I don't see how not paying the witness money helps the BSA. The witness originally offered the evidence in the hope and promise of a reward. Any evidence given by that witness is going to be tainted regardless of whether the reward was paid or not.

If they get a few big guys like Google and Yahoo to favor IPv6 hosted content over IPv4 when it comes to page rank, I think you would see a mad scramble to IPv6 with customers placing a crushing amount of pressure on their providers to get them a presence on IPv6. Not sure if I understand it right, but I *think* its not too difficult to serve content on both address spaces simultaneously?

If you jump off the roof of your house, you will hit the ground. If you have a really expensive house with like 5 stories, or a penthouse on 5th avenue, it may take you longer to hit the ground, but eventually.... splat.

You can create giant planet-sized data stores and find things in them with an RDBMS, its just not cheap or fast. I am not bashing NoSQL as a data store, I am pointing out that it's query language is not what makes it powerful. It's query language is limited compared to SQL, a compromise to be able to do queries that scale across many machines.

From what I have learned about the uses for and abilities of NoSQL, its a compromise you make when affordable scalability is required to stay in business. It is nowhere near as powerful as the RDBMS/SQL combination, however it is much cheaper to run. Don't believe anyone who tries to tell you there are things you can do with NoSQL that you can't do with SQL. That is complete bunk. Maybe it makes speed cheaper, and scaling easier, but those decisions should be forced by application demand and budget constraints, not application design. I am most interested in NoSQL as a way to store denormalized data in a pre-cache for light write, heavy read applications. Any other use would probably be due to desperation to scale to keep up with demand.

Whatever kind of question it is does not change the risk involved in trying to profit from software, or any product for that matter. I would argue that the time invested to write the software is the same for either case. You are also gambling that someone will want to pay for your closed source software.

You asked a marketing question that I don't really know how to answer. I make a full time living as a contractor developing and maintaining free open source software. All of my revenue comes from companies who find my code useful and are willing to pay for access to my talent to add features, fix bugs, give support, etc. I am not listed in the phone book, I don't pay for any advertising, etc. Free stuff gets around quickly and people seek me out.

Distribution is only part of it. The freedom to modify software that you rely on to perform your task better is what is at stake. Just like you have the freedom to modify your car to perform better.

Free as in free to turn you car in to a hot rod and re-sell it to someone else if you feel like it. Closed source software is a car with the hood welded shut that you aren't allowed to fix if the engine dies, or resell if you need the money to buy movie tickets.

Its kind of like owning a luxury car. You still get from A to B, but you feel better than everyone else because you wasted your money.

I don't get spam from Chase, but a ton from Capital One. Is that the one you meant?

and switching to a more reputable corporate behemoth like... hrmm... like... uhhh... doh!

The military has laws which make it very illegal to do what Manning allegedly did. At the time he allegedly released the documents, he was sworn to obey those laws. Assuming for a moment that he is indeed guilty, he should have to pay the price for his actions. As for whether or not his act was noble, that is for history to decide. Most heros pay a high price to earn that label. Often the price is their life.

The article is incorrect. Microsoft does not ban 'open source', it bans one very specific type of license that the author expressly intends to be viral.

Microsoft use open source code, but they only use code with licences that do not have a viral clause. They use some of my open source code in IE. Microsoft also publish open source code, but not under viral licenses. RMS is very definite about his intention to contaminate proprietary code with his own.

Now before folk go off into a slashweenie froth over this. I know RMS, i have argued this point with him. And he is very very clear about his intent that the gpl be viral. He makes no secret at all about this. Go and talk to him if you do not believe me. But dont assume that because the description of his idea sounds nutty that it must be false. Again, you need to talk to him and know him.

We expressly rejected the gpl for licensing the CERN web code because we did not want the ideological baggage. The code was merely a tool to spread the web. Well ok not for Tim, he hadvcode attachment, but not to owning it. We did make a big mistake in making the code public domain, but there was not the selection of licenses we have today. BSD would have been a better choice.

So dont blame Mr softy for taking RMS seriously. There probably isnt a legal risk there. But Gates is merely taking RMS seriously.

The group has published a manifsto that most of us here would consider to be very extreme.

they have gone beyond protecting wikileaks and some are looking to replace them and set all information and secrets free.

Both groups belong in jail in my view.