Cost of development still matters. That's why android works--phone companies want to compete with the iPhone, but they don't want to create a whole new OS. And (snicker) I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Year of the Windows Tablet.
As for media...that's a point. But then, it'd be open, so companies could develop the appropriate apps, and you could use the media you already have. I'll point out that Ubuntu has a music store, now...
I dunno, that wouldn't work again. Most Chinese people are essentially in denial about Tiananmen--they deny it happened, deny it's severity, blame it on outsiders and troublemakers, and, especially, they accuse outsiders of exaggerating it. Remember that they're used to a biased media, they take it for granted. It's natural for them to assume that our worldview is doctored, just like theirs is. With that assumption, it's safe for them to assume that our version of Tiananmen is hyperbole, intended to undermine their government (which...I mean, honestly, it's not like they have no grounds for suspecting our media...)
This is possible because they only ever got an after-the-fact, doctored version of events. In those days, you could cover it up.
Now? How would they suppress the storm of blog posts, YouTube (or equivalent) videos, images, cell phone messages, etc, that would accompany such an event? They'd have to shut the entire country down--and even then...well, in 1989, there were (relatively speaking) a handful of cameras in Beijing. Now, counting cellphones, every person has at least one (well, anyway, there's one per-capita in Beijing, I'm sure). An equivalent suppression would require shutting down the Internet permanently. They couldn't do it.
As evidence: there was a major earthquake in China in the 70's (not sure which one, so I don't know which to reference), many deaths, etc... The Chinese government took days (weeks?) to admit that it had occurred at all. In 2008, there was footage and images of the Sichuan earthquake on the Internet as it was happening. They can't cover things up like they used to.
And if the Chinese people had watched Tiananmen unfolding in real-time...?
This is why, in my opinion, arguments for embargoes are stupid. They end up hurting the people and strengthening governments (see: North Korea, Cuba, Iraq). On the other hand, if you freely engage in business with 'bad' countries, even obeying their rules, you get cellphones, computers, and cameras in the hands of common people. They don't need your wishes and prayers, they need your tools.
Well, there's the whole starving-to-death thing. When you're struggling to survive, it's a little harder to be creative and inventive. The speed of progress and innovation in the US and Europe was closely correlated with the amount of surplus food they had (and have) lying around.
China has only recently (almost) got rid of that problem. Now they're playing catchup. They're making a ton of money creating 'knock-offs', and building their infrastructure in the process.
Expect China (and India) to be the most innovative countries on earth in, oh, I dunno, twenty to thirty years.
I don't know why we take flack from the Windows world, here. How do you burn a CD in Windows? Open "Start->All Programs", and start scanning the list of programs for something than (hopefully) has "CD [Burn|Write|Creator]" in the name, open it, and...well, you're on your own, they all behave completely differently.
By contrast, "right-click on disk image, "Burn image to disk...", insert disk, click OK", on every (Ubuntu) system, seems like child's play.
....But that doesn't mean the pages shouldn't exist.
A friend of mine is a biker (pedal variety), and he was reading up on different makes, models, etc, on Wikipedia. He found a mess. Lots of companies, major companies (in their niches) were missing, and any attempt to create a page resulted in instant deletion. He chose one particular company, and, with another editor, defended it tooth and nail for a few weeks.
I'm not sure if it's still there or not.
He's not the CEO of this company, he's not a stakeholder...he doesn't even own one of their bikes. But that information should be in Wikipedia, whether or not it drives business for the company. People who visited company pages from Wikipedia stay longer? That's probably because they want to end up where they are.
That's not to say that conflict of interest isn't a problem; but the problem (IMHO) isn't simple inclusion. Any company with a reasonable number of employees and customers deserves at least a mention. In the case of bicycles, some of the pages that weren't permitted to exist were (to some subculture or style) vitally important; maybe, say, one of the only downhill bike manufacturers. The problem is when the pages are one-sided, or when people start tinkering with rankings or redirection.
Anyway, just my two cents. I've more often been frustrated by the lack of existence of a page for some random company, than by...well, the existence of a page, no matter how biased (I can always tone down the bias myself, after all).
But the people who can write the software, stories, movies, music, and games might do well to find a model where they get paid in advance... You're right, they're performing a valuable service; but once that service is performed, there's no particular reason why they should continue to reap benefits off of it forever. Is there?
Live performers have a harder time finding venues now than they did at the turn of the (previous) century. Movies had record audiences, percentage-wise, in the 1930's and 40's, and they've been declining ever since. Things changed; recorded music and VHS tapes (well, and other forms of entertainment) appeared, respectively. That's fine, the creators found new models. The models didn't involve smashing vinyl disks or herding people into theatres at gunpoint, even though they'd done something beneficial, and thus deserved to be paid. They adapted to their environment. Now it's time for them (and you, I presume) to do that again.
If you want access to the full version of my program, you need to chuck $40 my way.
Well, I can promise you, I don't use either version of your program.
I'd be interested to hear you address the point brought up earlier: if houses could be cloned for free, people would start 'pirating' houses. Carpenters could start complaining how they ought to get paid, because they built that house. They should get paid any time a person sleeps in it (or any copy of it)! Would that be 'fair'? Should the government then stamp out housing piracy?
Your business has changed. So has publishing, and media creation, and others. I feel for you, but I'm not going to support your efforts to fix your current business model in place. As far as I'm concerned, creation of software and support thereof is a valuable service, and it'll continue to be lucrative. Ownership of ('the rights to') said software, after it's finished, is as valuable as...well, you can even do the equation: (difficulty of making a copy + fear of punishment + guilt). That pool is drying up.
The big number thing...if you don't own that, what exactly do you own? I kind of agree that a number can be many different thing...that just highlights the difficulty of claiming ownership of one. So, you'd rather claim ownership of the 'idea' or something...
[it relies] on government enforcement.
Actually it doesn't, it relies on my software just not being out there for everybody to use for free.
See, exactly, and there's your problem. The cost of any person from making a copy is effectively $0. How can you fight that? With laws (i.e. government enforcement), or....?
....Or you could come up with a business plan that works, and doesn't rely on government enforcement.
I manage to get by without a single piece of "professional software"...in fact, I thrive without it, and do my best to avoid having to deal with or support it.
I think you missed his point about the 1's and 0's. It's not that they're easy to put together a certain way; but ownership of what amounts to one big number is hard to support. Maybe you should get paid for organizing them (so to speak) instead of claiming ownership after the fact.
Here's what's going on: in every universe that the LHC works, the earth immediately disappears in a giant black hole, so, by the entropic principle, we must always be in one of the failures. The project will be plagued with failure until they give up! It's proof positive that we live in a multiverse!
Maybe people shouldn't complain too much about the code not being open enough (though it sucks that I'm stuck with a crappy little Intel, since that's the only really functional driver available in Linux).
But what I remember from that argument was people bitching about the kernel devs not putting the driver in the kernel. There are very good reasons not to do that. Trying to support somebody else's buggy binary code sucks terribly; and the NVidia drivers sure were buggy. Multiply that by the number of drivers in the kernel (because really, who'd open the source if they didn't have to?), and you'd end up with a nightmare. They made the right--and only reasonable--decision.
It seems to me that a lot of Stallman's perceived zealotry comes from the way people see him. He seems like a zealot because...well, he's seen as a zealot.
From TFA:
I support these changes, in general; but the specific combination chosen by the Swedish Pirate Party backfires ironically in the special case of free software.
He's saying, "Hey, look, guys, less copyright is great, but if you think about it, GNU is copyright! And, closed developers wouldn't have to release their source, so we lose both ways! We ought to think about that."
And he's right. Good point, Stallman. I don't think that's crazy at all; that effect of a 5-year limit did not occur to me until now.
He has been a bit crazy at times, and you're right in saying he does kinda claim his list of restrictions is the Only True list. Still, that's a nice counterbalance to the corporate worldview; they also claim that their list of restrictions is the only acceptable one. Anyway, if you RTFA, he says he'd be happy with GPL software going into the public domain after five years...if closed software did the same, source-code and all.
I'm not sure that's a great idea, and anyway it'll never happen, but still...thought-provoking, and not at all nuts. I get a little sick of the off-the-cuff freakouts whenever Stallman's name is mentioned. If he's wrong, either ignore him or argue the points, and avoid the ad hominem attacks.
Well, first, "conservative" in the US doesn't seem to mean what it did before. It's not about taxation and political freedoms, it's about religion, moral righteousness, 'security', etc. I think the GP likely just meant that no position that is not extreme is allowed. I think you're being a little touchy. It's hard to object you you libertarians (or old-school liberals) these days; you're such a minority.
Second, the USA wasn't founded on avoiding taxes, it was founded on avoiding unfair taxes without representation. There's a big difference. "No citizen will be required to pay tax" appears nowhere in the declaration.
I've been on Intel ever since, and it's been rock solid. I don't to much 3d gaming, but Intel cards aren't any good for that anyway.
My desktop (Ubuntu, with compiz) is great looking, smooth, solid, and in the last year or so, I haven't had any problem whatsoever with the drivers. That's much better than having to remember to manually upgrade the NVidia drivers every time the kernel updated, or fiddle with X configuration parameters to try to get XV working with ATI. A couple years ago, I spent hours and hours (and hours) tweaking and fooling with video drivers, and I had scripts to reboot the computer in different modes in order to play games or watch videos.
Intel's open source drivers are great. If I can get that, and good OpenGL performance too... Well, I'm biding my time before buying an ATI. For now, I just want a working desktop.
(And the OS drivers for ATI cards has gotten noticeably better since they released the docs a year ago)
So, yeah, it's not a cure-all, and the drivers don't write themselves. But somebody, somewhere is doing some coding.
Well, he's making exactly the opposite point. You should maybe read it first. You're free to disagree, of course, but you should at least know what you're disagreeing with.
His point is that the ability to interact with notifications means that you have to decide, in the two or three seconds that the notification is on-screen, whether or not you want to interact with it. That's distracting, which makes notifications annoying.
Personally, I'm with him. I hate it when I try to switch desktops, close a window, open my IM client, or whatever, and a notification pops up to block my click (or catch it and do something unexpected).
Sometimes, I'm sitting around browsing Slashdot. If a new email arrives, I want to get to it immediately.
Other times, I'm working, and the damn email can wait. I'd rather just ignore it.
The point he's making is that, if the notification is clickable, then I suddenly have to decide what to do in the three seconds that the notification is onscreen. I experience a little mini-panic when one pops up. Then, whether I'm working or not, I lose my train of thought.
If the notification is non-interactive, I can safely ignore it. If I am just browsing the news, I can read it and react appropriately. If I'm working, I just zone it out.
I'm hoping that if my status is 'busy', the notifications won't even show up, or at least most of them won't.
Yes, but, as he says in the blog, that could be handled differently.
When I have notifications on in Pidgin, I have to disable most of them. Otherwise, people signing on, signing off, messaging me, etc, generate almost constant dings and pop-ups. I especially like the semi-transparent click-through-ability of the notifications on display. I hate it when I'm about to click 'close' (or on another desktop), and a popup appears at the last second, causing something entirely unexpected to occur.
Yeah, it's been around for twenty (well, 17) years. And it's a hell of a lot better than it was at the beginning.
With the newer versions of Ubuntu...it's really not that far behind, in terms of usability. In fact, in a lot of ways (apt-get, or "Package Manager") it's way, way ahead.
I don't buy that it's not ready for Joe Sixpack. It's been ready for years now. He's just stuck on Windows for the time being. If you gave a Ubuntu machine to a Joe Sixpack who'd never used Windows before, he'd do just fine.
Another stab: You exist in a 3d world. Your brain is pretty good at navigating in a 3d world. And, you can display more information in 3d than you can in 2d. It gives you a whole other dimension to play with.
All the information on your computer *could* be presented in 1d. At some point, it really was. Adding the extra dimension made it a heck of a lot easier to display information, and allowed you to stuff more info onscreen at one time.
The win from 3d vs. 2d isn't as huge as the win from 2d vs. 1d...because really, you can process 3 dimensions, but in the end it ends up being 2d. Still, it's a win.
IMHO, a lot of the possible uses for 3d interfaces haven't been invented yet, and probably won't be until they exist.
I'm in love with the idea of Croquet. It seemed silly to me at first, it doesn't anymore.
Well, that's where the GPL trumps the BSD license....:)
Apple doesn't contribute code back to BSD because it's not required. If they'd built OSX on top of Linux, it would be required, and Linux would have benefited. That's likely why Apple didn't use Linux. But HP cares less about locking down their shit, and more about moving boxes, so Linux would be a logical choice for them.
Nonsense. That's a big part of it, but there's more to it than that. FreeBSD, etc, could never have been as successful as Linux is now (given their license).
Slashdot Mirror
Cost of development still matters. That's why android works--phone companies want to compete with the iPhone, but they don't want to create a whole new OS. And (snicker) I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the Year of the Windows Tablet.
As for media...that's a point. But then, it'd be open, so companies could develop the appropriate apps, and you could use the media you already have. I'll point out that Ubuntu has a music store, now...
...Tin foil hat!
So, how long will it be before somebody uses the "Power Lines" defense in a murder case?
I dunno, that wouldn't work again. Most Chinese people are essentially in denial about Tiananmen--they deny it happened, deny it's severity, blame it on outsiders and troublemakers, and, especially, they accuse outsiders of exaggerating it. Remember that they're used to a biased media, they take it for granted. It's natural for them to assume that our worldview is doctored, just like theirs is. With that assumption, it's safe for them to assume that our version of Tiananmen is hyperbole, intended to undermine their government (which...I mean, honestly, it's not like they have no grounds for suspecting our media...)
This is possible because they only ever got an after-the-fact, doctored version of events. In those days, you could cover it up.
Now? How would they suppress the storm of blog posts, YouTube (or equivalent) videos, images, cell phone messages, etc, that would accompany such an event? They'd have to shut the entire country down--and even then...well, in 1989, there were (relatively speaking) a handful of cameras in Beijing. Now, counting cellphones, every person has at least one (well, anyway, there's one per-capita in Beijing, I'm sure). An equivalent suppression would require shutting down the Internet permanently. They couldn't do it.
As evidence: there was a major earthquake in China in the 70's (not sure which one, so I don't know which to reference), many deaths, etc... The Chinese government took days (weeks?) to admit that it had occurred at all. In 2008, there was footage and images of the Sichuan earthquake on the Internet as it was happening. They can't cover things up like they used to.
And if the Chinese people had watched Tiananmen unfolding in real-time...?
This is why, in my opinion, arguments for embargoes are stupid. They end up hurting the people and strengthening governments (see: North Korea, Cuba, Iraq). On the other hand, if you freely engage in business with 'bad' countries, even obeying their rules, you get cellphones, computers, and cameras in the hands of common people. They don't need your wishes and prayers, they need your tools.
Well, there's the whole starving-to-death thing. When you're struggling to survive, it's a little harder to be creative and inventive. The speed of progress and innovation in the US and Europe was closely correlated with the amount of surplus food they had (and have) lying around.
China has only recently (almost) got rid of that problem. Now they're playing catchup. They're making a ton of money creating 'knock-offs', and building their infrastructure in the process.
Expect China (and India) to be the most innovative countries on earth in, oh, I dunno, twenty to thirty years.
Thank you for this!
I don't know why we take flack from the Windows world, here. How do you burn a CD in Windows? Open "Start->All Programs", and start scanning the list of programs for something than (hopefully) has "CD [Burn|Write|Creator]" in the name, open it, and...well, you're on your own, they all behave completely differently.
By contrast, "right-click on disk image, "Burn image to disk...", insert disk, click OK", on every (Ubuntu) system, seems like child's play.
....But that doesn't mean the pages shouldn't exist.
A friend of mine is a biker (pedal variety), and he was reading up on different makes, models, etc, on Wikipedia. He found a mess. Lots of companies, major companies (in their niches) were missing, and any attempt to create a page resulted in instant deletion. He chose one particular company, and, with another editor, defended it tooth and nail for a few weeks.
I'm not sure if it's still there or not.
He's not the CEO of this company, he's not a stakeholder...he doesn't even own one of their bikes. But that information should be in Wikipedia, whether or not it drives business for the company. People who visited company pages from Wikipedia stay longer? That's probably because they want to end up where they are.
That's not to say that conflict of interest isn't a problem; but the problem (IMHO) isn't simple inclusion. Any company with a reasonable number of employees and customers deserves at least a mention. In the case of bicycles, some of the pages that weren't permitted to exist were (to some subculture or style) vitally important; maybe, say, one of the only downhill bike manufacturers. The problem is when the pages are one-sided, or when people start tinkering with rankings or redirection.
Anyway, just my two cents. I've more often been frustrated by the lack of existence of a page for some random company, than by...well, the existence of a page, no matter how biased (I can always tone down the bias myself, after all).
But the people who can write the software, stories, movies, music, and games might do well to find a model where they get paid in advance... You're right, they're performing a valuable service; but once that service is performed, there's no particular reason why they should continue to reap benefits off of it forever. Is there?
Live performers have a harder time finding venues now than they did at the turn of the (previous) century. Movies had record audiences, percentage-wise, in the 1930's and 40's, and they've been declining ever since. Things changed; recorded music and VHS tapes (well, and other forms of entertainment) appeared, respectively. That's fine, the creators found new models. The models didn't involve smashing vinyl disks or herding people into theatres at gunpoint, even though they'd done something beneficial, and thus deserved to be paid. They adapted to their environment. Now it's time for them (and you, I presume) to do that again.
Good luck with that!
If you want access to the full version of my program, you need to chuck $40 my way.
Well, I can promise you, I don't use either version of your program.
I'd be interested to hear you address the point brought up earlier: if houses could be cloned for free, people would start 'pirating' houses. Carpenters could start complaining how they ought to get paid, because they built that house. They should get paid any time a person sleeps in it (or any copy of it)! Would that be 'fair'? Should the government then stamp out housing piracy?
Your business has changed. So has publishing, and media creation, and others. I feel for you, but I'm not going to support your efforts to fix your current business model in place. As far as I'm concerned, creation of software and support thereof is a valuable service, and it'll continue to be lucrative. Ownership of ('the rights to') said software, after it's finished, is as valuable as...well, you can even do the equation: (difficulty of making a copy + fear of punishment + guilt). That pool is drying up.
The big number thing...if you don't own that, what exactly do you own? I kind of agree that a number can be many different thing...that just highlights the difficulty of claiming ownership of one. So, you'd rather claim ownership of the 'idea' or something...
[it relies] on government enforcement.
Actually it doesn't, it relies on my software just not being out there for everybody to use for free.
See, exactly, and there's your problem. The cost of any person from making a copy is effectively $0. How can you fight that? With laws (i.e. government enforcement), or....?
....Or you could come up with a business plan that works, and doesn't rely on government enforcement.
I manage to get by without a single piece of "professional software"...in fact, I thrive without it, and do my best to avoid having to deal with or support it.
I think you missed his point about the 1's and 0's. It's not that they're easy to put together a certain way; but ownership of what amounts to one big number is hard to support. Maybe you should get paid for organizing them (so to speak) instead of claiming ownership after the fact.
Here's what's going on: in every universe that the LHC works, the earth immediately disappears in a giant black hole, so, by the entropic principle, we must always be in one of the failures. The project will be plagued with failure until they give up! It's proof positive that we live in a multiverse!
Maybe people shouldn't complain too much about the code not being open enough (though it sucks that I'm stuck with a crappy little Intel, since that's the only really functional driver available in Linux).
But what I remember from that argument was people bitching about the kernel devs not putting the driver in the kernel. There are very good reasons not to do that. Trying to support somebody else's buggy binary code sucks terribly; and the NVidia drivers sure were buggy. Multiply that by the number of drivers in the kernel (because really, who'd open the source if they didn't have to?), and you'd end up with a nightmare. They made the right--and only reasonable--decision.
It seems to me that a lot of Stallman's perceived zealotry comes from the way people see him. He seems like a zealot because...well, he's seen as a zealot.
From TFA:
I support these changes, in general; but the specific combination chosen by the Swedish Pirate Party backfires ironically in the special case of free software.
He's saying, "Hey, look, guys, less copyright is great, but if you think about it, GNU is copyright! And, closed developers wouldn't have to release their source, so we lose both ways! We ought to think about that."
And he's right. Good point, Stallman. I don't think that's crazy at all; that effect of a 5-year limit did not occur to me until now.
He has been a bit crazy at times, and you're right in saying he does kinda claim his list of restrictions is the Only True list. Still, that's a nice counterbalance to the corporate worldview; they also claim that their list of restrictions is the only acceptable one. Anyway, if you RTFA, he says he'd be happy with GPL software going into the public domain after five years...if closed software did the same, source-code and all.
I'm not sure that's a great idea, and anyway it'll never happen, but still...thought-provoking, and not at all nuts. I get a little sick of the off-the-cuff freakouts whenever Stallman's name is mentioned. If he's wrong, either ignore him or argue the points, and avoid the ad hominem attacks.
But he said it would reduce errors, not increase speed...
Kneejerk much?
There you go, you've got your damn jobs back!
(In reference to the prevalent attitude that companies ought not to hire 'foreign labour', they should only hire Americans. Well, ha!)
Well, as Balmer has been known to say, DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS...
(And now a little something to get through the filter...c'mon, it's just not funny in lower-case.)
Well, first, "conservative" in the US doesn't seem to mean what it did before. It's not about taxation and political freedoms, it's about religion, moral righteousness, 'security', etc. I think the GP likely just meant that no position that is not extreme is allowed. I think you're being a little touchy. It's hard to object you you libertarians (or old-school liberals) these days; you're such a minority.
Second, the USA wasn't founded on avoiding taxes, it was founded on avoiding unfair taxes without representation. There's a big difference. "No citizen will be required to pay tax" appears nowhere in the declaration.
No, I'd prefer my cities designed by bored, unionized salarymen.
My desktop (Ubuntu, with compiz) is great looking, smooth, solid, and in the last year or so, I haven't had any problem whatsoever with the drivers. That's much better than having to remember to manually upgrade the NVidia drivers every time the kernel updated, or fiddle with X configuration parameters to try to get XV working with ATI. A couple years ago, I spent hours and hours (and hours) tweaking and fooling with video drivers, and I had scripts to reboot the computer in different modes in order to play games or watch videos.
Intel's open source drivers are great. If I can get that, and good OpenGL performance too... Well, I'm biding my time before buying an ATI. For now, I just want a working desktop.
(And the OS drivers for ATI cards has gotten noticeably better since they released the docs a year ago)
So, yeah, it's not a cure-all, and the drivers don't write themselves. But somebody, somewhere is doing some coding.
His point is that the ability to interact with notifications means that you have to decide, in the two or three seconds that the notification is on-screen, whether or not you want to interact with it. That's distracting, which makes notifications annoying.
Personally, I'm with him. I hate it when I try to switch desktops, close a window, open my IM client, or whatever, and a notification pops up to block my click (or catch it and do something unexpected).
Other times, I'm working, and the damn email can wait. I'd rather just ignore it.
The point he's making is that, if the notification is clickable, then I suddenly have to decide what to do in the three seconds that the notification is onscreen. I experience a little mini-panic when one pops up. Then, whether I'm working or not, I lose my train of thought.
If the notification is non-interactive, I can safely ignore it. If I am just browsing the news, I can read it and react appropriately. If I'm working, I just zone it out.
I'm hoping that if my status is 'busy', the notifications won't even show up, or at least most of them won't.
When I have notifications on in Pidgin, I have to disable most of them. Otherwise, people signing on, signing off, messaging me, etc, generate almost constant dings and pop-ups. I especially like the semi-transparent click-through-ability of the notifications on display. I hate it when I'm about to click 'close' (or on another desktop), and a popup appears at the last second, causing something entirely unexpected to occur.
I'm in favour!
With the newer versions of Ubuntu...it's really not that far behind, in terms of usability. In fact, in a lot of ways (apt-get, or "Package Manager") it's way, way ahead.
I don't buy that it's not ready for Joe Sixpack. It's been ready for years now. He's just stuck on Windows for the time being. If you gave a Ubuntu machine to a Joe Sixpack who'd never used Windows before, he'd do just fine.
Another stab: You exist in a 3d world. Your brain is pretty good at navigating in a 3d world. And, you can display more information in 3d than you can in 2d. It gives you a whole other dimension to play with.
All the information on your computer *could* be presented in 1d. At some point, it really was. Adding the extra dimension made it a heck of a lot easier to display information, and allowed you to stuff more info onscreen at one time.
The win from 3d vs. 2d isn't as huge as the win from 2d vs. 1d...because really, you can process 3 dimensions, but in the end it ends up being 2d. Still, it's a win.
IMHO, a lot of the possible uses for 3d interfaces haven't been invented yet, and probably won't be until they exist.
I'm in love with the idea of Croquet. It seemed silly to me at first, it doesn't anymore.
Well, that's where the GPL trumps the BSD license.... :)
Apple doesn't contribute code back to BSD because it's not required. If they'd built OSX on top of Linux, it would be required, and Linux would have benefited. That's likely why Apple didn't use Linux. But HP cares less about locking down their shit, and more about moving boxes, so Linux would be a logical choice for them.
Nonsense. That's a big part of it, but there's more to it than that. FreeBSD, etc, could never have been as successful as Linux is now (given their license).