Reportedly, Qualcomm used to file patents to cover only a part of the features of their hardware. The rest was kept as trade secret. As a result, the competitors still needed to pay the patent licenses for Qualcomm IP, but the missing info prevented them to produce competitive components easily.

This is why choosing WCDMA for 3G destroyed Qualcomm's European competitors. In the end, It worked so well that Qualcomm folded its own 3GPP2 organisation, because the supposedly rival 3GPP standards were much more lucrative.

It seems that I was confused: you don't have the same standard libraries when you use AdaCore's GNAT Libre, GNAT Pro, or Ada support in GCC. And the Ada support integrated into the GCC mainline supports the linking exception. There is a better explaintation, but all this is quite confusing...

Perhaps if one day we get a compiler that does not require you to choose between an expensive license or coding only GPLv2 projects. Until then, all those GCC efforts only serve as an advertisement for GNAT Pro, and the only users will continue to be those avionics companies that are used to pay a lot.

Do the people that produce the Honest Trailers or Cinema Sins clips on YouTube really have permission, as well as unencrypted sources to avoid the effects of the law?

It is pretty much a given that when they started, they used the rips directly, but today they're large enough to interview the real actors, be nominated for an Emmy award or have their harrasment scandals of their own. If they want to retain the power of saying offensive things, they need to be able to take the movies they want without needing to ask, but today it looks this can only happen through some kind of "criminal" activity.

We could stop changing clocks. But it won't necessarily change anything to the way we live. For example, the train timetables in France before implementation of summertime changed twice a year, with summer and winter service. The summer service usually ran one hour earlier than the winter service. Of course, this also not limited to trains, so there was already something like a summer time implemented. Note that Lithuanians could use this, changing their schedule around the legal change to keep using the same solar time.

Mobile phones by design broadcast their position all the time, with quite powerful signal and on a very specific band. A good directional antenna and a portable spectrum analyzer should be enough to pinpoint their location as long as they're on.

Is Qualcomm really commited to support the chip on the long term? A good measure of this would be the level of support for the chip in the Linux kernel mainline. All serious server processors have support in the mainline - even Itanium did. With Qualcomm's mobile chips, millions of lines of custom code for a two year old kernel is normal, but for server customers it will not be sufficient.

Moglen, chairman for the SFLC, has resigned as a FSF councel last year. Perens has stated that he was in fact fired over conflict on regarding GPL enforcement. The source of the split seems to be this talk at a Linux Foundation event, where he criticised some of his own former compliance efforts, and aligned on the point of view of many members of the kernel community.

The independence of Algeria from France in 1961-1962 was handled this way: a first referendum in the whole country (including both France and Algeria at the time) enabling the independence referendum, and then a second referendum for Algeria alone.

A critical requirement when programming is the ability to compare different versions of the same code. This is quite easy to do with text. With diagrams, it becomes much harder to do.

The proposed correction was merged even before Poettering's comment.

From what I see in the discussion, the correction has been merged. So it has been recognized as a bug, and corrected as such.

There are no security updates for Nexus 4, sold by Google itself from November 2012 to November 2013. The last update was offered on September 2015, not even 2 years after the last sale. It looks like the Nexus 5 is going to reach the same state soon.

And there is no carrier or OEM to blame here...

Texas Instruments has the Wilink chip series which is very well supported in the kernel, but it's aimed at embedded devices with its SDIO interface, and does not even do 802.11ac.