That argument doesn't hold water. Purchasing a copy of the Copyrighted material gives you exactly the rights outlined in Copyright law. Whereas, purchasing a license gives you exactly the rights you negotiated with the seller. Copyright law will be too loose in places, too tight in others, and too likely to change next time the politicians get excited. The license you can get just right.

What we *can* say is: Calculate the risk of licenses over the long term. Especially those hilarious examples which allow unilateral changes by the seller.

Speaking of fictions: has Psystar ever operated, offered, or considered "customer buys a copy and sends it to Psystar to install on a computer the customer is purchasing from them"?

Books are sold. CDs of software are sold. The software on them is licensed.

The latter makes it possible for all sorts of licenses -- BSD, GPL, CC-* -- to exist with the full force of Copyright law behind them. So don't screw with it.

This software is licensed, not sold.

This software is licensed, not sold.

This software is licensed, not sold.

*clown-suited lawyer appear cackling madly*

Every time there is a computer-related Copyright suit, some bright light notices that... OMG, someone's claiming in-memory copies are unauthorized.

117 says: "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to [...]". Apple asserts that Psystar does not own the copy they are duplicating, therefore 117 does not apply.

IM-non-lawyer-O, the ownership vs licensing debate is pretty well settled in Apple's favor. So if you buy a copy, you don't need additional permissions to run it. If you license a copy, the license needs to grant you permission to run it.

Well, that was easy.

Aside from the detail that Apple is busy suing them into a deep hole...

Welcome to legal systems. Whether or not you think justice is being rendered, the rendering takes time.

Have to voice agreement on that. Microsoft puts a lot of effort into attracting excellent developers and trying to keep them happy. The developers and front-line managers I've talked to struck me as a decent, and I know more than a few people who have settled in there.

There are lots of reasons to rip on MS and their products... but I'm not seeing good treatment of good interns as one of those.

I'm a cynic. Figure we just never noticed before.

[1-999]

I believe it.

A few years ago, Microsoft was ignoring Free Software and Open Source. Now Microsoft has moved onto misleading branding, false marketing, patent threats, and courting developers with what traditionally turned out to be empty promises.

So, the same way they treat other competition.

I would be more worried about people choosing poor products based on marketing if I thought it were a new phenomenon.

But, just like the next generation being when the world descends into sloth and vice, we don't really seem to be getting anywhere in our tumble toward oblivion.

No, that's just the cheapest. You don't know about 'good enough' without careful planning and quality evaluation.

Or, taking the more common approach, you purchase it and deployed it. Then you discover why it was cheapest. Because it wasn't good enough.

That would be where this bank of settings comes in.

and anything the other FB users saved, and anything their ISPs recorded, and on and on...

Of course, storing data received from the Facebook API for extended periods is a violation of their TOS. As are all the forms of redistribution people are paranoid about. And the applications *still* can't get more data than they could be having the installing users run a real application which spiders the FB pages.

So, *shrug*