Good question.

No, it is not my preference that companies can do this. But at the same time I recognize that many of the web sites I visit on a regular basis need to make money somehow, even if they're only trying to cover the cost of their bandwidth.

Also, like I said, I'd rather see these kinds of ads than the horrible flashy blinky mortgage and weight loss scams and whatever else I seem to initially encounter on a "clean" machine.

Lately I've been pleased by the ads I get on most sites. After having recently shopped for a luxury car I got almost nothing but BMW, Infinti, Acura, etc. ads for months. None of which were intrusive. This Christmas I did some online shopping for some pajamas for the GF at Victoria's Secret and lo and behold now I'm greeted with Victoria's Secret models on a number of sites. Not only can I live with that, I can proclaim complete innocence when she's looking over my shoulder.

I even clicked through on a couple of the car ones while I was making up my mind, and afterwards as a bit of a reward for sites that host decent non-intrusive ads.

On the other hand, sites that have intersticials or Javascript pop-up/fly-overs that can't be blocked without disabling script, can DIAF. I have a bookmarklet that nukes most of them, otherwise I just immediately close the tab.

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/25/mcdonalds-lawyers-italian-restaurant-name

Therefore, I'm planning on making an eBook reader just to name it a McBook*. If enough heavyweight lawyers at McDonalds, Facebook, and Apple descend on me they may collapse into a black hole.

* Pronounced "em cee book" of course.

At least for some of us, it's not just basic arithemetic but having to spend tons of hours tracking down information that *could* be readily provided but, for some bizzare reason isn't. For example, have you ever had to deal with a ESPP in a company? Here's an example:

From: http://www.ericlawrence.com/eric/show.asp?entry=4/2/2010%2012:20:00%20PM

I agree that a basic 1040 is easy, but there are tons of gotchas out there due to not only the legal complexity but also how your company and/or broker does their bookkeeping. Reverse solving to uncover lost data is a huge pain, especially if you're like some of us who opt-out of paper statements. Some of the critical information you need to know is just gone.

Of course, if you're one of those people who keeps a dozen filing cabinets and spends 30 minutes a day doing personal finance and bookkeeping, sure it's trivial. Most people aren't like that and shouldn't be required to be like that.

To be fair, my post was primarily addressing the "information should be free" crowd, particularly those who think that OSS is the only way to go and proprietary software is somehow evil. (These people also seem to be content stealing* movies and music). This isn't the same as the OSS community, although anecdotally there seems to be a lot of overlap.

So, would you be happy with a License to Tinker that doesn't allow an arbitrary company to legally take advantage of the R&D efforts of the people who created the product (software and/or hardware), but would still keep it fully open for your tinkering?

This wouldn't necessarily replace OSS software; there's nothing wrong with people deciding to release their work under the GPL or any other license. However, it does concern me when people think that all software MUST be released under such a license because this allows other companies to get a free ride (as in my Asus example) and profit off the original creators work. This also implies that the R&D process has no value, but the manufacturing process somehow does. I believe the net effect would be to discourage the creation process, leading to stagnation and exclusively promoting annoying business models such as ad-driven software.

* - The pedant who mentions that copyright violation is not a criminal act is an example of said person. :-)