The maximum amount of time a civil plaintiff has to collect damages is 7 years (shorter if bankruptcy is declared). For government debt, the maximum is 20 years. There is no life indebtedness in the USA.

I said "threatened with lawsuits". H.264 is a patented format with participation fees that websites who use H.264 are expected to pay.

Or YouTube will continue to use Flash. Not everyone hates Flash. To use H.264 you must get a license. If Mozilla gets a license it only protects Mozilla from lawsuits, NOT the rest of the Internet. It could lead to a situation like when GIF was patented, where if you had a GIF on your website you could be sued if you didn't pay for some $5000 license. I don't know if some of you are old enough to remember that, but it sucked.

H.264 could lead to a situation like when GIF was patented, where if you had a GIF on your website you could be sued if you didn't pay for some $5000 license. I don't know if some of you are old enough to remember that, but it sucked.

Well to use H.264 you must get a license. If Mozilla gets a license it only protects Mozilla from lawsuits, NOT the rest of the Internet. It could lead to a situation like when GIF was patented, where if you had a GIF on your website you could be sued if you didn't pay for some $5000 license. I don't know if some of you are old enough to remember that, but it sucked.

No, it's a really bad option. Do remember when people got threatened with lawsuits for having GIFs on their website? That might happen with H.264 as well.

That's not true. They just haven't gone after the rest of the Internet yet. H.264 is like a new GIF in the making (remember why PNG was created?). People don't realize how dangerous this can be, it's more then just a ethics thing.

You must be talking of an older version of Bind. Bind9 can use a wide variety of database backends. It's also a complete rewrite.

A big business is more liable then a small business, they have more assets to lose, assuming they lose a copyright infringement case. Lawyers like to sue people with money.

Big business historically have been the target of GPL lawsuits.

So I don't buy your theory.

GPL is a probably the best open source license for distributing software you actually want to make money from. What you do is charge a fee for people who don't agree to the GPL terms. With BSD, it's not quite as easy to do this. Notice some of the most profitable open source products (eg: SugarCRM, and MySQL) are GPL.

Well lets take this a little deeper. Microsoft was convicted of illegal activity based on the deals they did with OEMs. It's a valid compliant, when you consider the popular choice is probably popular because of criminal activity.

Where is this evidence you speak of?

I am interested in your seeing sources about msvc performance advantages over gcc. Where did you get this information from?

The fact is not EVERYONE needs Office, but some people do. Which baffles me why a corporation wouldn't consider deploying OOo to everyone, and give MS Office to the people who depend on weird MS Office features. This way you save the most money while not slowing your business process!

I definitely think stuff like Turing machines and abstract computer science should be thought at the middle school level as part of science courses. In fact I recently gave a presentation to a bunch of undergraduate MATHEMATICS students and not a single one know who Alan Turing even was.