I was quite surprised to see this graffiti on my way to work. Billboards, yeah, but street graffiti has a rudeness doesn't strike me as IBM-like at all.
Definitely, encrypting the drive is cheaper, much more effective, and also doesn't require carrying your 2-kg laptop in a 10-kg armor-plated bullet-proof phone-home-capable handcuff-equipped trenchcoat-color-coordinate briefcase (although that can be 31337 k00l if you're into that sort of thing:-)
Fundamentally, this is a case of governments shooting themselves in the foot with anti-encryption policies.* While there are encrypting file systems available, including commercial and freeware, they're not universal, hardware support for encryption and encrypted disk drives aren't universal, and lots of products are dumbed down to 40-bit or 56-bit crypto because of US export laws and those of other countries which the US talked into adopting. Many of the policies had the pretense, or sometimes the serious motivation, of keeping Commies from getting crypto, because we all know that Commies can't read math books and write software using them, but in large part they were supported and promoted by civilian wiretapping enthusiasts like the US FBI and the UK Home Secretary, who want to be able to keep track of everything their subjects** do, say, write, read, or look at. Instead, they're endangering the security of their military secrets, making it more likely that Commies and Terrorists can get them from stolen laptops and other unencrypted and underencrypted sources like GSM cell phones.
* OK, it's partly the US government helping the UK government get shot in the foot, but Louie The Freeh and Mr Jack Straw really deserve each other...
* Yes, US Citizens aren't technically subjects, and UK people are subjects of the Queen, not the Home Office, but that's not how the internal police forces *feel* about them....
16 digits? That's only ~48 bits, which is way lame, and doing decent encryption doesn't take any more work. And yes, that does invite use of a credit card number as the key, which maybe safer than some kinds of numbers because you won't leave it on a yellow sticky note next to the computer but is otherwise wildly insecure. (Especially to anybody who wants to spend a few bucks on a credit report:-)
You don't store the key in the machine, where you have to trust your system to erase it. You have the key entered by the user when they boot. No key, no valid blocks decrypted from the disk. There are plenty of encrypting file systems that do this correctly, though probably others that botch the job (:-) If you want better randomness than that, yes, store additional bits somewhere like NVRAM or on the unencrypted parts of the disk, and hash them together with the user's passphrase to get the drive key.
In practice, it's tough to put the drive encryption on the disk controller, especially for laptops where the controller's integrated into the motherboard. (Most desktops also integrate it, but you can still run a separate controller board.) Either put it in the disk drivers (so you're writing encrypted blocks to the disk, but not changing the file system code), or else put it in the file system code (which has different limitations, but is much more friendly about keeping encrypted and unencrypted partitions, e.g./usr can be unencrypted read-only while/home and/swap are encrypted.)
A few years ago, when I was having to deal with Windows on unreliable laptop hardware on a regular basis, it was time to find some good wallpaper, and good replacements for the Windoze bootup screen. The "Sad Mac" icon seemed like a good choice "Hey, this is really lame hardware, and the OS keeps crashing as well!"
Even some of the free email services have anti-spam options these days.
I've used pobox.com for more than 5 years. They're a mail forwarding service - my-login-name@pobox.com forwards to whatever account I'm currently using to get my mail (so I can change ISPs, or use a free email account, or whatever.) About $15/year, cheaper if you buy multiple years up front. They've got a spam-handling service that you *could* trust to delete anything exceeding a spam threshhold, but is safer to use by having them mark the Subject: line of suspected spam (it's a 0.0-10.0 scale, and you can set what level gets marked, default >=3.0.) They've gotten pretty accurate. Also, any mail that's addressed directly to my ISP account that isn't from the ISP themselves is almost guaranteed to be spam, so my Eudora filters mark those automatically.
Brightmail uses the "only accept mail from known addresses" method - if it gets mail from an address it hasn't seen before, it sends confirmation mail back to the sender saying "hi, this is brightmail spam blocker, please confirm that you're a real person". Mildly annoying, once, to real people who send you mail, but since spammers almost never have real return addresses, it almost always blocks them.
To follow on to what Fjord said, if they let you deduct the $150,000 you're asserting your labor is worth, they'd also want to tax you on the $150,000 of *income* for that labor, so you'd lose badly. It would be equivalent to being employed by the charity, paid $150K in cash, and donating the cash back. If you don't claim the monetary value of your labor as income, it counts as worth $0 for the deduction. So just as a painter who donates a painting only gets to deduct the paint and brushes and such, maybe if you're writing free software and donating it to the FSF you can deduct the value of those blank CD-Rs and any electrons you weren't able to recycle, but it typically ain't worth the paperwork.
Dealing with tax collectors is like dealing with vampires - if you invite them into your house, it's hard to make them go away without them sucking your blood first.
The one place you get special bennies on your taxes is if you buy capital assets (typically stock) and donate the stock rather than selling it and donating the cash. I think you get to deduct the market value of the stock rather than your basis, but you manage to get around some of the differences in tax treatment between capital gains and ordinary income. So if you gave the FSF your RedHat shares last year when they were worth big bucks, that was a win ; doing so today is less useful:-)
Brin deals with at least three issues about cheap and therefore ubiquitous cameras
Citizens running cameras themselves. Cameras are already cheap enough that anybody with net access can run a webcam; as wireless bandwidth in various forms becomes affordable, we can build things like a "Rodney King" shoulder camera that transmits back to your home site - you're not only protected against thugs because you've got your camera, but also against police. Cheap enough technology makes this increasingly unstoppable.
Cameras with public access wherever governments are doing things - court rooms, parliamentary and bureaucratic offices, police stations. This has mixed success so far - we've got CSPAN on the US cable TV networks (not that BBC would devote two of the four legally authorized TV stations in the UK to actually seeing government in action), and police car video cameras are increasingly used as evidence (and also help remind the police to behave properly, because defendants can get access to them), but courts are generally resistent to cameras, bureaucrats don't like the things, and forget taking them onto military bases. There are the usual mixed-value cases - cameras in police stations not only catch misbehaving police, they violate the privacy of the accused (who sometimes want their arrests to be known, sometimes not), both innocent and guilty, and may violate the privacy of complainants, which can be dangerous to them, and of innocent bystanders (the passenger in the car that got pulled over for speeding or Driving While Racially Challenged.)
Public access to the cameras the government is running. The Internet makes this increasingly possible and inexpensive, to the extent that governments are willing to let it happen. Part of it requires a change in public mindset - making the public-space cameras be that "fifth utility" rather than the Big Brother Police Tool, which may require having the cameras run by the civil-service side of the local government and police just getting access to it, and turning the police back into the Neighborhood Watch rather than an occupying army. I've mentioned police-car cameras above. In places that have made access to police-run closed-circuit TVs available to the public (at least to occasional reporters), there's been a tendency to find that the police are watching Suspicious-Looking People (pick your usual stereotypes of race and youth) or alternatively Hot-Looking Women. Real-time public access would help this problem.
Cuddly Penguin Mascots vs. Microsoft
on
Linux Anecdotes
·
· Score: 2
Lars said > What is it that Linux has that no other operating system has? A cuddly, lovable, silly-looking mascot. If we play our cards right, the Linux penguin could be the next mass-consumer hit product. Can you imagine a Windows flag competing against our penguin? No, this time Mr. Gates has definitely dropped the ball and we're in exactly the right position to pick it up. Forget Microsoft, they're history. Start worrying about Mattel and the Barbie doll!
No, no. Microsoft already has a cuddly stuffed animal toy - it's the Microsoft Barney doll that sings and dances and is Evil Purple colored. Fear that! -- Gates doesn't have a chance....
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. Telling the public to trust the election results because they came from computers is far less credible than telling them to believe in the results of lever-style machines. Where computers have the potential to be really useful is to help track down anomalies in the process and find where to go look for the miscounted votes, stuffed ballot boxes, and run the manual counts on the machine-counted ballots that got confused by hanging chad or extra holes punched in by Demopublicans. It might not have mattered in Florida, where the Republican court maneuvers effectively kept most of the ballots from being successfully recounted, but that's where the processes need the most help.
Oh, come on. Mandatory retirement might make sense for people doing physical labor, and it might be harder for some of us over-40 geezers to pull all-nighters than it used to be, but there's no inherent reason to send us on Logan's Run when we hit 30, or 60, or 90. A lifetime of experience in technology may or may not be useful today, and is often more useful in management or research than in direct-product implementation, but some guy over 72 may have a lot more perspective on reality than some kid under 22, even if the kid _was_ a CEO for last year's failed dot-com.
Also, I've done construction work with old guys. They don't move as fast as kids, and don't swing the hammer as many times, but somehow the nails go in the board a lot faster because they did it the way it needed to be done and put it in the places that need the nails most. And inexperienced workers can do a fine job with well-aged perfectly straight wood they bought at the hardware store, but when you're dealing with wood that might be a bit warped, or a bit green, or that you milled from real trees, or slate roofing where every piece of material is unique, you really want some old guy who's been building buildings on farms to be in charge. Sure, the old guys make _us_ haul the heavy stuff around, while they give it a little push here and stick a wedge under it there which cuts the work in half, and spend a while sharpening their tools just right instead of chopping away, and their attitude towards digging ditches often includes renting a backhoe for the rough work and doing the detail by hand, instead of all muscle or all machine, but don't go thinking it's time to throw _them_ out on the woodpile....
People had lots of fun with domain names before the accredited-4-year-schools-only policy was created.
Miskatonic University (MISKATONIC2-DOM)
100 High Street
Arkham, MA 02235
US
Domain Name: MISKATONIC.EDU
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Billing Contact:
Metzger, Perry E. (PEM) Perry@PIERMONT.COM
Piermont Information Systems Inc.
160 Cabrini Blvd., Suite #2
New York, NY 10033
(212) 927-5963
Record last updated on 24-Jun-1997.
Record created on 03-May-1995.
Database last updated on 13-Apr-2001 03:50:00 EDT.
It's important to differentiate here - this is AT&T, which currently offers DSL using Covad's CLEC services, not the Regional Bell Operating Companies like PacBell and USWest and Ball Atlantic, most of which offer DSL service themselves.
Some of the web mapping programs can tell you lat/long given a street address. One of them is Mapblast.com, which used to be my favorite mapping site before it got redesigned with megaclutter (:-).
It will also tell you where the nearest Starbucks is, which could be useful depending on how open their wireless lan access is (intentionally or not:-).
There are several classes of "illegal activity" you can worry about, it you like to worry about that sort of thing, such as (more serious) crackers and (much less serious) downloaders of politically incorrect materia[l, but the problem that may cause the most interference is abuse by spammers. They're not the
Four
Horsemen of the Infocalypse,
but everybody understands them, everybody hates them, and they're not very clever but they won't go away, because there are suckers born every minute. Part of the interference will be the spammers themselves, but much of it will probably be the measures people take to prevent them that will make real wireless freenets harder to deploy than they should be.
Would a "working prototype" for a business model require that you run the system in a manner that *actually* *makes* *profits* before you could get a patent? That'd cut out most business model patents from the dot-com years....
Yup. I work for a telecom company, and some of my customers are banks, and we _do_ talk about putting ATMs over ATM as a growth path from ATMs over Frame Relay (and of course, we transport our Frame Relay over ATM:-).
At least it beats running the suckers on SNA over Multi-Drop Private Line, and the less that can be said about running UUCP over SNA over Multi-Drop to implement service monitoring, the better:-)
Looking at the FAQs, Midori is tuned to be runnable in a small environment like a flash rom, though it needs a development system with a couple hundred meg of storage (i.e. probably not the target system, unless you've got a target with LOTS of memfs ram or a USB disk or you're running it on a real PC.) But what's missing that would be in a normal Linux configuration? Presumably lots of development tools, but is the kernel all there, or is it rabidly stripped of any device drivers you don't explicitly configure in? Would it be easy to add something like the FreeSWAN IPSEC system (which is mostly kernel plus a few user-space daemons and utilities, and tends to also want some firewalling tools)? Is building a small linuxrouter configuration relatively easy in Midori?
One thing I've never seen explained is whether there's a way to link together multiple QC widgets (No, I didn't say a Beowulf Cluster of them!:-) or whether you're limited to the resolution of one widget, which Heisenberg limits to a value around Planck's constant (~10**-46 = ~140 bits.) If you could do the physics and precision construction to get this resolution, it would be lots of fun, but it doesn't fundamentally change cryptography, because it doesn't get you unlimited exponential growth - you can always add another 140 bits to your key length.
New York - are you kidding? The robots had better be pretty well-armed to deal with the Alligators in the Sewers. On the other hand, simply using alligators might do the job. Or alligator-shaped robots.
It's sure really useful to tell the government your religion and race - how else will they find the Jews when they want to round them up again? Or the Japanese-Americans? Or Guatemalans ?
I refused to tell the US government more than how many people live in my place - even the short form census package had a large number of privacy act violations and highly deceptive material with it (like talking about how they've done a great job of protecting privacy of census data for the last 50 years, conveniently starting their self-congratulation period just a few years after they'd illegally given the US Army data on where to find Japanese-Americans to round up.) It was clearly done in bad faith. The US Constitutional provisions against self-incrimination make it easy to deal with the problem, and if they send census takers around to count, I'll ask them to repeat the Miranda warnings ("You have the right to remain silent" "OK, good. Bye!").
I'm not having much luck searching www.icann.org tonight, so these details may be incorrect and may have changed by now - YMMV. One of the big obstacles to IPv6 deployment is ICANN's totally artificial pricing for address space. One of the motivations for IPv6's design is to provide nearly-infinite quantities of address space, which means it ought to be basically free - but ICANN set pricing on it that makes the smallest available chunk of routable address space cost an annoyingly large amount of money. IIRC, it was something like $2500 for a/48, but even if I've got the size wrong the principle is reflected accurately - they're trying to delay and control the deployment by setting an unreasonable price.
It's not totally stupid - one of the problems that does need to be solved by any widespread replacement of the current IPv4 stack is routing table size for the Big Internet, as BGP usage continues to multiply. IPv6 has some support for efficiency and consolidation, but there's still a lot of work to be done.
Fishdude - I can't send email, so hope you see this. It's easy to get glasses where one lens is pretty close to neutral and the other is much stronger. It's not quite the same effect as contact lenses, and you end up wearing these things on your face (:-), but it's non-invasive and miminal trouble, and much easier to put on and off than contact lenses. You're also a likely good candidate for laser surgery on the bad eye, since you've got one good eye you don't need to worry about if the surgery isn't successful, but glasses are easier and will do most of the job.
It's not classical Haiku :-)
on
The DeCSS Haiku
·
· Score: 3
Haiku is more than just three lines with 5,7,5 syllables - classically there's supposed to be some nature or seasonal allusions. Also, while the first stanza of a longer haiku was 5,7,5, it was common for people to build shared compositions, adding sets of 7,5 after the initial 5-7-5 following the theme of the original
D E C S S
no decrypting in winter
or we'll sue your ass
the region code from Finland
says you can't watch it
cherry blossoms blooming in spring
don't watch Anime
a tree in a golden forest
no Chinese movies
Disney movies in summer
watch the commercials
On the other hand, the poem had great use of European poetic forms - invoking the muse on occasion, analogies to Paradise Lost, and it was altogether good stuff.
I've been starting to see open source emerging as a business model that gives consultant developers more control over their work in areas that might otherwise be work-for-hire, and it's a somewhat balanced business model that can still work for both sides. The specific examples I've seen have been in the telephony business - a large company will hire a small group that's working on something like an H.323 or SIP (or other ugly standard) implementation to extend their work but keep it open-source. For the small group, this gives them the traditional consultant leverage that the things you learn working for one client can be reused for the next client. For the sponsoring company, it means that people who have a lot of embedded experience are now working on _their_ problems, so they get to market faster) and they get market synergy because their products interoperate with any free products (or other commercial products) built with the open-source software. Telephony has the additional issue that there's typically a lot of customization required for specific hardware, so hardware-oriented companies use free software as a way to make it easy for customers to buy their boards instead of some competitor where the customers would have to license software to develop applications that use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was quite surprised to see this graffiti on my way to work. Billboards, yeah, but street graffiti has a rudeness doesn't strike me as IBM-like at all.
Fundamentally, this is a case of governments shooting themselves in the foot with anti-encryption policies.* While there are encrypting file systems available, including commercial and freeware, they're not universal, hardware support for encryption and encrypted disk drives aren't universal, and lots of products are dumbed down to 40-bit or 56-bit crypto because of US export laws and those of other countries which the US talked into adopting. Many of the policies had the pretense, or sometimes the serious motivation, of keeping Commies from getting crypto, because we all know that Commies can't read math books and write software using them, but in large part they were supported and promoted by civilian wiretapping enthusiasts like the US FBI and the UK Home Secretary, who want to be able to keep track of everything their subjects** do, say, write, read, or look at. Instead, they're endangering the security of their military secrets, making it more likely that Commies and Terrorists can get them from stolen laptops and other unencrypted and underencrypted sources like GSM cell phones.
* OK, it's partly the US government helping the UK government get shot in the foot, but Louie The Freeh and Mr Jack Straw really deserve each other...
* Yes, US Citizens aren't technically subjects, and UK people are subjects of the Queen, not the Home Office, but that's not how the internal police forces *feel* about them....
16 digits? That's only ~48 bits, which is way lame, and doing decent encryption doesn't take any more work. And yes, that does invite use of a credit card number as the key, which maybe safer than some kinds of numbers because you won't leave it on a yellow sticky note next to the computer but is otherwise wildly insecure. (Especially to anybody who wants to spend a few bucks on a credit report :-)
In practice, it's tough to put the drive encryption on the disk controller, especially for laptops where the controller's integrated into the motherboard. (Most desktops also integrate it, but you can still run a separate controller board.) Either put it in the disk drivers (so you're writing encrypted blocks to the disk, but not changing the file system code), or else put it in the file system code (which has different limitations, but is much more friendly about keeping encrypted and unencrypted partitions, e.g.
I've used pobox.com for more than 5 years. They're a mail forwarding service - my-login-name@pobox.com forwards to whatever account I'm currently using to get my mail (so I can change ISPs, or use a free email account, or whatever.) About $15/year, cheaper if you buy multiple years up front. They've got a spam-handling service that you *could* trust to delete anything exceeding a spam threshhold, but is safer to use by having them mark the Subject: line of suspected spam (it's a 0.0-10.0 scale, and you can set what level gets marked, default >=3.0.) They've gotten pretty accurate. Also, any mail that's addressed directly to my ISP account that isn't from the ISP themselves is almost guaranteed to be spam, so my Eudora filters mark those automatically.
Brightmail uses the "only accept mail from known addresses" method - if it gets mail from an address it hasn't seen before, it sends confirmation mail back to the sender saying "hi, this is brightmail spam blocker, please confirm that you're a real person". Mildly annoying, once, to real people who send you mail, but since spammers almost never have real return addresses, it almost always blocks them.
Dealing with tax collectors is like dealing with vampires - if you invite them into your house, it's hard to make them go away without them sucking your blood first.
The one place you get special bennies on your taxes is if you buy capital assets (typically stock) and donate the stock rather than selling it and donating the cash. I think you get to deduct the market value of the stock rather than your basis, but you manage to get around some of the differences in tax treatment between capital gains and ordinary income. So if you gave the FSF your RedHat shares last year when they were worth big bucks, that was a win ; doing so today is less useful
No, no. Microsoft already has a cuddly stuffed animal toy - it's the Microsoft Barney doll that sings and dances and is Evil Purple colored. Fear that! -- Gates doesn't have a chance....
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. Telling the public to trust the election results because they came from computers is far less credible than telling them to believe in the results of lever-style machines. Where computers have the potential to be really useful is to help track down anomalies in the process and find where to go look for the miscounted votes, stuffed ballot boxes, and run the manual counts on the machine-counted ballots that got confused by hanging chad or extra holes punched in by Demopublicans. It might not have mattered in Florida, where the Republican court maneuvers effectively kept most of the ballots from being successfully recounted, but that's where the processes need the most help.
Also, I've done construction work with old guys. They don't move as fast as kids, and don't swing the hammer as many times, but somehow the nails go in the board a lot faster because they did it the way it needed to be done and put it in the places that need the nails most. And inexperienced workers can do a fine job with well-aged perfectly straight wood they bought at the hardware store, but when you're dealing with wood that might be a bit warped, or a bit green, or that you milled from real trees, or slate roofing where every piece of material is unique, you really want some old guy who's been building buildings on farms to be in charge. Sure, the old guys make _us_ haul the heavy stuff around, while they give it a little push here and stick a wedge under it there which cuts the work in half, and spend a while sharpening their tools just right instead of chopping away, and their attitude towards digging ditches often includes renting a backhoe for the rough work and doing the detail by hand, instead of all muscle or all machine, but don't go thinking it's time to throw _them_ out on the woodpile....
It's important to differentiate here - this is AT&T, which currently offers DSL using Covad's CLEC services, not the Regional Bell Operating Companies like PacBell and USWest and Ball Atlantic, most of which offer DSL service themselves.
It will also tell you where the nearest Starbucks is, which could be useful depending on how open their wireless lan access is (intentionally or not :-).
There are several classes of "illegal activity" you can worry about, it you like to worry about that sort of thing, such as (more serious) crackers and (much less serious) downloaders of politically incorrect materia[l, but the problem that may cause the most interference is abuse by spammers. They're not the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse, but everybody understands them, everybody hates them, and they're not very clever but they won't go away, because there are suckers born every minute. Part of the interference will be the spammers themselves, but much of it will probably be the measures people take to prevent them that will make real wireless freenets harder to deploy than they should be.
Would a "working prototype" for a business model require that you run the system in a manner that *actually* *makes* *profits* before you could get a patent? That'd cut out most business model patents from the dot-com years....
At least it beats running the suckers on SNA over Multi-Drop Private Line, and the less that can be said about running UUCP over SNA over Multi-Drop to implement service monitoring, the better
Looking at the FAQs, Midori is tuned to be runnable in a small environment like a flash rom, though it needs a development system with a couple hundred meg of storage (i.e. probably not the target system, unless you've got a target with LOTS of memfs ram or a USB disk or you're running it on a real PC.) But what's missing that would be in a normal Linux configuration? Presumably lots of development tools, but is the kernel all there, or is it rabidly stripped of any device drivers you don't explicitly configure in? Would it be easy to add something like the FreeSWAN IPSEC system (which is mostly kernel plus a few user-space daemons and utilities, and tends to also want some firewalling tools)? Is building a small linuxrouter configuration relatively easy in Midori?
One thing I've never seen explained is whether there's a way to link together multiple QC widgets (No, I didn't say a Beowulf Cluster of them! :-) or whether you're limited to the resolution of one widget, which Heisenberg limits to a value around Planck's constant (~10**-46 = ~140 bits.) If you could do the physics and precision construction to get this resolution, it would be lots of fun, but it doesn't fundamentally change cryptography, because it doesn't get you unlimited exponential growth - you can always add another 140 bits to your key length.
New York - are you kidding? The robots had better be pretty well-armed to deal with the Alligators in the Sewers. On the other hand, simply using alligators might do the job. Or alligator-shaped robots.
I refused to tell the US government more than how many people live in my place - even the short form census package had a large number of privacy act violations and highly deceptive material with it (like talking about how they've done a great job of protecting privacy of census data for the last 50 years, conveniently starting their self-congratulation period just a few years after they'd illegally given the US Army data on where to find Japanese-Americans to round up.) It was clearly done in bad faith. The US Constitutional provisions against self-incrimination make it easy to deal with the problem, and if they send census takers around to count, I'll ask them to repeat the Miranda warnings ("You have the right to remain silent" "OK, good. Bye!").
It's not totally stupid - one of the problems that does need to be solved by any widespread replacement of the current IPv4 stack is routing table size for the Big Internet, as BGP usage continues to multiply. IPv6 has some support for efficiency and consolidation, but there's still a lot of work to be done.
Fishdude - I can't send email, so hope you see this. It's easy to get glasses where one lens is pretty close to neutral and the other is much stronger. It's not quite the same effect as contact lenses, and you end up wearing these things on your face (:-), but it's non-invasive and miminal trouble, and much easier to put on and off than contact lenses. You're also a likely good candidate for laser surgery on the bad eye, since you've got one good eye you don't need to worry about if the surgery isn't successful, but glasses are easier and will do most of the job.
On the other hand, the poem had great use of European poetic forms - invoking the muse on occasion, analogies to Paradise Lost, and it was altogether good stuff.
I've been starting to see open source emerging as a business model that gives consultant developers more control over their work in areas that might otherwise be work-for-hire, and it's a somewhat balanced business model that can still work for both sides. The specific examples I've seen have been in the telephony business - a large company will hire a small group that's working on something like an H.323 or SIP (or other ugly standard) implementation to extend their work but keep it open-source. For the small group, this gives them the traditional consultant leverage that the things you learn working for one client can be reused for the next client. For the sponsoring company, it means that people who have a lot of embedded experience are now working on _their_ problems, so they get to market faster) and they get market synergy because their products interoperate with any free products (or other commercial products) built with the open-source software. Telephony has the additional issue that there's typically a lot of customization required for specific hardware, so hardware-oriented companies use free software as a way to make it easy for customers to buy their boards instead of some competitor where the customers would have to license software to develop applications that use it.