The original article is just an oh-so-typical piece of American thinking, wherein money and market are the ultimate movers of everything.

Of course, if your concept of culture stops at Coke, Pop Music and Hollywood, this may hold true. If it extends to encompass Homer, Beethoven, Boole, Sartre, or Australian aboriginal art, however, you'll have to admit there is no direct correspondence between cultural "value" and market "price". The CULTURAL value of Picasso is NOT the price of his painting as sold at the latest auction.

Culture will go on existing even after all the Googles, Amazons, Wall Streets and Doctorows have perished.

Is a car a "legitimate hardware appliance"? It CAN be used to kill people, you know... Not to mention airplanes...

And it is showing us that civil liberties won't end with a bang, they will end with a pathetic, humiliating trifle. Apparently, we will forfeit our liberties not in order to fight terrorism, AIDS, exploitation, or poverty, but to "protect" some copyrighted content or to prevent some teenager from downloading porn. A really sad way to go, Democracy!

Corporations have a deep aversion toward anything that is "free" -- be it free as in beer or as in libre! This is an important factor to consider.

No matter what level of maturity a product may reach, if it's a "freebie", the corporate world will simply frown upon it. It's just too much of a contradiction to their business model: it's almost like expecting the oil producers to give an honest judgment on, say, solar energy cars. And it's not about "malice" either -- they are not "evil", they simply have a blind spot for everything "free".

The sad thing however, is that the hardware vendors, incapable of making unbiased, merit-based evaluations of various operating systems, are the ones who decide which OS gets approved in the end...

...may be your most secure bet. No matter what antivirus solution you implement, given enough exposure to the Internet, one of the machines will eventually get infected in the end. So, unless you're willing to migrate your entire office to Linux, the safest solution would be frequent volume shadowing, maybe combined with a good antivirus such as AntiVir (which even has a Linux version IIRC).

... why shouldn't it export economic collapses or fishy elections? Export is good for the economy.

an artificial one. The main job of every efficient government is to make us ALL feel guilty and scared. In other words, to make us all "bad guys", so they can legally go after us and manipulate us at will.

The efficiency of a government is strongly related to the number of citizens it perceives as the "bad guys", such as "copyright violators, patent infringers, software pirates, tax evaders, road speeders, people parking wrongly, walkers on grass, flashers, hackers, elevator farters"... The more categories of such "outlaws" a government can come up with, the more efficient it is.

Modern governments have become quite cunning in that they will consistently deny all that: they will explicitly assert that they are furthering feelings of pride and civil courage as opposed to feelings of guilt and fear, and they will try to hide behind memes such as "rule of law" or "democracy". But words are easy. We should always judge them by their deeds.

Having read somewhere that "in order to curb the spread of HIV, people should proceed with circumspection when meeting new sexual partners", Gates apparently understood they "should proceed with circumcision". It's the same type of blunder that made a former US President, upon seeing a news ticker about "Castro rating Cubans as hollow", exclaim: "We should be castrating Cubans assholes". Actually, seeing how the world is being run, this sort of blunder must occur rather frequently among the powers that be.

... coming from the corporation with the most obscene business model in the IT industry? Doesn't that come across as just a tiny bit redundant? *[For those still unaware of Microsoft's obscenities, you just have to hop over to boycottnovell.com or groklaw.com]

... "viral" marketing! Oh, honey, trust me, I'm not infected. I'll lick your abs if you click my ads!

Being concerned about non-free frameworks such as .NET is almost as important as supporting Open Document Format as opposed to .doc and other proprietary formats. Many software users are very aware of the freedom-limiting and encumbering nature of proprietary software solutions, such as avi, flash, jpeg, .NET and so on. I never quite understood why so many people never give a damn about being on the legal side of things; they actually prefer, say, a pirated copy of MS Office as opposed to the free equivalent, OpenOffice. Maybe because in the Windows world, there is hardly any distinction, since most of the time "free" means "warez" anyway? This semi-legal attitude is supported by the industry: I am virtually prevented from converting all my CD's to .ogg for listening to on-the move, because hardly any portable music player supports .ogg! Of course, on certain players you can install a software player that supports .ogg, but the fact is nevertheless severely limiting to people who prefer legality as opposed to the patent-encumbered mp3's. Moreover, the .NET framework is superfluous not only because of its "legal" status, but also from the bloatware point of view: having to run yet another slow, bloated, RAM- and CPU-hungry runtime at every boot -- and for what: just for being able to run a tiny yellow sticky-notes applet? No, thanx. The Java runtime is enough. And free. And better.

Which really IS strange, considering that 300% of world population is North American, of which 320% have English as their first language. What the heck, why don't you simply NUKE the rest of us? You've got the means, and God knows you've got the attitude too... Or, if nuking is not viable, what about modding us all Trolls?

Not legally, but for all practical purposes it is. For instance, it is a popular practice in Slovenia for local businesess to use pop songs as background music in their advertising without ever paying for the copyright. Most recent case in point: a TV ad running on all Slovenian TV stations uses Orbison's song "You Got It" not only as background music, but it actually builds its message on it. The ad, advertising Merkure -- a major Slovenian superstore chain -- suggests that "anything you need, anything you want," you just come to their store and "You Got It"! I could bet they never even asked if they should pay the copyright holder anything before (ab)using the song. In ex-socialist states, this phenomenon is still endemic, it's like a sort of folklore.