Compare heroin prices in your neighborhood ghetto to bulk prices in Afghanistan (at _least_ 1500% -- what kind of interest rates do you see in your bank?). It might not be ethical, but it certainly could be rational -- even when you factor in the risk of getting caught, or killed by the competition.
No amount of tax payer money wasted on police and prisons can stop that kind of profit; all we manage to do is drive up prices, thus making recruitment even more lucrative.
Selective enforcement is key here. Locking up anyone you don't like is easy when everyone's a criminal.
Flaky UIs - click on a button and nothing happens. Or things not drawing properly. These are my observations.
Unresponsive UIs tend to be written by naive/ignorant developers who don't understand threading.
I'm sure the timing isn't accidental. Whole lot of kids out there begging their parents to replace that bricked console now..
The USPTO is not your enemy, congress is.
If your library is GPL-licensed, you're barring people from using it; from finding bugs and contributing patches. What open source is all about imho.
Over the last two years, I've contributed to three different open source projects on my employers time. Granted, just small stuff, but improvements none the less. Had these projects been GPL-licensed, we'd never consider them. I'm sure my company is by no means unique. Would Apple be using, and contributing to, FreeBSD if it was GPL'ed, for instance..?
In the end, open is always more competetive, and BSD/MIT/Apache/LGPL/+++ are more open than GPL. It's as simple as that.
C#? Really..?
According to tiobe, Java, as well as C++, beats C# and VB combined..
The JVM is pretty much ubiquitous. It is also free, open and mature.
There's of course Java, but you also have a multitude of other languages taking advantage of the JVM, e.g. JRuby, Groovy and Jython. See a more complete list here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages
My personal favorite is Clojure; a modern lisp taking full advantage of the JVM and Java's extensive libraries.
With your bare hands?!?
