Bjarne is Socrates? WOW!

But you also can't improve GPL'd things and give other downstream from YOU more freedom (ie, here I've followed the GPL, but I'm making my mods MIT).

"Big business historically have been the target of GPL lawsuits."

That is exactly what I meant in that most people can't afford to sue. I don't dispute your last paragraph, but it still means you need to be large company to accomplish such a feat. Otherwise you are, at this point in time, rather better off staying completely proprietary and creating a coolness cult around your product (even though Apple uses plenty of free software themselves. portions of LLVM come to mind.).

A) First time I've ever seen this SFLC. (Can you point me to other /. articles about this SFLC. I wiki'd, but it reads like an ad).
B) Seems like an assumption that they would choose to help. After all, they can only help so many, and its not like they get paid (unless you pay them with winnings or something).

And then a bigger company comes along, does what's allowed in the license, and makes all the money while giving you none because they have a far greater ability to market YOUR product.

* standard libraries always linked dynamically.

I'm totally to brunk to post on /.

The GPL is essentially pro-big business. If the little guy writes a library and releases under the GPL, any major corp. can come along and *yoink* (technical term) it. Assuming said little guy finds out, he probably cannot afford to do anything about it. There's places that'll probably help (EFF? ACLU? I don't recall specific cases, but I am mildly intoxicated right now), but that doesn't change the advantage.

The GPL is especially annoying when you find the ONLY library that does a certain thing, and you really don't feel like releasing code while at the same time being unable to write an equivalent (whether that mean skill or time-wise). Just about the only thing I can immediately think of that should be GPL is standard libraries for a programming language (C++ STL for example).

People talk about "code freedom". It seems ridiculous (to me) for code to have freedom. What about my freedom? If I make something awesome with a library that is GPL and I'm feeling altruistic, I can't let people sell it without distributing source? That's ridiculous.

And how many people care about source code anyway? About half the planet is populated by females ya know (ie Natalie Portman)!

Beans.

Words made a purchase of goods or services?

I did not know they could do that these days. 'round these parts that would not be tolerated.

Gmail is stable too, and STILL has the little "BETA" tag on it.

Beats there being noone pretending to be me at all.

Like say, Red Giantness? We're going to vaporize; it's only going to take 4.5 billion years to happen. We NEED to leave (at some point), because it's going to happen.

A lot of other things can happen before then, making it essentially, we need to leave NOW.

And damnit, I want to be beamed up.

Speaking of comparisons, anyone have some links
about memory usage?

Some simulations/virtualizations of Win7 I've
been present for seem to show it using less RAM
idling than WinXP, albeit the Win7 is a clean
install, and the XP is Scotty style rigged
holding together after 6 years or so.

However my laptop with Ubuntu 8.10 seems to use
about half the available 464MB RAM. With Win7
idling at 40% used, should I average everything
and call it about even?

But then what about not having to use Anti-Virus
on Linux? Speed boost, eh? I'm not concerned with
look and feel. I just want my computer to run
optimally. My XP install is old. I don't even
know how I managed to fix the broken MSI install
capability.

My only other concern is drivers. If I have an
old enough ATI card, will there by some kind of
accelerated driver for it? I'm guessing the
answer to this is going to be use-the-live-cd and
find-out.

My CPU is an early Pentium 4 and a recent upgrade
to 1.5GB from 512MB of RDRAM.

Do you know where I might be able to find cheap RDRAM? Back in '02, this totally seemed like a good idea...

The computer next to me has 64MB(I think) of EDO-RAM