RSS-and-friends is not the answer because the burden is on the readers to seek out interesting logs, what if a blog is interesting one day and crap the other? What if there's another insightful blog pops out of nowhere today?
The solution to this is simple. Let's take the general case of the Internet as a whole. To determine what sites are better than others, we use (through Google) the number of reputable people who thought the site was valuable enough to link to. These reputable people are in turn determined by the number of people linking to them. It takes a while for good sites to percolate to the top, but it really doesn't matter since most information on the Internet is long lived.
Blogs on the other hand, are updated much more frequently than normal web sites, and the information on them is most valuable once it's posted. The best way to stay on top of information coming from blogs is to monitor a predetermined set of blogs about a topic of interest that you know usually has valuable information, and add blogs that are commonly linked to by them to the set. Whichever posts are most linked to and most recent get pushed to the top of the page.
Throw in a few nifty features like grouping discussions, and you've got memorandum. No need to seek out interesting blogs if you can get someone else to point out specific interesting and timely posts for you.
So I bought Lost season 1 from Itunes and liked it, now that I could actually tell wtf was going on.
I've been watching Lost since the beginning and I still can't tell what's going. I get pissed off every time they end an episode without explaining the freaking polar bears.
If successful it will make Linux the #1 client OS, surpassing Windows and totally change the tech dynamics in 2/3 of the world.
Those aren't the numbers that matter for 2006. The main reason operating system market share matters is because people build products on top of these platforms. The buying power of the target recipients of these $100 laptops is very low because they are poor and they are children.
The OLPC project will be very influential on the future, however. The main goal of the project in the first place is to help educate these poor people, which hopefully will bring them out of poverty. Then the operating systems they use will actually matter.
When you combine the education they are receiving with the internet access they will eventually get, many of these people will be able to contribute to the open source software that they're using to make it even better. It will be interesting to watch the open source community change as thesemaps change.
About the only thing worth doing under 'Doze anymore is running certain peripherals, like the printer and scanner, that are fairly low-usage, with crappy FOSS driver support.
Printers and scanners work fine as long as you buy them from companies that actually support open source, like HP. My last printer and scanner were from Canon, and they worked fine as well.
It's not a rumor. It's a prediction, a not unreasonable prediction.
Rumors and predictions aren't mutually exclusive. If the rumor is about something that hasn't happened yet, it's still a prediction.
From the article: Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC.
Sounds like a rumor to me. Most end-of-year prediction lists are just things pulled out of people's asses, but this is apparently based on actual information.
Ah, yeah, remember In Vitro Meat? No? Neither did I. It's because that article was published the same day (Dec. 11th, 2005).
From the article: In July, scientists at the University of Maryland announced the development of bioengineering techniques that could be used to mass-produce a new food for public consumption: meat that is grown in incubators.
All of the "Year in Ideas" articles are dated today.
If a $100 laptop was possible, some bottom feeder like Wal-Mart would already be selling it. As is, we have people beating each other up in big box stores all across the nation to get a $400 loss leader laptop.
That's because all mainstream laptops have hard drives, expensive monitors, expensive processors which generate heat that is expensive to cool, and more than 128 MB of RAM because they have to run Windows XP. Have you actually looked at the specs of this laptop and compared it to anything on the market? They don't compare.
Because knowing the specials in San Francisco is more important than expanding coverage in other countries, in many of which you can only find cities (if that).
Obviously, Google thinks so. What makes you think that Google has some obligation to provide a service for whatever part of the world you live in? Google is a company. They will roll out services when it makes business sense to them.
You're completely mistaken if you think that North and South Korea would want anything to do with each other. Here's a hint: there's troops on each side of the border between them.
"It's time for us to put an end to history of dissension, and open an era of national integration. This also means laying the grounds to surmount division, and to ring in a reunified era ruled by peace and prosperity."
- South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun
Sure, there's some tension there, but I think saying that they want nothing to do with each other is a bit much. That'd be a better characterization for Pakistan and India, where some of the people actually dislike each other. I don't think the North and South Korean people actually dislike each other, but one group just happens to be ruled by a crazy dictator.
The first example I gave was to show the realm in which most people think the non-commercial clause is reasonable, and far from onerous. I was also showing why the non-commercial clause isn't necessary. Even if an advertisement is created from one's shared work, the resulting advertisement will be a shared work as well! Anyone can create derivative works as they see fit, which is the main goal of sharing one's work. The existance of the non-commercial option puts dollar signs in the eyes of creators, and many end up restricting uses they don't intend to in the name of stopping companies from creating advertisements with their work, which isn't even a bad thing! It's a net gain for the "creative commons", the pool of creative works that all are free to derive from, the same entity that the eponymous organization proclaims to be protecting. If the company creating the advertisement doesn't want to share it, then they approach the author for a license as they'd do normally. Both of these potential outcomes are a win for the creator.
The second example, me wanting to use a shared picture on my site with Google ads on the side, was showing a use that most people don't intend to restrict, but end up doing far too often merely because the unnecessary non-commercial option exists. If I have to approach the author for a license to use her picture on my web site, which also happens to be shared under a Creative Commons license, then the license has failed. That's the transaction that the license was supposed to make unnecessary, but since I want ads on my web page, the usable portion of the creative commons is shrunk significantly.
Just do what you would do with any other commercially-published tune or image you came across - assume it is copyrighted, that you will need some sort of licence (and that the CC isn't going to be a get-out-of-jail-free card) and negotiate royalties with the original author.
See, that's the thing. I wouldn't use a copyrighted work on my web page, because I don't want to pay someone money for a site that I'd make pennies of AdWords revenue on. That wouldn't even pay for hosting. If I'm sharing the content of my site as well, that should be enough. Moreover, that's what most creators intend to be enough from people who create derivatives of their creations.
To me, Creative Commons licenses are supposed to encourage sharing works for all uses, as long as resulting works are shared as well. They've chosen not to do that; instead, they restrict uses of the work. That doesn't mesh with what my idea of Freedom is. I don't think that all works must be shared, but since the Creative Commons organization is the frontman for freedom outside the software arena, I'd like them to give people a clearer idea of the freedoms they should have, instead of the muddled one they are putting forth. If their goal is to encourage the growth the largest creative commons for creators to draw from, they are failing. They're doing an awesome job in general, but it could be better.
This is why there is a Non-Commercial version of the license.
That's also why the Non-Commercial Creative Commons licenses suck. The whole point of sharing something with a Creative Commons license is to allow other people to build upon work that you've created, resulting in more creative works for people to enjoy. When you tack on the non-commercial restriction, you're making people jump through hoops to make sure they don't make any money with the new work that has been created. Let's look at an example of a blatant commercial use of a work, such as using a song in a television commercial. If a company uses a Creative Commons licensed song with the ShareAlike and Attribution requirements, that means the resulting commercial will be shared as well, allowing other people to make derivative works as well. That's supposed to be the goal: free usage of and derivation from creative works. Adding on the non-commercial restriction is supposed to let the creator earn money on the work, but far more often it just makes potential derivers look for alternatives, along with hampering the overall goal.
If someone wants to sell a movie with your song in it, they're either going to have to allow free redistribution of the movie, or ask you how much they have to pay to use your song in the movie. Both of those options are the goals of someone who is sharing their work. The non-commercial clause is unnecessary, and hampers the usage of shared works by many people. The only use that people often want to prevent when they add the non-commercial restriction is when the derivative work is an advertisement, as I've described above. When someone shares there Flickr pictures, they don't want to stop me from using their pictures just because I have Google ads on my blog, but that's what they end up doing. (Okay, I don't know what the non-commercial clause says exactly, but that's another problem. From the wording on the "Human-readable license summary, I think it would be prohibited.) When you combine the existance of the non-commercial clause with many people's latent distrust of corporations, you end up with a lot of people who limit the usefulness of works that they really want to share with people. The whole point of Creative Commons is to make it easy to share, so the murkiness and ill effects of the non-commercial clause hurt the goals of the licenses. If I want to ship people copies of Wired's Creative Commons CD but charge for shipping and the media itself, I can't do that, because some of the tracks are licensed with a non-commerical clause. Or can I? Do I have to provide receipts for the media and shipping to prove that I didn't make money off of it?
The success of copyleft licenses in the software arena is based heavily on the simplicity of the main license: the GPL. All you have to do is share alike, and you can use the code however you want. The only confusion that crops up is how much you have to share (do I have to pipe in commands from my closed source binary?), not whether or not one can make derivative works at all. If you're aiming for freedom, restricting usage is a bad idea, especially when it's done in such a way that many people choose to restrict usage without being aware of the consequences.
The reason why I'm particularly excited about this development is because it looks like they'll be using Jabber. I'd like to use Jabber myself, but there's no way I could get all of my friends to switch over. I'm pretty sure Google could pull it off, though.
If I'm being exploited, then damn, being exploited is kind of nice. I'm being paid to work on a project for an organization that I want to see succeed. I get to work whatever hours I want instead of being forced into a 9 to 5 schedule. This allows me to take classes and do my Summer of Code project at the same time. I also get to do something that's meaningful to me, instead of IT gruntwork or whatever an normal company would have me doing. I use open source software myself, and I've been looking to get involved. Now I have my foot in the door. My project will be used by (at least) hundreds of thousands of people come October when the next Ubuntu release goes out. I think that's pretty nifty. To top it all off, I get paid to do this. The money Google is giving is more than many of the internships I looked at, so I don't know why you're saying it's very little money.
I know that saying bad things about Google is the in thing these days to make yourself look like a free-thinker, but there's absolutely no way you can twist their Summer of Code program into a bad thing.
Thus, they can maintain some control over their code while allowing others to benefit from its openness, by using a BSD type license.
Um... how does using a BSD type license help you keep control over your code when compared to the GPL? You don't lose any control with the GPL. You do, however, gain more bugfixes and features added to your code by people who use it.
People like to yell about how BSD is more free and GPL users are socialists, but you've got it all backwards. When you license your code under a BSD type license, you're letting anyone use the code, no questions asked, and hoping that the goodness in their hearts will compel them to contribute fixes back to you. If that's not idealistic, I don't know what is. When I release my code under the GPL, I know that doing so will lead to better code. I'll get more contributions back, because people have to. That makes me feel like I have some control over the code, so I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm sleepy. I think I made a mistake in my original post. To make a derivative work, you need permission from the author, usually in the form of a blanket license like the GPL. Theoretically, someone could come up with a license that says you must make public any derivative work you create. If this were the case with the GPL, then people running modified versions of GPL'd software on their servers would have to share their changes. It'd be hard to prove, but it could still be "required."
Now on to your question. Why is not sharing changes against the spirt of the GPL? I explained exactly why in my post. If you're making the piece of software better with your internal changes, shouldn't the original authors benefit from those changes as well? It's slightly assholish to not help the people who helped you.
I like that the GPL doesn't require this. I'm sure there are many cases in which internal modifications are trivial and only suited to specific uses, and requiring that all those little changes be public would probably lead to a lot of noise with few beneficial changes. If something you add is actually useful, you should share it. Do unto others and whatnot.
Some people have expressed concern that organizations can take GPL'd code, modify it, and then run a web site with it. The act of running a web site using GPL code isn't considered distribution by the FSF, and the source code modifications therefore can be kept to themselves.
Running a web site isn't considered distribution by copyright either, and that's what really matters here. The GPL doesn't go into effect until you try to make a copy of the software, and even when it's in effect, you only have to distribute the source code to the people you distribute binaries to. If you only distribute it internally, then it really doesn't make a difference. Technically, a new version of the GPL could say that you have to give a copy of the code to the FSF if you want to distribute binaries at all, even within your own organization, but I don't think many people would actually want to use that license.
Personally, I think that making internal changes and not sharing them with the world is against the spirit of the GPL. People gave their work to you for free, and you don't want to give your changes back as payback? That's pretty lame. However, I don't think there's any practical way for a new version of the GPL to prevent it. Smart people try to get their changes accepted upsteam anyway so they don't have to maintain patches and make sure they apply and don't introduce new bugs. It's just less work.
It seems like you're trying to compare Firefox and it's additional features to a barebones Linux distro and extra programs the user gets on his own. I don't think that's what most users want. They want to be able to finish the install and get working, not spend hours customizing their computer beyond little things like wallpaper and shortcuts. Firefox is meant to perform one main task: browsing the web. Any features that aren't necessary or very complementary to that task are provided as extensions. That only works because it only has to browse the web. An operating system is expected to do everything users do with their computers.
Your last point hints at a desire for a more decentralized model for distribution building. It could work, but there are lots of benefits you miss out on as a distribution by not maintaining your own packages. For instance, the large Ubuntu repository allows us to show the users all the programs available to them and let them search among them. For most users, the things they want to install will be there. I think Autopackages work better as a complement to the centralized repository system. When a distribution isn't providing packages for new software as quickly as users want them, it'd be nice to be able to install them in a user friendly way without an official package. Autopackage gets this done, but I think centralized repositories still have their place.
Incidentally, I found out about Google News' RSS feeds from an item in my Yahoo News feed that I subscribed to solely because Google News didn't have an RSS feed. Now I can get rid of it. Thanks Yahoo!
After using the Google and Yahoo RSS feeds side by side for a day, I'm definitely sticking with the Google one. There are a wider variety of sources, unlike Yahoo's content partners or whatever's going on there. Pretty pictures inside the feed help as well. What really put Google over th edge is that I can get my own customized feed that has the entertainment section stripped out, and more interesting stuff in it's place. Can My Yahoo do this? I'd never actually played around with it until just now. It'd probably be a better idea to integrate some of the customization features from My Yahoo into the main Yahoo News site so it's a bit more discoverable.
Slashdot Mirror
RSS-and-friends is not the answer because the burden is on the readers to seek out interesting logs, what if a blog is interesting one day and crap the other? What if there's another insightful blog pops out of nowhere today?
The solution to this is simple. Let's take the general case of the Internet as a whole. To determine what sites are better than others, we use (through Google) the number of reputable people who thought the site was valuable enough to link to. These reputable people are in turn determined by the number of people linking to them. It takes a while for good sites to percolate to the top, but it really doesn't matter since most information on the Internet is long lived.
Blogs on the other hand, are updated much more frequently than normal web sites, and the information on them is most valuable once it's posted. The best way to stay on top of information coming from blogs is to monitor a predetermined set of blogs about a topic of interest that you know usually has valuable information, and add blogs that are commonly linked to by them to the set. Whichever posts are most linked to and most recent get pushed to the top of the page.
Throw in a few nifty features like grouping discussions, and you've got memorandum. No need to seek out interesting blogs if you can get someone else to point out specific interesting and timely posts for you.
Small problem: What if when you tell them to get the facts, they actually Google for "get the facts"?
So I bought Lost season 1 from Itunes and liked it, now that I could actually tell wtf was going on.
I've been watching Lost since the beginning and I still can't tell what's going. I get pissed off every time they end an episode without explaining the freaking polar bears.
If successful it will make Linux the #1 client OS, surpassing Windows and totally change the tech dynamics in 2/3 of the world.
Those aren't the numbers that matter for 2006. The main reason operating system market share matters is because people build products on top of these platforms. The buying power of the target recipients of these $100 laptops is very low because they are poor and they are children.
The OLPC project will be very influential on the future, however. The main goal of the project in the first place is to help educate these poor people, which hopefully will bring them out of poverty. Then the operating systems they use will actually matter.
When you combine the education they are receiving with the internet access they will eventually get, many of these people will be able to contribute to the open source software that they're using to make it even better. It will be interesting to watch the open source community change as these maps change.
About the only thing worth doing under 'Doze anymore is running certain peripherals, like the printer and scanner, that are fairly low-usage, with crappy FOSS driver support.
Printers and scanners work fine as long as you buy them from companies that actually support open source, like HP. My last printer and scanner were from Canon, and they worked fine as well.
It's not a rumor. It's a prediction, a not unreasonable prediction.
Rumors and predictions aren't mutually exclusive. If the rumor is about something that hasn't happened yet, it's still a prediction.
From the article: Sources say Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., among other retailers, to sell a Google PC.
Sounds like a rumor to me. Most end-of-year prediction lists are just things pulled out of people's asses, but this is apparently based on actual information.
Ah, yeah, remember In Vitro Meat? No? Neither did I. It's because that article was published the same day (Dec. 11th, 2005).
From the article: In July, scientists at the University of Maryland announced the development of bioengineering techniques that could be used to mass-produce a new food for public consumption: meat that is grown in incubators.
All of the "Year in Ideas" articles are dated today.
Macedonia (FYROM is the officialname, ask the Greeks why)
For those curious enough as I was, this is why.
If a $100 laptop was possible, some bottom feeder like Wal-Mart would already be selling it. As is, we have people beating each other up in big box stores all across the nation to get a $400 loss leader laptop.
That's because all mainstream laptops have hard drives, expensive monitors, expensive processors which generate heat that is expensive to cool, and more than 128 MB of RAM because they have to run Windows XP. Have you actually looked at the specs of this laptop and compared it to anything on the market? They don't compare.
Because knowing the specials in San Francisco is more important than expanding coverage in other countries, in many of which you can only find cities (if that).
Obviously, Google thinks so. What makes you think that Google has some obligation to provide a service for whatever part of the world you live in? Google is a company. They will roll out services when it makes business sense to them.
Loose alien chicks? Earth girls are easy.
What did the clever artificial hand say to the face?
SLAP!
You're completely mistaken if you think that North and South Korea would want anything to do with each other. Here's a hint: there's troops on each side of the border between them.
"It's time for us to put an end to history of dissension, and open an era of national integration. This also means laying the grounds to surmount division, and to ring in a reunified era ruled by peace and prosperity."
- South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun
Sure, there's some tension there, but I think saying that they want nothing to do with each other is a bit much. That'd be a better characterization for Pakistan and India, where some of the people actually dislike each other. I don't think the North and South Korean people actually dislike each other, but one group just happens to be ruled by a crazy dictator.
The first example I gave was to show the realm in which most people think the non-commercial clause is reasonable, and far from onerous. I was also showing why the non-commercial clause isn't necessary. Even if an advertisement is created from one's shared work, the resulting advertisement will be a shared work as well! Anyone can create derivative works as they see fit, which is the main goal of sharing one's work. The existance of the non-commercial option puts dollar signs in the eyes of creators, and many end up restricting uses they don't intend to in the name of stopping companies from creating advertisements with their work, which isn't even a bad thing! It's a net gain for the "creative commons", the pool of creative works that all are free to derive from, the same entity that the eponymous organization proclaims to be protecting. If the company creating the advertisement doesn't want to share it, then they approach the author for a license as they'd do normally. Both of these potential outcomes are a win for the creator.
The second example, me wanting to use a shared picture on my site with Google ads on the side, was showing a use that most people don't intend to restrict, but end up doing far too often merely because the unnecessary non-commercial option exists. If I have to approach the author for a license to use her picture on my web site, which also happens to be shared under a Creative Commons license, then the license has failed. That's the transaction that the license was supposed to make unnecessary, but since I want ads on my web page, the usable portion of the creative commons is shrunk significantly.
Just do what you would do with any other commercially-published tune or image you came across - assume it is copyrighted, that you will need some sort of licence (and that the CC isn't going to be a get-out-of-jail-free card) and negotiate royalties with the original author.
See, that's the thing. I wouldn't use a copyrighted work on my web page, because I don't want to pay someone money for a site that I'd make pennies of AdWords revenue on. That wouldn't even pay for hosting. If I'm sharing the content of my site as well, that should be enough. Moreover, that's what most creators intend to be enough from people who create derivatives of their creations.
To me, Creative Commons licenses are supposed to encourage sharing works for all uses, as long as resulting works are shared as well. They've chosen not to do that; instead, they restrict uses of the work. That doesn't mesh with what my idea of Freedom is. I don't think that all works must be shared, but since the Creative Commons organization is the frontman for freedom outside the software arena, I'd like them to give people a clearer idea of the freedoms they should have, instead of the muddled one they are putting forth. If their goal is to encourage the growth the largest creative commons for creators to draw from, they are failing. They're doing an awesome job in general, but it could be better.
This is why there is a Non-Commercial version of the license.
That's also why the Non-Commercial Creative Commons licenses suck. The whole point of sharing something with a Creative Commons license is to allow other people to build upon work that you've created, resulting in more creative works for people to enjoy. When you tack on the non-commercial restriction, you're making people jump through hoops to make sure they don't make any money with the new work that has been created. Let's look at an example of a blatant commercial use of a work, such as using a song in a television commercial. If a company uses a Creative Commons licensed song with the ShareAlike and Attribution requirements, that means the resulting commercial will be shared as well, allowing other people to make derivative works as well. That's supposed to be the goal: free usage of and derivation from creative works. Adding on the non-commercial restriction is supposed to let the creator earn money on the work, but far more often it just makes potential derivers look for alternatives, along with hampering the overall goal.
If someone wants to sell a movie with your song in it, they're either going to have to allow free redistribution of the movie, or ask you how much they have to pay to use your song in the movie. Both of those options are the goals of someone who is sharing their work. The non-commercial clause is unnecessary, and hampers the usage of shared works by many people. The only use that people often want to prevent when they add the non-commercial restriction is when the derivative work is an advertisement, as I've described above. When someone shares there Flickr pictures, they don't want to stop me from using their pictures just because I have Google ads on my blog, but that's what they end up doing. (Okay, I don't know what the non-commercial clause says exactly, but that's another problem. From the wording on the "Human-readable license summary, I think it would be prohibited.) When you combine the existance of the non-commercial clause with many people's latent distrust of corporations, you end up with a lot of people who limit the usefulness of works that they really want to share with people. The whole point of Creative Commons is to make it easy to share, so the murkiness and ill effects of the non-commercial clause hurt the goals of the licenses. If I want to ship people copies of Wired's Creative Commons CD but charge for shipping and the media itself, I can't do that, because some of the tracks are licensed with a non-commerical clause. Or can I? Do I have to provide receipts for the media and shipping to prove that I didn't make money off of it?
The success of copyleft licenses in the software arena is based heavily on the simplicity of the main license: the GPL. All you have to do is share alike, and you can use the code however you want. The only confusion that crops up is how much you have to share (do I have to pipe in commands from my closed source binary?), not whether or not one can make derivative works at all. If you're aiming for freedom, restricting usage is a bad idea, especially when it's done in such a way that many people choose to restrict usage without being aware of the consequences.
See also: Towards a Standard of Freedom: Creative Commons and the Free Software Movement
That would be freakin' sweet.
No, that would really grind my gears.
There may be some connection with Blogger Buzz.
The reason why I'm particularly excited about this development is because it looks like they'll be using Jabber. I'd like to use Jabber myself, but there's no way I could get all of my friends to switch over. I'm pretty sure Google could pull it off, though.
As an added bonus, it already starts with a 'G'!
If I'm being exploited, then damn, being exploited is kind of nice. I'm being paid to work on a project for an organization that I want to see succeed. I get to work whatever hours I want instead of being forced into a 9 to 5 schedule. This allows me to take classes and do my Summer of Code project at the same time. I also get to do something that's meaningful to me, instead of IT gruntwork or whatever an normal company would have me doing. I use open source software myself, and I've been looking to get involved. Now I have my foot in the door. My project will be used by (at least) hundreds of thousands of people come October when the next Ubuntu release goes out. I think that's pretty nifty. To top it all off, I get paid to do this. The money Google is giving is more than many of the internships I looked at, so I don't know why you're saying it's very little money.
I know that saying bad things about Google is the in thing these days to make yourself look like a free-thinker, but there's absolutely no way you can twist their Summer of Code program into a bad thing.
Thus, they can maintain some control over their code while allowing others to benefit from its openness, by using a BSD type license.
Um... how does using a BSD type license help you keep control over your code when compared to the GPL? You don't lose any control with the GPL. You do, however, gain more bugfixes and features added to your code by people who use it.
People like to yell about how BSD is more free and GPL users are socialists, but you've got it all backwards. When you license your code under a BSD type license, you're letting anyone use the code, no questions asked, and hoping that the goodness in their hearts will compel them to contribute fixes back to you. If that's not idealistic, I don't know what is. When I release my code under the GPL, I know that doing so will lead to better code. I'll get more contributions back, because people have to. That makes me feel like I have some control over the code, so I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm sleepy. I think I made a mistake in my original post. To make a derivative work, you need permission from the author, usually in the form of a blanket license like the GPL. Theoretically, someone could come up with a license that says you must make public any derivative work you create. If this were the case with the GPL, then people running modified versions of GPL'd software on their servers would have to share their changes. It'd be hard to prove, but it could still be "required."
Now on to your question. Why is not sharing changes against the spirt of the GPL? I explained exactly why in my post. If you're making the piece of software better with your internal changes, shouldn't the original authors benefit from those changes as well? It's slightly assholish to not help the people who helped you.
I like that the GPL doesn't require this. I'm sure there are many cases in which internal modifications are trivial and only suited to specific uses, and requiring that all those little changes be public would probably lead to a lot of noise with few beneficial changes. If something you add is actually useful, you should share it. Do unto others and whatnot.
Some people have expressed concern that organizations can take GPL'd code, modify it, and then run a web site with it. The act of running a web site using GPL code isn't considered distribution by the FSF, and the source code modifications therefore can be kept to themselves.
Running a web site isn't considered distribution by copyright either, and that's what really matters here. The GPL doesn't go into effect until you try to make a copy of the software, and even when it's in effect, you only have to distribute the source code to the people you distribute binaries to. If you only distribute it internally, then it really doesn't make a difference. Technically, a new version of the GPL could say that you have to give a copy of the code to the FSF if you want to distribute binaries at all, even within your own organization, but I don't think many people would actually want to use that license.
Personally, I think that making internal changes and not sharing them with the world is against the spirit of the GPL. People gave their work to you for free, and you don't want to give your changes back as payback? That's pretty lame. However, I don't think there's any practical way for a new version of the GPL to prevent it. Smart people try to get their changes accepted upsteam anyway so they don't have to maintain patches and make sure they apply and don't introduce new bugs. It's just less work.
It seems like you're trying to compare Firefox and it's additional features to a barebones Linux distro and extra programs the user gets on his own. I don't think that's what most users want. They want to be able to finish the install and get working, not spend hours customizing their computer beyond little things like wallpaper and shortcuts. Firefox is meant to perform one main task: browsing the web. Any features that aren't necessary or very complementary to that task are provided as extensions. That only works because it only has to browse the web. An operating system is expected to do everything users do with their computers.
Your last point hints at a desire for a more decentralized model for distribution building. It could work, but there are lots of benefits you miss out on as a distribution by not maintaining your own packages. For instance, the large Ubuntu repository allows us to show the users all the programs available to them and let them search among them. For most users, the things they want to install will be there. I think Autopackages work better as a complement to the centralized repository system. When a distribution isn't providing packages for new software as quickly as users want them, it'd be nice to be able to install them in a user friendly way without an official package. Autopackage gets this done, but I think centralized repositories still have their place.
Incidentally, I found out about Google News' RSS feeds from an item in my Yahoo News feed that I subscribed to solely because Google News didn't have an RSS feed. Now I can get rid of it. Thanks Yahoo!
After using the Google and Yahoo RSS feeds side by side for a day, I'm definitely sticking with the Google one. There are a wider variety of sources, unlike Yahoo's content partners or whatever's going on there. Pretty pictures inside the feed help as well. What really put Google over th edge is that I can get my own customized feed that has the entertainment section stripped out, and more interesting stuff in it's place. Can My Yahoo do this? I'd never actually played around with it until just now. It'd probably be a better idea to integrate some of the customization features from My Yahoo into the main Yahoo News site so it's a bit more discoverable.