There's a car manufactured over here and then shipped everywhere. It is three times as expensive in Australia as USA. "Cost of international shipping" is often used as a reason cars are so expensive over here, but things like this just make a mockery of such lies. I imagine the size of the market and number of potential customers has more to do with it than the tyranny of distance.

In Hynds' cite this is a good thing.

Who wants to bet they'll be crying when there's no way of distributing their 4K content to consumer's new TVs?

I did try it a few times, but each time it took me away from the article I had come to read and dumped me on the homepage. Unacceptable.

On the plus side, it did appear to load a lot quicker than the 'Classic' mode.

Fun in the sun!

Dependency hell, as well as dpkg recalculating the dependencies after every modification to the list instead of waiting until the end. There were other problems, but all of their solutions involved adding packages and it quickly became so tedious it wasn't worth persisting with.

And it's not apt/deb. Deb is the whole reason I gave up on Linux for a decade and will never return to a Debian-based distibution. The problems with RPM you list in the second paragraph have happened to me in the past, but not for over two years and only when I was doing things "off the beaten track". Also, I understand the SPEC format and have no idea how Deb is easier. So, this boils down to opinion, and your opinion appears to be based on whimsy at best, rather than fact.

TL;DR: RPM's not the greatest solution (fact), but Apt/Deb is worse (opinion).

YUM does those things: Because I'm lazy...

Red Dwarf - Future Echoes

I know of no mighty company named "Quince"... maybe it's because I'm foreign?

Layout need not be changed and automated testing should bring that down to within a day. Says a guy who specializes in such endeavors.

Getting the copy approved, maybe. However, if you take more than a couple of minutes to make and test a change like this on the website of a massive engineering company you are doing it wrong.

It's really quite boring, actually. My employer requires software to get its business done. They use a vast array of proprietary and open source software and throw teams of business and software folk at it. The open source stuff gets contributions through this system (as does the proprietary) and everyone may benefit from it (unlike the proprietary). As in my initial (obviously poorly thought out and rushed) post, somebody wants the work to get done, they're willing to pay for that work, they take the benefits and (where possible) contribute the results to everyone else without expecting compensation. As with any business, there are lots of times when this isn't possible, but one can see that 'free' is of great benefit without big impacts to "making the world go 'round".

I often pay for apps and software in general (especially the 'free' stuff), usually because I believe that those products are valuable. The people who run those projects are mixed between those who expect compensation and those who are probably going to keep at it anyway. I personally don't understand why people would bother 'pirating' mobile apps, as there are so many that each do the same thing, if someone's trying to stitch you up by over-charging or micro-payment trickery, you'd just move on to the next one, surely? If people are going to the trouble of 'pirating' on the platform under discussion, I can't imaging them doing so for any reason other than directly annoying the author or otherwise being treacherous. Or perhaps just because they can? You are never going to get money from these consumers of your product, so why bother crying about it?

Plenty of folk are enjoying the spoils of their efforts on the platform (either monetarily or they're just having fun doing it), so it appears that this situation is one of a poor value proposition so there will be less genuine customers, because genuine customers won't wait for compensation to become reasonable and have moved on.

Who says it hasn't been updated? Who says the source code won't be made available? Who says anyone would actually want it? Do you also presume I expect money for it at any point? You seem to think my desire for everyone to get software for free means I expect to get things for free. I don't. I pay for plenty of stuff and contribute to other open source projects. I just see a bunch of people putting their stuff out there and complaining when everybody doesn't buy it as if the consumers were at fault.

Software Development. I think everyone should get it for free, because I know that if I want something I will build it myself.