As far as I know, using a codec for personal use to decode media is not easily (and certainly not routinely) punished, though I may be mistaken. Obviously commercial software has been pulled off the shelves for illegally using codecs, like the DVD backup software a few years back, but I don't recall ever hearing about end users of it being sued, let alone convicted. Decoding MP3s with LAME or installing the Win32 codecs on a Debian system is probably not going to land you in the slammer, and I've never been afraid to click Yes.
On the other hand, reading through a EULA for perfectly legitimate software and codecs (as some people have already pointed out in earlier comments) is downright scary. You know you're not breaking any law in using the software on the othr end of an MS EULA, but I'm much more hesitant to click Yes on those than on a simple legal warning suggesting that my country's patent and copyright laws might be a bit too severe.
It doesn't matter. There could be 3,000 distributions and counting and it wouldn't make the Linux world any more of a mess than it is now, because you don't have to be familiar with any more than one or two distributions to implement and maintain Linux in a corporate environment. If 10,000 new distributions were to spring up tonight, tomorrow morning you'd still find that companies pick Red Hat or SuSE. They provide the best-known enterprise support. This is particularly true if a company uses Oracle databases, since they are only certified to run in a finite number of environments.
New distributions (and the existing ones) are not "forks," but rather different builds based upon the same code base. It's not like they'll end up with entirely different kernels in a couple years - what's in the pipeline for major projects like Linux and Xorg will be in the pipeline for all of these distributions. Companies can choose amongst the majors without too much pain, as most Linux-supporting staff are familiar with more than one distro.
Personal desktop systems will largely be *buntu or Fedora, with small numbers of enthusiasts using other distributions.
The notion that an increasing number of distributions equals increasing complexity is a delusion. Let's get over it.
A lot of people have commented that the conspiracy plot was the real meat of the show, and the non-conspiracy episodes were a waste of time. And a lot of people have commented that the oddball episodes were the only interesting ones, and the conspiracy got stale. I personally think the success of the show comes down to having both types of episodes. Obviously the FBI was not going to hire these two agents to investigate one single controversial case for a decade. It made sense that they had shifting responsibilities. The conspiracy would have gotten stale a lot sooner if this hadn't been the case.
That said, a movie always has to be bigger than an episode (*cough* Star Trek V *cough*) and if this is just a monster-of-the-week episode with a scope that is smaller than that of the previous film, and if they make no mention of the overall story arc whatsoever, it could end up being a waste of celluloid. They'd be safer making the movies exclusively about the conspiracy.
I've been visiting Digg a lot lately and I'd have to say that the dupe level there is far worse, especially lately. The difference is editorial control, which Digg's "wisdom of the crowds" can't really match. A zillion people picking front page stories are going to pick dupes, whereas the once-a-week rate here is considerably better.
Oh, I'm not moaning - it could turn out well, and sponsorship of a company like Apple can be a great thing. But the timing of the buyout, right when the GPL3 is possibly looming for many OSS projects, is interesting. It certainly hints that the GPL3 may be the reason for the purchase. If Apple were to put a GPL3 CUPS on the AppleTV or osme similar product they'd probably waive some patent rights by selling the product.
No, you're the only one who got the point and someone needs to mod you up. This is quite wrong:
Apple has not put themselves into a position of power over the FLOSS community with this move, as a GPL3 fork could be started at the drop of a hat, from whatever the last compatible release was.
Apple is in a position of power because they now own the CUPS copyright. They are only distributing it under GPL2/LGPL2, and it is not, and has never been available under that license "or any later version," so we can't make a GPL3 fork. The only entity that can get it into GPL3 (or any other license) is the copyright holder.
In the short term this is fine, as GPL2 is a good license. But Apple reserves the right to stop licensing it under the GPL. You could fork the project, but your forks would always have to be GPL2 forks (again, this is not exactly a disaster). But Apple can also make their own internal company modifications specifically for OS X, yet not release the changes to the community. They are no longer obliged to release the OS X version's changes because it will presumably be covered by the Apple EULA instead of the GPL. The only legal escape is to wait until the copyright expires in 70 years or so, then take the expired version's public domain code as your own and license it under the GPL3 or whatever. Get back to me in 70 years if you decide to try that. I'll beam over and help you update it.
How well Amazon's implementation of the patent works is irrelevant in the subject of the patent's validity. If it were relevant, I could patent the wheel if the one I built were the shiniest.
I'd go a step further than that. I'd guess a lot of good ideas at Microsoft are thrown by the wayside not because communication is bad, but because the ideas are "dangerous." The company's massive revenue comes mostly from Office and Windows; many things that are new, shiny and have the potential to change the world, also have the potential to change the OS and productivity markets. The Web's history at Microsoft is the core example of this way of thinking - if Microsoft can control something and prevent it from being too world-changing, it's all right. Hence Fake-Java, IE, ActiveX and so on. If it weren't for the company's paranoia of upsetting the cash cows, Microsoft would probably have changed the world a dozen times over. They might have better supported Java, built Web versions of Office, opened more APIs in Windows, spearheaded the OpenDocument format and adopted it in Word... and I'm sure there are thousands of other "what-ifs" that the cash cows have killed.
Google doesn't seem to care what they tear down in order to build new technologies, aside from their ad revenue, but at the moment that's not in serious danger.
One of the nightmares most educators face when they attempt to introduce Linux into their school is the myriad of distros and choices they have
I've read about 1,000 variations on this sentence over the past few years, and I haven't been able to puzzle it out. Maybe I'm dense, but I've never figured out why diversity is a problem that threatens to make all our heads asplode. You don't see Baskin-Robbins cutting back to serving only vanilla and chocolate because people have avoided their store, heads dizzy with thoughts of cookies-n-cream, mint chocolate chip and the like.
I suppose computing is an inherently stressful field. (I know this first hand after spending a few years supporting desktops for some of the smartest neuroscientists in the world, who still can't organize a folder or set up a wireless network nearly as easily as they can publish a 100-page paper on brain chemistry... if they can figure out how to get their network printer to work.) But still, in software I've always found a lack of choice to be more stressful than too much of it. This is particularly true with free operating systems. Pick one of the major ones: Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS. To find out whether it works, just install it. If it runs on your hardware (which almost any major distro will) and if suits your needs (you may be able to figure this out relatively quickly), the choice is made. If the choice was RedHat Enterprise, having people tell you that Ubuntu was also a good choice doesn't diminish the choice you already made: you are not qualified to feel stress. If you decide that the cost of running RHEL is not worth it and you want to run Ubuntu, you have the freedom to switch.
Contrast with non-free software. You can buy Windows from one vendor. Ditto with OS X. And with Solaris. If you decide you don't like their terms, tough. If you want to take OS X and run it on a non-Apple machine someone donated to your school, or roll out more copies of Windows Vista than your budget allows, then you become eligible to feel stress.
Re:Wrong - Not the "first" ATM.
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ATM Turns 40
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That's nothing - in the Roman Empire they used monkeys instead of midgets. You had to present via a front-facing slot your request and a certificate of account ownership, each etched onto a small sheet of lead, along with a banana. Your coins would be deposited in the bowl beneath the ATM, if you didn't mind that they were mixed with monkey dung. If nothing came out, the monkey was dead. This was called 'kicking the monkey' and entitled you to a replacement banana from the bank. The one in Pompeii was discovered last year, with a fossilised monkey in situ. The switch to midgets was considered an improvement.
"Hi, this is Bob from Smith, Smith and Wendell returning your call. I'm afraid we're not interested in advising you on matters of software licensing and distribution, but have you considered asking a few hundred thousand opinionated geeks in a public forum? Because that's what we advise most of our potential clients to try first. Here, let me get the URL for you..."
I have always been saying that MS products have no place in government. This is a glaring example of why.
No, while I'd usually agree with you, this is a glaring example of why more people in government should use MS products. Can we get PowerPoint installed on more desktops in the Justice Department?
While a native OS X version of OpenOffice.org is a great thing, the title of TFA is a bit misleading. This software hasn't exactly been 'released' in the normal sense of the word. It would have been more accurate to say 'Alpha build of OpenOffice.org for OS X released!' (Yes, technically the exclamation point is not inaccurate, so I left it in.) Being an alpha build it has a number of odd qualities, including but not limited to the following:
It can't print
It can't export to PDF properly
It can't always do that fancy 'copy and paste' thing
Whenever this subject comes up I always marvel at the stupidity of suggesting a tax on e-mail. Not only is it unjustifiable, it's unenforceable.
E-mail removes revenue from the post office, but who cares? The USPS can hire fewer mail carriers as their volume decreases. E-mail runs mostly (if not entirely) over private infrastructure. There is no justification for an e-mail tax, because the government is not providing any significant e-mail related services. Even if you like the idea of Internet access taxes and Internet sales taxes, a tax on e-mail is simply unjust.
And how would we implement an e-mail tax? Even if we decided that it made sense for some reason - if we thought it would make spam uneconomical, for example - it's all over private infrastructure. How could we force SMTP servers to fairly account for the number of SMTP transactions they perform? E-mail server providers like Microsoft and Novell can be forced to build immutable, proprietary reporting into Exchange and Groupwise and other products, but the most common SMTP server is open source. If you are charged a cent per 100 messages you could easily recompile the SMTP daemon to be more generous. And what's to stop people from setting up new servers for unlimited e-mail? A tax on e-mail is unenforceable. I'd be surprised anyone is talking about it, if I didn't know as much about Congress as I do.
Furthermore, businesses that will not like Linux under GPL v3 or think the spirit of the GPL doesn't apply to them (Tivo, that's you) should be using BSD.
Yeah - or they should be writing their own damn software. That's one of the things that leaves me with no sympathy with the TiVos and Linksyses of the world: in the old days they would have had to do all the engineering themselves. Now they get software gratis. But the deal is that the gratis software is also free. If they don't like the deal, the exit is clearly marked.
This is why I tend to like the GPL over the BSD license. There is less opportunity for abuse, particularly with GPLv3 - a license that still allows TiVo to have much of their software engineering done at no cost, as long as they don't do something nasty like prevent their customers from running modified software on their own hardware.
Dell is only offering hardware support, but the machines are priced the same as Windows boxes. I call that favoritism! I demand that Ubuntu Feisty be given the same excellent level of support that Microsoft offers it Windows customers.
Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation. Like this: "Scientists at (fill in name of university) have managed to get (name of particle) to (some verb), a first step toward what could one day be practical (quantum computing, space elevators, carbon nanotube frisbees, or whatever). They used a (system you'd never be able to afford) to (do something even your grandkids won't be able to do), and predict that the process will be commercially viable in (about the same amount of time it will take us all to get cold fusion reactors installed in our cars)." Nice to see something like this actually come to market!
It's like me, a web developer, being asked to make a website about law. I don't understand law, I don't understand the terms, but I am an expert in making websites. I am there to apply my understanding of how to make a website; if I don't understand a legal term that is important to the website, I should be expected to admit it and find out about it, but not to resign every time I hear something that I don't understand.
I see what you're saying, but the analogy would be better if someone were asking the judge to make a website. Technologies like HTML, ASP, PHP, Perl, mimetypes, CSS and so on are more than we should expect the average judge to understand in depth. However the very existence of the web and its basic concepts are at issue here.
Here's a more targeted tweaking of your analogy: You are asked to make a website about law, but you have no idea what a law is, nor what the term "regulation" is supposed to stand for, and you weren't aware that there are differences between local and national policy. You tell your potential client that you need to do some research first to understand what the site is supposed to be about, and are surprised when they stop returning your calls. If that sounds woefully ignorant, so should this judge.
Microsoft has a research project called 'Fone+' that would allow the phone to work with a TV as a secondary display, and one that could allow video stored on the device to be played back on the television.
Microsoft will eventually release this as a patented, mostly proprietary system designed lock in consumers and hardware vendors. While consumers are lemmings, hardware vendors have more or less figured out what Microsoft's business model is about, and will avoid implementing the company's "solutions." If Microsoft decides to make their own hardware, it will come out a year after Apple, Nokia, Samsung and other companies we haven't even heard of yet have already released better and more open products.
(I should save the above paragraph in a text file on my desktop so I can paste it here regularly.)
I demand the freedom to be able to choose how I release my code. Therefore, I BSD.
Not a very profound statement when you consider that freedom to license software the way you want is being exercised by virtually everyone who releases software. Observe these other courageous people taking a stand:
Linus: I demand the freedom to be able to choose how I release my code. Therefore, I GPLv2.
Steve Ballmer: I demand the freedom to be able to choose how I release my code. Therefore, I (restrictive Microsoft EULA of the week).
Xorg contributor: I demand the freedom to be able to choose how I release my code. Therefore, I MIT license.
RMS: I demand the freedom to be able to choose how I release my code. Therefore, I GPLv3.
I was about to write something really nasty about Scientology in this post, but as my fingers hit the keyboard I noticed black sedan drive up and park across my street. The driver watched me for a while, while I watched him. I typed this post instead of the nasty one and he drove off. Anyway, I just wanted to add: let's keep the Scientology bashing to a minimum, guys - I'm sure the Scientologists, their suspicious profit motive and their plans to eliminate psychiatry and dupe the mentally ill are mostly harmless. I'm through with this article - anybody up for an online personality test?
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, using a codec for personal use to decode media is not easily (and certainly not routinely) punished, though I may be mistaken. Obviously commercial software has been pulled off the shelves for illegally using codecs, like the DVD backup software a few years back, but I don't recall ever hearing about end users of it being sued, let alone convicted. Decoding MP3s with LAME or installing the Win32 codecs on a Debian system is probably not going to land you in the slammer, and I've never been afraid to click Yes.
On the other hand, reading through a EULA for perfectly legitimate software and codecs (as some people have already pointed out in earlier comments) is downright scary. You know you're not breaking any law in using the software on the othr end of an MS EULA, but I'm much more hesitant to click Yes on those than on a simple legal warning suggesting that my country's patent and copyright laws might be a bit too severe.
It doesn't matter. There could be 3,000 distributions and counting and it wouldn't make the Linux world any more of a mess than it is now, because you don't have to be familiar with any more than one or two distributions to implement and maintain Linux in a corporate environment. If 10,000 new distributions were to spring up tonight, tomorrow morning you'd still find that companies pick Red Hat or SuSE. They provide the best-known enterprise support. This is particularly true if a company uses Oracle databases, since they are only certified to run in a finite number of environments.
New distributions (and the existing ones) are not "forks," but rather different builds based upon the same code base. It's not like they'll end up with entirely different kernels in a couple years - what's in the pipeline for major projects like Linux and Xorg will be in the pipeline for all of these distributions. Companies can choose amongst the majors without too much pain, as most Linux-supporting staff are familiar with more than one distro.
Personal desktop systems will largely be *buntu or Fedora, with small numbers of enthusiasts using other distributions.
The notion that an increasing number of distributions equals increasing complexity is a delusion. Let's get over it.
A lot of people have commented that the conspiracy plot was the real meat of the show, and the non-conspiracy episodes were a waste of time. And a lot of people have commented that the oddball episodes were the only interesting ones, and the conspiracy got stale. I personally think the success of the show comes down to having both types of episodes. Obviously the FBI was not going to hire these two agents to investigate one single controversial case for a decade. It made sense that they had shifting responsibilities. The conspiracy would have gotten stale a lot sooner if this hadn't been the case.
That said, a movie always has to be bigger than an episode (*cough* Star Trek V *cough*) and if this is just a monster-of-the-week episode with a scope that is smaller than that of the previous film, and if they make no mention of the overall story arc whatsoever, it could end up being a waste of celluloid. They'd be safer making the movies exclusively about the conspiracy.
I've been visiting Digg a lot lately and I'd have to say that the dupe level there is far worse, especially lately. The difference is editorial control, which Digg's "wisdom of the crowds" can't really match. A zillion people picking front page stories are going to pick dupes, whereas the once-a-week rate here is considerably better.
Oh, I'm not moaning - it could turn out well, and sponsorship of a company like Apple can be a great thing. But the timing of the buyout, right when the GPL3 is possibly looming for many OSS projects, is interesting. It certainly hints that the GPL3 may be the reason for the purchase. If Apple were to put a GPL3 CUPS on the AppleTV or osme similar product they'd probably waive some patent rights by selling the product.
40 Gbps? Wow, sign me up for this!
Meh, on second thought it doesn't sound worth the effort.
No, you're the only one who got the point and someone needs to mod you up. This is quite wrong:
Apple is in a position of power because they now own the CUPS copyright. They are only distributing it under GPL2/LGPL2, and it is not, and has never been available under that license "or any later version," so we can't make a GPL3 fork. The only entity that can get it into GPL3 (or any other license) is the copyright holder.
In the short term this is fine, as GPL2 is a good license. But Apple reserves the right to stop licensing it under the GPL. You could fork the project, but your forks would always have to be GPL2 forks (again, this is not exactly a disaster). But Apple can also make their own internal company modifications specifically for OS X, yet not release the changes to the community. They are no longer obliged to release the OS X version's changes because it will presumably be covered by the Apple EULA instead of the GPL. The only legal escape is to wait until the copyright expires in 70 years or so, then take the expired version's public domain code as your own and license it under the GPL3 or whatever. Get back to me in 70 years if you decide to try that. I'll beam over and help you update it.
Translation: "We will limit the public's rights to creative works if you help us run our nanny state." Who does David Cameron work for again?
How well Amazon's implementation of the patent works is irrelevant in the subject of the patent's validity. If it were relevant, I could patent the wheel if the one I built were the shiniest.
They stoles codes? Oh noes!
Looks like we'll need to modify Adblock's settings to filter out entire blogs. Then we'll have a true, dependable People-Ready Browser.
I'd go a step further than that. I'd guess a lot of good ideas at Microsoft are thrown by the wayside not because communication is bad, but because the ideas are "dangerous." The company's massive revenue comes mostly from Office and Windows; many things that are new, shiny and have the potential to change the world, also have the potential to change the OS and productivity markets. The Web's history at Microsoft is the core example of this way of thinking - if Microsoft can control something and prevent it from being too world-changing, it's all right. Hence Fake-Java, IE, ActiveX and so on. If it weren't for the company's paranoia of upsetting the cash cows, Microsoft would probably have changed the world a dozen times over. They might have better supported Java, built Web versions of Office, opened more APIs in Windows, spearheaded the OpenDocument format and adopted it in Word ... and I'm sure there are thousands of other "what-ifs" that the cash cows have killed.
Google doesn't seem to care what they tear down in order to build new technologies, aside from their ad revenue, but at the moment that's not in serious danger.
I've read about 1,000 variations on this sentence over the past few years, and I haven't been able to puzzle it out. Maybe I'm dense, but I've never figured out why diversity is a problem that threatens to make all our heads asplode. You don't see Baskin-Robbins cutting back to serving only vanilla and chocolate because people have avoided their store, heads dizzy with thoughts of cookies-n-cream, mint chocolate chip and the like.
I suppose computing is an inherently stressful field. (I know this first hand after spending a few years supporting desktops for some of the smartest neuroscientists in the world, who still can't organize a folder or set up a wireless network nearly as easily as they can publish a 100-page paper on brain chemistry ... if they can figure out how to get their network printer to work.) But still, in software I've always found a lack of choice to be more stressful than too much of it. This is particularly true with free operating systems. Pick one of the major ones: Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS. To find out whether it works, just install it. If it runs on your hardware (which almost any major distro will) and if suits your needs (you may be able to figure this out relatively quickly), the choice is made. If the choice was RedHat Enterprise, having people tell you that Ubuntu was also a good choice doesn't diminish the choice you already made: you are not qualified to feel stress. If you decide that the cost of running RHEL is not worth it and you want to run Ubuntu, you have the freedom to switch.
Contrast with non-free software. You can buy Windows from one vendor. Ditto with OS X. And with Solaris. If you decide you don't like their terms, tough. If you want to take OS X and run it on a non-Apple machine someone donated to your school, or roll out more copies of Windows Vista than your budget allows, then you become eligible to feel stress.
That's nothing - in the Roman Empire they used monkeys instead of midgets. You had to present via a front-facing slot your request and a certificate of account ownership, each etched onto a small sheet of lead, along with a banana. Your coins would be deposited in the bowl beneath the ATM, if you didn't mind that they were mixed with monkey dung. If nothing came out, the monkey was dead. This was called 'kicking the monkey' and entitled you to a replacement banana from the bank. The one in Pompeii was discovered last year, with a fossilised monkey in situ. The switch to midgets was considered an improvement.
(Pre-Slashdot conversation ...)
"Hi, this is Bob from Smith, Smith and Wendell returning your call. I'm afraid we're not interested in advising you on matters of software licensing and distribution, but have you considered asking a few hundred thousand opinionated geeks in a public forum? Because that's what we advise most of our potential clients to try first. Here, let me get the URL for you ..."
No, while I'd usually agree with you, this is a glaring example of why more people in government should use MS products. Can we get PowerPoint installed on more desktops in the Justice Department?
While a native OS X version of OpenOffice.org is a great thing, the title of TFA is a bit misleading. This software hasn't exactly been 'released' in the normal sense of the word. It would have been more accurate to say 'Alpha build of OpenOffice.org for OS X released!' (Yes, technically the exclamation point is not inaccurate, so I left it in.) Being an alpha build it has a number of odd qualities, including but not limited to the following:
Again: good, but alpha.
Whenever this subject comes up I always marvel at the stupidity of suggesting a tax on e-mail. Not only is it unjustifiable, it's unenforceable.
E-mail removes revenue from the post office, but who cares? The USPS can hire fewer mail carriers as their volume decreases. E-mail runs mostly (if not entirely) over private infrastructure. There is no justification for an e-mail tax, because the government is not providing any significant e-mail related services. Even if you like the idea of Internet access taxes and Internet sales taxes, a tax on e-mail is simply unjust.
And how would we implement an e-mail tax? Even if we decided that it made sense for some reason - if we thought it would make spam uneconomical, for example - it's all over private infrastructure. How could we force SMTP servers to fairly account for the number of SMTP transactions they perform? E-mail server providers like Microsoft and Novell can be forced to build immutable, proprietary reporting into Exchange and Groupwise and other products, but the most common SMTP server is open source. If you are charged a cent per 100 messages you could easily recompile the SMTP daemon to be more generous. And what's to stop people from setting up new servers for unlimited e-mail? A tax on e-mail is unenforceable. I'd be surprised anyone is talking about it, if I didn't know as much about Congress as I do.
Yeah - or they should be writing their own damn software. That's one of the things that leaves me with no sympathy with the TiVos and Linksyses of the world: in the old days they would have had to do all the engineering themselves. Now they get software gratis. But the deal is that the gratis software is also free. If they don't like the deal, the exit is clearly marked.
This is why I tend to like the GPL over the BSD license. There is less opportunity for abuse, particularly with GPLv3 - a license that still allows TiVo to have much of their software engineering done at no cost, as long as they don't do something nasty like prevent their customers from running modified software on their own hardware.
Dell is only offering hardware support, but the machines are priced the same as Windows boxes. I call that favoritism! I demand that Ubuntu Feisty be given the same excellent level of support that Microsoft offers it Windows customers.
Er, wait a minute ...
Wow, a real product. Every time I read about holographic storage, particularly on Slashdot, it's in the same sort of context in which you'd read about quantum computing or Star Trek-style teleportation. Like this: "Scientists at (fill in name of university) have managed to get (name of particle) to (some verb), a first step toward what could one day be practical (quantum computing, space elevators, carbon nanotube frisbees, or whatever). They used a (system you'd never be able to afford) to (do something even your grandkids won't be able to do), and predict that the process will be commercially viable in (about the same amount of time it will take us all to get cold fusion reactors installed in our cars)." Nice to see something like this actually come to market!
I see what you're saying, but the analogy would be better if someone were asking the judge to make a website. Technologies like HTML, ASP, PHP, Perl, mimetypes, CSS and so on are more than we should expect the average judge to understand in depth. However the very existence of the web and its basic concepts are at issue here.
Here's a more targeted tweaking of your analogy: You are asked to make a website about law, but you have no idea what a law is, nor what the term "regulation" is supposed to stand for, and you weren't aware that there are differences between local and national policy. You tell your potential client that you need to do some research first to understand what the site is supposed to be about, and are surprised when they stop returning your calls. If that sounds woefully ignorant, so should this judge.
Microsoft will eventually release this as a patented, mostly proprietary system designed lock in consumers and hardware vendors. While consumers are lemmings, hardware vendors have more or less figured out what Microsoft's business model is about, and will avoid implementing the company's "solutions." If Microsoft decides to make their own hardware, it will come out a year after Apple, Nokia, Samsung and other companies we haven't even heard of yet have already released better and more open products.
(I should save the above paragraph in a text file on my desktop so I can paste it here regularly.)
Not a very profound statement when you consider that freedom to license software the way you want is being exercised by virtually everyone who releases software. Observe these other courageous people taking a stand:
I was about to write something really nasty about Scientology in this post, but as my fingers hit the keyboard I noticed black sedan drive up and park across my street. The driver watched me for a while, while I watched him. I typed this post instead of the nasty one and he drove off. Anyway, I just wanted to add: let's keep the Scientology bashing to a minimum, guys - I'm sure the Scientologists, their suspicious profit motive and their plans to eliminate psychiatry and dupe the mentally ill are mostly harmless. I'm through with this article - anybody up for an online personality test?