Yes. Please read up on dynamic linking and the GPL and LGPL. The questions your asking have been asked, answered, and discussed by many people every day for the past twenty years. Try Google, it's very useful.

And you're going to claim Windows recognized all the hardware and functioned properly without fiddling?

Pull the other one.

At this point, Linux hardware problems are not significantly different from Windows hardware problems (e.g. a fresh install of Linux on any given PC is at least as likely to run fine as Windows, probably more likely since more up-to-date drivers are included), but they're harder to fix when they do occur due to lack of direct manufacturer support.

In Windows it's usually "go download the driver from the manufacturer's site", in Linux that's less likely to be an option, and if it is, the installation process is probably going to involve the command line, which scares people.

If you already own such packages, most of them work well in Wine these days (and Wine is a lot easier to use than it was in the past, though still not what it should be).

You'd rather hunt through the web for applications, install them manually (assuming their installers even work; how many Windows and Mac installers have I run that are just broken in some serious way? quite a lot), and keep them up to date manually or through their wildly varying auto-update mechanisms (which, again, vary wildly in quality and reliability)?

You're not an advanced user, you're a masochist. And so's your mom.

Hah! You could offer me a million bucks a year and there are still certain fields I WILL NOT work IT in. Health care is one, finance is another. I do not want the stress of the environment, nor the knowledge that someone's life or livelihood may hinge on whether I inverted an 'if' test.

Compensation is not the only thing that keeps smart people out of health care.

Speaking of reading comprehension fail... Do you know what "headline" means?

To be fair, the headline itself is poorly written, and does imply $0.99/comment.

That's not really much assurance. I can get a credit card (or something they can't distinguish from a credit card) in the name of "John Smith" pretty easily, even though that's nowhere close to my real name. It might be a bit much to be able to spew random crap in a comments section, but trolls and astroturfers can be pretty motivated.

You are extremely confused about how the law works. Trademark law is used to prevent someone from using your names and marks to pretend they're selling your product (e.g. I can't make a stereo and slap a "Sony" label on it).

There is absolutely nothing in trademark law to prevent me from taking software under an open-source license, changing the name and logos, and redistributing it freely. This is why CentOS can take Red Hat's product, strip out/replace the Red Hat trademarks, and distribute it for free.

Have you tried actually reading the first criteria of the open source definition?

http://opensource.org/docs/osd

I think I see the problem. You don't seem to be aware that two federal courts of appeal (6th and 9th circuits) have already held source code to be speech protected by the First Amendment. Its mere distribution by its author/copyright holder cannot be restricted.

I'm not sure you can make that assertion. What if I implemented something as a shell script, which is fully interpreted? Is it immediately infringing, or does it only infringe once interpreted (which happens in real-time at point of execution)?

What about languages that use intervening bytecode? If I take some Java and reduce it to JVM bytecode, is that infringing, or does it only become infringing once the JVM interprets the bytecode or the JIT reduces it to native machine code?

That raw code is speech is an unremarkable concept to most who are familiar with the subject, but when the speech becomes a device/process is not always completely clear.

You absolutely do deserve it, because it's _not_ true. This stance can be used to justify ignoring anything, including the most heinous crimes imaginable.

No, the attorney told him he's risking a lawsuit and that releasing open-source code using patented techniques is a "grey area". None of that indicates a lawsuit would have merit. You can sue anybody for anything. By posting, you risk me suing you because I don't like your use of the letter 'z'. That doesn't mean I'd win.

Yes, exactly. In the same way that a description or schematic of a patented invention does not infringe a patent, simple source code does not infringe a patent. How is this difficult to understand?