", but contractors or real estate agents always on the move sending instructions back to the office via blackberry to buy/sell or to approve a worked up quote. Things that need to be closed today, so checks can be written and the best price for the company obtained.
That info needs to be captured... Your company needed that house sold now! but you need some kind of proof to hold the buyer too that they approved the sale.. or the buyer may need proof they told the agent to put in the buy order and they forgot to tell the office. While we live in a world of written contracts, much of "business" is being in the right place, at the right time to get an extra good price because somebody needs something bought or sold right "now". But that needs to be documented somehow to cover your butt if somebody cries "foul" a week later.
ODF at its heart is a zipped folder of unicode formated text files. In 10 years when nobody cares you can still fire up a perl parser and run thru the files in a standard fashion to pick out your data. OOXML doesn't ever guarantee you will get by with anything less than a full office suite.
My state Michigan adds 16 cents per gallon, plus the federal 40 cents. the highest single state I could find was 32 cents... average for all states was 62 cents of tax total. Consider that those taxes are the same as when gas was under $2 per gallon and oil companies are getting a steal to sell their product... they've marked the price of gas up 300%+ from several years ago. Why shouldn't the state that need money for roads take a bigger cut, obviously customers are willing to pay more for gas than they thought.
but in this case the response is to the original grant of the search request.. that was illegally granted without right to challenge. The AG's response is that the RIAA didn't have legal standing to ASK for the searches.. and that the judge had no legal right to grant the subpoena to the school in the first place under state law. The RIAA already did an end run around the rules. The AG is stepping in and saying the rules were never followed in the first place.
The RIAA is using a tactic similar to SCO, when they issued out-of-district subpoenas to IBM employees on vacation. The judge of the case told SCO questions were done. SCO went to another judge in another district and got depositions scheduled anyway. When IBM lawyers tried to break it SCO tried saying the depositions were on because showing up to the "illegal" deposition put it "in play". Any system that plays this carelessly with right and wrong versus "rules" is already doomed.
but in this case the "challenge" is to the ex-parte subpoena of student records. This is a reply to the RIAA's first shot, the only contact with the case that the University has had, if you will. They're still trying to claim the original subpoena was in force when clearly this is a direct challenge to that fact. The AD is saying they have no right to ask what they are asking, and they're claiming they already asked so it can't be challenged? They're attempting to abuse the process because they won't like the outcome.
corn derived ethanol is the only practical alternative to gasoline and it's renewable. Originally Cars were build to run on ethanol, but somebody discovered oil and got to be bigshots about the same time cars started rolling off the lines, so politically Oil was chosen.
As far as helping farmers that is a good thing. We subsidize farmers because they are so efficient at only 5% of the population we can't afford any more to go out of business or we'll have that arable land go to waste and natural disasters will make people starve. So we pay farmers some money so that we have geographic diversity in our crops so the other 95% of us don't starve. As far as subsidies, we have found a product farmers can sell, so maybe they won't need them.. then people will have to pay fair value for their food every day instead of the govt doing it for them. Isn't getting farmers OFF subsidy something to work toward as you seem so set against it? Why should your food price matter more than farmers profits?
As far as the govt subsidizing ethanol, the oil companies are doing a good job on their own. They kept the gas taxes artificially low for decades so ethanol wouldn't be able to compete, build up economy of scale with the price of gas. Now that gas is $3.00+ a gallon, ethanol is economically viable.. it just has to be encouraged long enough to "grow up".
As far as the environmental aspect, all energy (except nuclear) comes from the sun.. even oil is just stored up sunlight from a rather large environmental disaster millions of years ago.... how many dinos died to fill your tank? The amount of energy available to mankind comes from the Sun period. We can capture it thru wind, the water cycle (dams), the gravitational cycle (tides), sunlight, etc. but ultimately we have to learn to work with in that limit to have a self-sustaining society. We should limit the use of fossil fuels to building things that can capture natural solar power.
with gas prices at $3.00 for the future, the govt should get their cut too. The highest gas taxes are in the 30 CENT per gallon range... those should be increased to 60-90 cents. Sure that would suck, but we're already paying it. It would help get thru that we need to start using less gas. At this point the laws are structured to Allow at all costs people to drive the biggest SUVs and somehow expect auto makers to push the "efficient" cars on enough of the "geeks" to pad the numbers. We've been at "war" over oil for 6 years and the top pushed models are all SUVs? The govt instead of pushing people to conserve in time of war and use less, keeps trying to justify letting auto makers build Bigger SUVs at the expense of the small, efficient models customers request.
you have a point about big vehicles subsidizing smaller ones but not what you think. The US industry can make cheap cars, but has to "hide" thousands of dollars of markup in each one. On a small, high MPG car, that's hard to do, but on a big SUV with DVD, moving seats, etc, you can double the price of the "extras" over market value and still make the SUV look reasonable. Also that 6000lbs SUV tax credit really sucked as it knocked thousands off the overall price. Instead of pushing the auto makers to make more small cars these rules do the opposite. They don't want to market small, affordable cars as that would be bad for profits... The best mileage cars made on US soil are all Toyotas and Hondas. But even their parent companies won't release the REALLY high mileage cars over here that are required in Japan.
GM cars are crap for mileage. Even the tiny Aveo gets crap mileage.. my Nissan Sentra from 1984 got 10mpg better than that car does.. and Aveo's not actually MADE in the USA! A model T gets 25mpg... and weighed close to a minivan, in 100 years we haven't done better?
but Microsoft's people don't stick around for years on a project. They don't "own" it. They are very smart, but highly transit in their work. Then of course, the MBAs in management decide to only use half the features of the product and DRM the rest... for "sales" purposes, so the product comes out crappy.
Witness Xbox vs Vista. Microsoft devs wrote TWO full versions of Xbox hardware and software that actually exceeded expectations twice. While Vista, the flagship product, took longer than BOTH versions of Xbox and failed to meet advertised features, let alone customer expectation. The problem isn't developer coding prowess.. it's management! And note, the guys that created Xbox were gone to VP positions or their own companies with in the first year of release.. They'd know nothing about the current version... it was "just a job" to them.
read that as collaboration to get results... it said nothing about SHARING CREDIT. If you look at their "open" licenses, they love to share, as long as MICROSOFT goes at the top of the page, always. Open source is just another tool to get people in the fold. Open Source doesn't really hurt in the markets they don't sell software in, or think are important, an it keeps any one competitor from ever growing big enough to challenge Microsoft should they choose to buy out their "open" code and sell it. (hint: they already do that) I think he's seen the "light" of software patents & DMCA. They could open half the Windows utilities up under MIT or such if they wanted... but tied to their dev tools and with software patents you could never get out from under that. Microsoft seems to be testing the bounds of that "open cage" theory.. they're looking for a legal structure to put an "invisible fence" collar on the OSS dogs.
But the firefox copyrights are still there. Those aren't removed. In these cases people go thru ALL the file headers trying to remove the other person's name thinking nobody will notice. In the case of Iceweasel, Mozilla requested the trademarks of firefox (not copyright notifications) be removed in accordance with the license terms included with all the versions. Debian changed the name because the license required it. The copyrights are still 100% intact.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the store was clearly wrong not to return the drive upon demand as the customer paid full price. From other posts Apple has a policy to handle this situation some PHB at the counter wasn't willing to pull out the right "contract" and make the customer's request right.
the key to the comparison is that it's still your CHOICE to return the part or not.. and lose the core deposit refund.
In this case Apple is simply charging for the full cost of out-of-warranty replacement part.. there is no "core charge" here. While it's good to recycle, Apple isn't really using that excuse. They're more than likely returning the part for warranty. After all, to offer Applecare warranty they probably demand a 3-5 year warranty even though they only pass on one to the end users... This is probably simple double-dipping, charging YOU for the full cost, and then getting warranty claim as well. Nothing to see here... move on.
In my opinion, that's the main reason to be pro-GPL versus BSD. If the big players want extreme-IP then we might as well benefit as a community by the increased strictness!! it's sort of using their own rules against them. Companies like Microsoft or the RIAA can't propose to "lessen" licenses like GPL because their own rules are so much less fair.
they want total information control. Their news and only their news... all the time. Cracking down under the name of "copyright" makes it less "negative" to the western cultures... gotta be lawful and all. It also has lots of American companies willing to jump right in and build better filters in hopes they can sell them in the USA too.
What they want is people "watching the watchers" and reporting to them if the watchers "miss" anything... Total control. The idea of personal freedom as absolute is a unique American ideal... and even most American's don't really believe in it.. witness all the anti-gay, anti-abortion.. that still goes on trying to run people's bedroom time. Other countries have no concept of "personal opinion" if you're saying wrong, you're thinking wrong and need fixed.. period. In Europe its and "illness" in Asia and Africa "criminal". Either way they'd like to know who's "ill" and it's important for all companies to help those people.
but the issue is dealing with those pesky zero-day exploits.. the ones you don't know about yet. If you have all Windows there are zero-day attacks that work on EVERY released version after XP... a kid with idle time can just run the same attack over and over thru your whole chain. If you have multiple systems, then the attack stops somewhere and they have to be good enough to build bridges between targets, installing software and reconfiguring... There's some parts of each OS that are near bulletproof, if you have to get thru the best parts of multiple OSes you're not going to be doing cracking for a living. those skills knock the pool of successful attackers way down.
Look at it this way, put in a Cisco firewall and block all the known-attacked ports at the router. That turns away the easy kiddies. Behind that put something like Mac, BSD, or Linux just to answer the needed services and packet forward from your actual workhorse servers... Give each server precisely one unique task so cross-application attacks don't work. You've isolated your weaker windows machines, but not limited their performance in anyway.. they don't have to put up with random internet attacks. You've limited your hacker to only being able to access one kind of data at a time, if they do break in. Once they realize they're not going to get anything useful, they'll move on. Add some active intrusion detection and it it's easy to pick out who's "trying the doors" quickly.
security thru variation!! if you vary the outward facing machines then one "magic" script kiddie won't get thru all the security. If you make Mac the outside firewall/service provider then fewer attacks will be attempted as fewer people know how to attack macs... then they'll get to the next level and have to hack Win 2003, etc. If you make clever use of security layers you can stagger your vulnerabilities so no one hacker will see the whole security stack at once. It's not PERFECT security, but it's good enough to know when people are trying to go where they're not supposed to.
no, this is less evil than that. The Chinese internet "security" market colluded with the copyright lobby to get this new law passed as it will require MORE spending on the "great firewall of china". Next article will be the Chinese court requiring Yahoo to pony up huge amounts for software and hardware to "protect copyrights".
These are US companies doing the lobbying... China is the prototype for what the US "security"/"morality" market wants the US govt to pass into law.
the problem artists have is they aren't told up front how much getting that one hit will cost. The labels pay for NOTHING out of their pockets... they recoup it all, much like Amway or Avon that gets moms to "sell" for them. Usually, the "payola" comes from the ARTISTS budget, any demo tracks, like free iTunes are comped at full royalties to the other royalty getters from the artist's CD profits... Concert promotion is paid up front from the Artist's account. The instruments, studio, manager, janitor.. all comped by the artist, and chosen by the label-supported manager.
Any artist that won't "pay to play" won't get a contract, and won't get good players... that's how the industry works. If you're a manager, studio player, engineer, set maker's unions etc. they get reasonable money, like average IT workers ($75-$100k).... but from the backs of these overcharged new artists. In the industry it's seen as "dues" by those that have crawled out from under it... but can't actually record because they still "owe" the label, so they work studios for cheap.
That's how it works now. The record labels don't "make" artists take big advances or use the most expensive studio.. of course the label backed Manager does, because it lines their pockets. When the dust settles THEN artists find out the money they spend on recording, guitars, videos, etc was really coming out of THEIR pay... Labels conveniently don't tell artist the truth when spending their money and management is often in on the swindle. Artists don't see the "standard terms" until the money's spent and they owe the label.. and the IRS taxes.
If entertainment was held to GAAP accounting like every other business with proper approvals, signatures, and reciepts, this would be more apparent, but they get huge tax breaks, deferments, and labor regulation favors in the name of "starving" artists and producers.
back to the usual copyright inflation tricks. we got this better law passed in some second class country so to be fair you should do it too... look how that's working in Canada or Sweden trying to get a DMCA, or in Britian to extend Beatles rights because "other countries" already have.
these new royalties wouldn't be in the contract so the artists get NONE of this. just like Ringtones. The law states radio companies pay Soundforge that pays record companies.. artists cleverly aren't mentioned directly,.
no the stations still have to pay the same per song...it's law. the RIAA just pockets the cash because they don't have the artist signed up to pay.
no it won't. This is a law for ALL music played.. and ALL the royalties go thru SoundForge. Even if you make a song and hand it to them, radio still has to pay the royalties... so for small people the answer is "who are you" and "we can't find your name in the computer" they can't pay you so they can't play you. Isn't federal law great!
D) people are hoarding Wii base systems to ebay them and not play them. Nintendo is making balanced shipments based on the titles they know are selling, say, 2 extra wiimotes per system. Extras are on the shelf because Wiis are not being bought by players. Note in the early days, separate Wiimotes went about as fast as Wiis as most people bought a Wii then went back a few days later for the extra remotes. I'd doubt Nintendo is making MORE than 4:1 extra wiimotes.
there's more reasons to keep this stuff for civil suits than criminal suits anyway.
Many business are conducting business via email (or worse IM) Think not about "executives", but contractors or real estate agents always on the move sending instructions back to the office via blackberry to buy/sell or to approve a worked up quote. Things that need to be closed today, so checks can be written and the best price for the company obtained.
That info needs to be captured... Your company needed that house sold now! but you need some kind of proof to hold the buyer too that they approved the sale.. or the buyer may need proof they told the agent to put in the buy order and they forgot to tell the office. While we live in a world of written contracts, much of "business" is being in the right place, at the right time to get an extra good price because somebody needs something bought or sold right "now". But that needs to be documented somehow to cover your butt if somebody cries "foul" a week later.
ODF at its heart is a zipped folder of unicode formated text files. In 10 years when nobody cares you can still fire up a perl parser and run thru the files in a standard fashion to pick out your data. OOXML doesn't ever guarantee you will get by with anything less than a full office suite.
My state Michigan adds 16 cents per gallon, plus the federal 40 cents. the highest single state I could find was 32 cents... average for all states was 62 cents of tax total. Consider that those taxes are the same as when gas was under $2 per gallon and oil companies are getting a steal to sell their product... they've marked the price of gas up 300%+ from several years ago. Why shouldn't the state that need money for roads take a bigger cut, obviously customers are willing to pay more for gas than they thought.
http://www.michigangasprices.com/tax_info.aspx
but in this case the response is to the original grant of the search request.. that was illegally granted without right to challenge. The AG's response is that the RIAA didn't have legal standing to ASK for the searches.. and that the judge had no legal right to grant the subpoena to the school in the first place under state law. The RIAA already did an end run around the rules. The AG is stepping in and saying the rules were never followed in the first place.
The RIAA is using a tactic similar to SCO, when they issued out-of-district subpoenas to IBM employees on vacation. The judge of the case told SCO questions were done. SCO went to another judge in another district and got depositions scheduled anyway. When IBM lawyers tried to break it SCO tried saying the depositions were on because showing up to the "illegal" deposition put it "in play". Any system that plays this carelessly with right and wrong versus "rules" is already doomed.
but in this case the "challenge" is to the ex-parte subpoena of student records. This is a reply to the RIAA's first shot, the only contact with the case that the University has had, if you will. They're still trying to claim the original subpoena was in force when clearly this is a direct challenge to that fact. The AD is saying they have no right to ask what they are asking, and they're claiming they already asked so it can't be challenged? They're attempting to abuse the process because they won't like the outcome.
corn derived ethanol is the only practical alternative to gasoline and it's renewable. Originally Cars were build to run on ethanol, but somebody discovered oil and got to be bigshots about the same time cars started rolling off the lines, so politically Oil was chosen.
As far as helping farmers that is a good thing. We subsidize farmers because they are so efficient at only 5% of the population we can't afford any more to go out of business or we'll have that arable land go to waste and natural disasters will make people starve. So we pay farmers some money so that we have geographic diversity in our crops so the other 95% of us don't starve. As far as subsidies, we have found a product farmers can sell, so maybe they won't need them.. then people will have to pay fair value for their food every day instead of the govt doing it for them. Isn't getting farmers OFF subsidy something to work toward as you seem so set against it? Why should your food price matter more than farmers profits?
As far as the govt subsidizing ethanol, the oil companies are doing a good job on their own. They kept the gas taxes artificially low for decades so ethanol wouldn't be able to compete, build up economy of scale with the price of gas. Now that gas is $3.00+ a gallon, ethanol is economically viable.. it just has to be encouraged long enough to "grow up".
As far as the environmental aspect, all energy (except nuclear) comes from the sun.. even oil is just stored up sunlight from a rather large environmental disaster millions of years ago.... how many dinos died to fill your tank? The amount of energy available to mankind comes from the Sun period. We can capture it thru wind, the water cycle (dams), the gravitational cycle (tides), sunlight, etc. but ultimately we have to learn to work with in that limit to have a self-sustaining society. We should limit the use of fossil fuels to building things that can capture natural solar power.
with gas prices at $3.00 for the future, the govt should get their cut too. The highest gas taxes are in the 30 CENT per gallon range... those should be increased to 60-90 cents. Sure that would suck, but we're already paying it. It would help get thru that we need to start using less gas. At this point the laws are structured to Allow at all costs people to drive the biggest SUVs and somehow expect auto makers to push the "efficient" cars on enough of the "geeks" to pad the numbers. We've been at "war" over oil for 6 years and the top pushed models are all SUVs? The govt instead of pushing people to conserve in time of war and use less, keeps trying to justify letting auto makers build Bigger SUVs at the expense of the small, efficient models customers request.
you have a point about big vehicles subsidizing smaller ones but not what you think. The US industry can make cheap cars, but has to "hide" thousands of dollars of markup in each one. On a small, high MPG car, that's hard to do, but on a big SUV with DVD, moving seats, etc, you can double the price of the "extras" over market value and still make the SUV look reasonable. Also that 6000lbs SUV tax credit really sucked as it knocked thousands off the overall price. Instead of pushing the auto makers to make more small cars these rules do the opposite. They don't want to market small, affordable cars as that would be bad for profits... The best mileage cars made on US soil are all Toyotas and Hondas. But even their parent companies won't release the REALLY high mileage cars over here that are required in Japan.
GM cars are crap for mileage. Even the tiny Aveo gets crap mileage.. my Nissan Sentra from 1984 got 10mpg better than that car does.. and Aveo's not actually MADE in the USA! A model T gets 25mpg... and weighed close to a minivan, in 100 years we haven't done better?
but Microsoft's people don't stick around for years on a project. They don't "own" it. They are very smart, but highly transit in their work. Then of course, the MBAs in management decide to only use half the features of the product and DRM the rest... for "sales" purposes, so the product comes out crappy.
Witness Xbox vs Vista. Microsoft devs wrote TWO full versions of Xbox hardware and software that actually exceeded expectations twice. While Vista, the flagship product, took longer than BOTH versions of Xbox and failed to meet advertised features, let alone customer expectation. The problem isn't developer coding prowess.. it's management! And note, the guys that created Xbox were gone to VP positions or their own companies with in the first year of release.. They'd know nothing about the current version... it was "just a job" to them.
read that as collaboration to get results... it said nothing about SHARING CREDIT. If you look at their "open" licenses, they love to share, as long as MICROSOFT goes at the top of the page, always. Open source is just another tool to get people in the fold. Open Source doesn't really hurt in the markets they don't sell software in, or think are important, an it keeps any one competitor from ever growing big enough to challenge Microsoft should they choose to buy out their "open" code and sell it. (hint: they already do that) I think he's seen the "light" of software patents & DMCA. They could open half the Windows utilities up under MIT or such if they wanted... but tied to their dev tools and with software patents you could never get out from under that. Microsoft seems to be testing the bounds of that "open cage" theory.. they're looking for a legal structure to put an "invisible fence" collar on the OSS dogs.
But the firefox copyrights are still there. Those aren't removed. In these cases people go thru ALL the file headers trying to remove the other person's name thinking nobody will notice. In the case of Iceweasel, Mozilla requested the trademarks of firefox (not copyright notifications) be removed in accordance with the license terms included with all the versions. Debian changed the name because the license required it. The copyrights are still 100% intact.