Really? That's all? Let's see... 2000 lbs, about 150 lbs/person ... some thirteen people. In my view, when only thirteen people want to corral themselves in a walled garden, with or without ads, that's real progress.

Seconding TaxAct. Cheapest and best. Does not phone home, as far as I know. It's the only reason I still have to have a virtualbox Windows taking up space on my drive.

I've been looking for a reliable, complete FOSS alternative for years. I think, as others have said, it doesn't exist because nobody (me included if I knew how!) would do that kind of tedium for free.

Interesting. I'm a biologist, and had no idea that the filesystem thingy was down to Bitfrost. I'm very impressed with the kinds of things Bitfrost let people do. Just for starters, preventing every early OLPC from winding up on the black market. It would have been nice if they could have wrapped that around a familiar-looking filesystem that was more than a jumble of recently accessed stuff.

I own one of the first OLPCs. The problem isn't Linux. (I hate to think of Win XP running in 256MB system, 1GB storage.) The problem is the whole philosophy of "it's not a computer, it's an education tool." (Or however they put it.)

No. A computer is whatever the user wants it to be. If you try to make that difficult, it'll fail sooner or later. The less money behind it, the sooner.

The educational philosophy they were pushing works for some subjects, some of the time. But they should have made it easy to use the OLPCs any way people wanted much earlier. It was only some time last year that a simple desktop switcher (sugar - gnome) was included with the basic OS. For me, at least, not having an ordinary filesystem available was a showstopper. I'd been dualbooting debian since the beginning, but all the trial and error to accomplish that isn't something a lot of teachers would do. But initially, for the first four years!, there was a lot of resistance to just giving people a familiar interface.

Then there were the hardware limitations. Even for Linux, at least the Fedora they're using, 256MB is barely enough to breathe. The keyboard takes a lot of getting used to. I'm not sure they ever got the expanded touchpad working.

So, like I said, nice idea, but they should have put more effort into improving hardware, providing the software people want, better distribution so they had a larger community of enthusiasts to write code for the project and help on (better organized!) forums, and kept their goofy educational philosophy for the people who wanted it.

I'm a biologist and I watched the whole evolution of PCR and the mad scramble to patent every bit of human DNA with stunned disbelief. Did the legal beagles not understand that they were allowing the equivalent of patenting somebody else's books in a library?

Apparently, they didn't.

But, after a generation or so, and a festering swamp of patents, the truth seems to be dawning on them. I shall watch our future progress with considerable interest.

If you're comfortable with Debian, just go for straight Debian. A nice stable outfit who does a good job of respecting the user's time.

If regular Debian is a bit hard, like it was for noobie me, then Linux Mint Debian (lmde, different from Linux Mint Ubuntu) is a great alternative. So far, nobody trying to shove idiotic UIs down my throat that might be the bees knees on smartphones, but I'm using a core i7 with a big screen, thank you very much.

(About that, by the way. These aren't stone adzes or something. We're talking about computers with plenty of memory. Why aren't there several UIs the user can choose from, based on what works for their platform? I mean, really. Why not? I gather that's what KDE is aiming for, but they need to hurry up and get there. They seem to be our only advanced GUI hope right now.)

Google, Amazon, the majority of servers, the list could go on forever, all wouldn't exist without linux. Apple strapped on the rocket engine known as BSD, but I'd be surprised if BSD is being paid by them. That doesn't seem like Apple's style.

Linux is adding unmeasurable value. All it needs is a different model of how creativity is rewarded.

We should be censusing usage and paying creators. The more your product was used or enjoyed, the more you'd get paid. In that world, linux wouldn't have a thing to worry about. (And, yeah, I know the nitty gritty of censusing and paying out is really complicated and it could never work perfectly. But it could work well enough to funnel a lot more of the rewards to the actual coders, writers, artists, musicians, than the few measly percent the current system does.)

It's called user control and privacy. 99.95% of people don't care about that too much, but every Megaupload that happens inches people a bit closer to realizing that no control is maybe not all that free.

It's interesting that the Department of Defense in the US is using more and more open source software, even while lots of people are saying "My data? Who cares?" Once control is worth something to you, there's no real alternative, ultimately, to FOSS. Or writing your own custom software.

Not that your main point is wrong... but you talk as if no geeks are women. That's obnoxious. People are self-centered, y'know?

Exactly! And it's not even difficult to make the chain of links explicit or to give people the environment they want. There's software for the first one, which should just be standard and automatic everywhere. And there's also a solution for the second issue. Slashdot has been using it for years. Give people the option to see different levels of grossness. If I want my world squeaky clean, I have my settings at "5." Or, at the other end, at "0." No censorship involved, and yet people can control at least that part of their own world.

Of course, that would require the big 4 browsers and the big search engines to cooperate in open source, transparent rating/moderation schemes, and everyone who puts anything on the web to be at least vaguely honest in their initial self-rating for where they fit in the scheme of things. And, yeah, I know, what are the chances of that?

Exactly. (But kindly don't correct me if I have my facts wrong.)

(P.S. I know some are free. I'm talking about the ones that aren't.)

"I used to work for a large magazine and their printing and postage costs are insane."

Okay. OT, I know, but I've figured this was the case. So why aren't their non-print subscription costs insanely less? I don't get it. And I don't see something else making up the difference. Server costs? Not bloody likely. Super-highly paid web designers? Yeah, right.

Oh, and get the money to pay the creators from a small fee, 0.1%?, on paper, drives, sdcards, anything used to store and use the works in question.

Reduce the friction. Get rid of it entirely. Then count the usage levels of any given work. (Yeah, yeah, I know That's not simple, but it would be a whole lot more straightforward than the current mess.) Then pay the artists / authors / coders / whatever based on how much their work is used or enjoyed.

Then the reduced friction would be in everyone's interest, both the users' and the creators'.

Of course, the publishers would still go fairly extinct. Is that a problem?