For those too lazy to click a couple of links:

magnet

More about the headline than the story, but it sounds like an execution announcement was made this way. I assume the order went through more traditional channels.

I read the summary because the headline sounded absurd. The summary basically said the headline is false. So the only reason I ended up on the conversation page of this one was to bitch.

I like slashdot, but I'd really like to see this sort of headline writing curbed. I mean, we have editors, right?

I know this has been said, but I think it bears repeating, as the bad behavior keeps being repeated.

If the the money is to offset the "cost" of private lending, and you have to pay it whether you do any such lending or not, it sounds like it's exactly like that.

It's a neat trick in countries where this is the case that paying a little completely screws up the recording industry's ability to threaten individuals with extreme punishment, but that doesn't change the ethics of the tax. You've just painted it up with positive language and said exactly the same thing: You're presumed guilty, and charged a nominal fee.

That's leaving out other issues such as who the money goes to, and whether there is any "guilt", or liability, to speak of.

Yes, we're assholes. Hilarious.

Basic rights shouldn't be dependent on friendliness. They should be respected at all times. Being nice is a better way to be than the American caricature you draw, but rights are rights, not privileges for the polite.

Assholes have rights, too.

Your assertion is false. You don't become guilty the moment you're found guilty. You become guilty when you commit a crime.

This isn't a comment on the case at hand, but you're currently modded high as "informative", although your post makes no sense, and reads like a schoolyard taunt.

How is it cognitive dissonance if people are actually being paid to work on free software? A hell of a lot of open source work is volunteer, but that "for you" part makes a big difference.

Don't make light of false information. It's a terrible thing, especially when intentionally promoted.

Being wrong accidentally is unfortunate, but being wrong on purpose is malicious. I can appreciate your point that scientific debate should happen outside the court room, but don't act like it's an overreaction to take legal action in response to libel.

I agree with your point. The very notion of "dangerous sites" sounds to me something like "dangerous newspaper articles". There's something wrong with the concept.

That said, I will point out that it's not necessary to root the machine to leave a back door, and it's not even necessary to gain arbitrary execution as the user to gather private details, passwords to online accounts, etc.

Kind of sounds like business in general. I'd be curious to see statistics directly comparing profitability and failure rates of businesses built around open source (or with units devoted to open source projects) compared to similar businesses that favor closed source.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that early failure rates are particularly high for open source startups. The fact that you can draw on decades of already completed development work could give a serious case of the warm fuzzies to an optimist. That's a legitimate advantage, but the other side of that coin is that the products of that movement are already available to all your customers for free.

Apple seems to do pretty well, taking advantage of open source software (although not necessarily being a big contributor of it, which seems to be more what's being discussed), but I think they'd have real problems just trying to sell OSX, divorced from their prized hardware line. A smaller company, especially a startup, trying to sell a fork of BSD, would be screwed. They'd be competing with the entire existing community, who would be watching everything they release, and saying, "Oh, we can do that. In fact, we can put more hours into it, and do it better. And here's our superior product, for free."

I guess it's a redundant conclusion at this point, but if you're going to make money on open source software, you'd better have a business other than software. Hardware and support are classic options.

Google is a pretty interesting example, even if it's been rehashed to death around here. They're so entrenched in the web that it's just assumed that more people browsing, or browsing more, means more money for Google. They build the server farms, roll out fiber, index content, and pour money into browsers to view it (not to mention Summer of Code and other random FOSS contributions) just to make sure eyeballs meet content, and they have a chance to be in the middle, and inject what must be extremely profitable advertising at below the threshold where the viewer will be annoyed enough to either seek to block it or be inclined to spend less time online. Pretty cool, I think.

But that's not Oracle. While it's true that you can work on open source projects, give them away, and use their existence to promote your hardware or support, if you can get away with it, why not sell hardware, sell the support, and sell the software, too?

The word is "may". Not that it just tears apart the rest of your case or anything, but many can and do.