As the licensing terms Apple chose to use deny access to the app store for over 50% of open source software worldwide by including language that attempts to place restrictions on software above and beyond what the contributors intend, there's really no other conclusion to come to. Apple and their lawyers know the GPL very well and were well aware of what they were doing. As to their intentions, I won't hazard a guess, but Apple's intentions are seldom honorable.

The licensing for these open source was done years ago. Two decades at this point in the case of the GPLv2, the world's most popular software license... well before iOS even existed. Apple designed their licensing for the iOS and Mac App Stores so that they are incompatible with said license. That's their own fault. So, even though a couple VLC devs tried to put it in the store, they didn't get the permission of all the copyright holders to violate the terms of the GPL and do so. Thus, those devs and Apple themselves violated the GPL.

As the iOS and Mac App Stores have restrictive licensing terms and are setup in a way which are incompatible with the GPL and LGPL. And as the GPL and LGPL represent the majority of open source software (about 57% combined). Yes, Apple does indeed restriuct open source apps from their app store.

Right, and they RELEASED all the source code that was GPLed as well as all source that was directly linked to it. They did this for Honeycomb. They've ALREADY done this for Ice Cream Sandwich. And they've released the FULL source (GPL, Apache, BSD, etc bits) for Gingerbread, as they will for ICS once phones are released.

This is FUD based on nothing. Google has said for quite some time that Gingerbread was available, that Honeycomb would be closed and only suited for tablets and that Ice Cream Sandwich would have the source available once it was released. Google was true to their word and everything for 2.x is available and 3.x is closed. The post linked to in the main article is the sources they are required to release (GPL) now that the Ice Cream Sandwich SDK is available. It should be noted that Ice Cream Sandwich itself as an OS has not been released and is not available on any shipping product. They've already said "We plan to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices." It's not available on devices yet.

Well, considering the source code to Gingerbread 2.3.4 (what my phone runs) is fully available as Google said it would be, and Google said Android 3.x Honeycomb would be closed as it is, why would you doubt them? Android 4.0 Ice Cream will be open source and the Cyanogen guys will be hacking it into working ROMs for every phone on the market soon after it's released.

Java is only used for the Base database utility and a number of new document wizards plus a few other minor bits. The rest of LibreOffice has no Java components, so Java has nothing to do with normal usage of the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool or drawing programs. Ribbon use is subjective. Like many others, I hate it. It's clumsy and harder to find what you need.

All the major tablet and phone OSes work this way, even the recently-defunct ones like WebOS, so I'm not sure why this is a surprise. These are designed to be personal individual devices used by one person. You want another login, buy another device. (That part is by design to sell more things).

Yes and No. If the labels are claiming that they can dictate what goes for their music, then the other labels can to. And they can disagree with Apple and then sue. And there are WAY more than thousands of other labels. I know tons of musicians who self-publish under their own labels. What the big 4 decides has no bearing on the way these artists see things.

I'm in complete agreement. But the fact that users can upload their own music (which may be ripped or downloaded illegally) to Apple just like they can to Google and Amazon, means Apple is no better. It's just that they are making a deal with the bug 4 labels to essentially pay protection money upfront.

Though Apple is in negotiations with the 4 big labels, there will still be thousands of labels that haven't given them permission for users to upload and stream their songs. So Apple's being just as legally iffy as Google and Amazon. The difference is that Apple is cutting deals with the labels most likely to sue them so they won't.

For the technologically confused, it's just a change in version numbering. That's all. 5.0 is essentially 4.1 (or maybe even 4.0.2). Nothing super-crazy going on. Sure, if someone *really* wanted, they can change the 5.0 to a 4.0.3 and feel all warm and fuzzy about 'stability'. The only real issue is the possibility that some extensions weren't properly updated to understand this. Any that aren't can be remotely updated by addons.mozilla.org, though, and anyone with the Addons Compatibility Tester extension can enable disabled extensions and report any issues directly to Mozilla.

As always, we posted the portable version within a few hours over at PortableApps.com. As we did an extended test of version 4.0 portably following the whole 4.0 beta and RC process, it's turned out to be a nice, stable release. It's great for running from your flash drive, DropBox or just trying out a new firefox install without affecting your local one.

Release Announcement | Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 4.0 homepage

I suppose it does depend on your definition of a PC. Most people think Windows, because there is PC (Windows) and Mac. Outside of our geek community, *nix doesn't really exist (some netbooks notwithstanding) in terms of what most people think of. Even on phones, people have no idea that Android is Linux-based.

When outside of our sphere, the world is Windows. If you have your portable apps on a USB drive, you may use them at a local library, a net cafe, a hotel business center, at work or at school. All of those are generally going to be Windows (though a small number of primary and smaller number of secondary schools may be Mac only). Where most of our users wind up using their apps on Wine is on their home computer (or work PC in sysadmin roles or similar), which serves them well as they really only need to configure it, sync some bookmarks, install/update some apps, etc.

In terms of the 'platform being open', we're talking about our platform (menu, backup utility, application updater) as well as our format, installer and launcher/portablizer. All are open source (GPL) and available to all. And they aren't artificially tied to hardware (like Sandisk's now-defunct U3 platform).

It works just fine under Wine. We just recommend setting Wine to Windows 2000 in the version so Firefox doesn't try and do DirectX 9 hardware acceleration (as it does on XP) for most users. I know on my Ubuntu test VM, you wind up with a black window that doesn't redraw if it is set to XP, but it works just peachy set to Windows 2000.

Windows is generally a safe assumption as 94% of the market is using it (then 5% Mac and 1% *nix/BSD).