Substitute 'Firefox' or just about any other open source program in place of 'Gedit' and you have a perfect description of what is wrong with open source today.

Because closed source almost never has a publicly viewable bug tracker. At best, there's a forum where you can post bugs that most likely will be ignored and rarely acknowledged even if accepted and fixed..

Because closed source never has people from outside the company submitting patches By definition, people other than the developers can't see the source (hence 'closed'). For example. the vast majority of people who work at Microsoft are not allowed to see the Windows source code.

Because closed source rarely solicits or accepts work of any kind from people outside the company, except under NDA.

Exactly. I have tried almost all of the methods of contributing listed in the article and have either been ignored or rejected.

I thought stupidity was the most abundant material on earth.

I was really hoping that when Mozilla's contract with Google ran out the whole bloated business would collapse and they would go back to just making a browser that people actually want to use. But a new money truck just arrived in town and they can continue to add more and more useless 'features' while destroying all the things that made Firefox popular in the first place.

How are online merchants offering free shipping without charging higher prices? UPS and FedEx don't deliver packages for free. The merchant eats the cost to get more business. Same with credit cards.

.They lose money on me but make it back 1000 times over on all the dumbasses who charge more than they can afford to pay back.

Hey, guess what, I pay exactly the same price whether I use cash or credit card. The number of businesses that do not accept credit cards is extremely small and getting smaller every day. Yes, merchants *DO* eat the 3% CC fee. They have to. They have no choice thanks to good old fashioned competition. If you don't take credit cards you WILL lose business to competitors who do.

Back some time ago a bunch of merchants won a lawsuit challenging Visa/Mastercard rules, and as a result merchants are now allowed to charge people more for using a credit card instead of paying cash.. Well guess what, I have yet to encounter one single merchant doing that. They have no choice. Once again, good old fashioned competition. If they charge more for using a credit card, they will lose business to competitors who don't.

There is no "message" and I rarely mention this to anyone. Because I know that most people are too stupid to do it properly.

I've been 98% cashless since the early 90s and never have more than a few dollars on me at any given time.. I put everything on a credit card and write one check a month to pay for everything. And now I don't even have to write a check, I just go online and make a payment straight out of my bank account to the credit card company. And, because I pay everything off every month it costs me nothing, and, since I'm using a 'cash back' credit card, I get a check for $50 every few months. It's not much but it's free money that I didn't have before. I'm sure the credit card company hates people like me, but fuck'em.

Well of course alcohol affected human evolution. Without it, cavemen wouldn't have fucked the ugly cavewomen.

The lawsuit addresses that:

"It would be egregious and unlawful for a major retailer, such as Tower Records, for example, to require that all music CDs purchased at Tower Records can be played only with CD players purchased at Tower Records. Yet, this is precisely what Apple has done."

This might be true, but, if you look at the contents of any folder you'll find that all the files in it are unrelated, i.e., several songs from several different albums by several different artists. This is Apple we're talking about, there's no way that some of the obfuscation isn't deliberate.

There are programs for all operating systems that do this. They work, sort of, but are just as shitty and broken as iTunes, just in different ways

Apparently Apple did change something at some point. I received an iPod Classic 160GB, one of the models listed in the lawsuit, as a Christmas Gift in December 2010. Although I have to use the iTunes software to put music onto the iPod (iTunes being the absolute shittiest software ever written) I have never had a problem putting any music files I want on my iPod, even though none of there were purchased from the iTunes store. The iPod was purchased at Best Buy and is not Jailborken as far as I know.

I notice that the lawsuit specifically defines members of the class action as people who "purchased one of the iPod models listed below directly from Apple between September 12, 2006 and March 31, 2009"