If you don't want to look at code, however bad it is, it doesn't mean you should necessarily turn to proprietary software (or even "not fight for F/OSS).. Which is somehow his point. If locked on proprietary software, his only option was to ask the editor to correct the bug. Which may or may not be willing to do so.

With opensource software, he could have hired someone to waste his time on it, even if the original developper wouldn't have been willing to do so.. Plus it could have been a nice contribution, so probably for a lower price, he could have had his software up&running, and made the software better..

And anyway, just by reading that: "which I can find out by other means than looking at source code", we can probably assume the technical details aren't exactly relevant to him.

What exactly would have changed if it had not been free software?

Actually, there is one website which has switched to Silverlight.. I'm not sure why they did, but it made me very unhappy:
http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/dests.php?flash=chk

This is a map to show the possible routes from Ryanair airports. They now have included a list of their routes so people can read from it instead of their silverlight map, but still.. I've installed the plugin, and this still doesn't work.

So of course, no, we don't want that MS thing, but at a point.. it's like Flash, if webmasters start to use it, better have some support that works than just whine about who made it in the first place..

Or they could do.. whatever.. and you'd still die in the end.

They will only do that for piracy issues, because someone is paying for that directly. Not sure how the maths work if you compare it to how much the taxpayers pay. I'd rather have my government/police work and actually spend money on fighting true spam/virii issues rather than going after P2P users..

I actually thought about that, and couldn't find any nice interface to be able to manage Samba/LDAP users & configuration. The furthest I could go was going for an OpenLDAP GUI, which is not enough for a "manager" to work on such an environment..

I'd be interested in any FOSS opportunities to manage that using a GUI (may it be web based or not..., but then has to be able to run on Windows :p), without having to go through the hassle of writing it myself (or have it written by someone from scratch).

So, if anybody went through something that might fit here, I'd be really interested! Even if it's alpha, pre alpha, only brain work.. Even if it's not free as in free beer..

Though it certainly looks effective, what makes it powerful is also a drawback, you have to send all the content you want to be checked to them. Maybe that's because my tinfoil hat is getting too big, but in many cases, I'd like to avoid spam AND keep the content for myself.

Of course, here the guy is asking for forum/blogs which are in main case submissions for publicly available content, so I guess it would fit.