Yes, Linux is only on embedded devices. It's not running on my phone, laptop, desktop, and server at all.

Awesome! I just found out there's a sequel, too. I'll be reading that this weekend.

Broken what law? Dutch law, I guess, so the Dutch would have to find and arrest them.

It's not a violation of American law to rob a store in Paris.

Even if you don't speak or write, you read. They note everything you read, in what order, how long you linger on which articles. They know what goes in your head, which gives them a pretty good idea what stays there.

No. Treating traffic differently based on protocol is fine. It's called QoS, and that's all this is. Net Neutrality is about the source and destination of packets.

What they're doing is conflating the two to confuse people so they'll say "gee I guess some fast lanes are okay..." and give up on Net Neutrality when really all they agreed is that QoS is a good idea.

It wouldn't be a violation of net neutrality to completely squash all BitTorrent traffic.

When we talk about net neutrality, we're talking about treating the traffic the same regardless of source or destination. This is different from QoS where it's perfectly fine and useful to treat packets differently based on protocol. Yes, please slow down a web page load by a millisecond so a VoIP packet isn't dropped. One is noticeable, the other isn't.

And what's the source or destination of a request for (or seeding of) a BitTorrent file? The BitTorrent network. Doesn't matter which peer you're getting it from (on your end).

What this really is is a PR wedge in the door against net neutrality by making it seem like this is a net neutrality issue, when it isn't. "Just the tip...just for a minute..." "Oh, well I guess some fast lanes are okay..." And then they're giving it to you hard and deep.

I'm pretty sure that has been tried (by others) and did not hold up in court.

If he could, believe me, Stallman would.

You called Stallman a hypocrite, and love him or hate him...I can't think of anyone on the planet who is less deserving of that title. He is blindingly, crippling consistent.

How do you propose they prevent GCC from producing propriety software? Probably would if they could, but I don't think there's any legal mechanism that would allow that.

I'm sure there's plenty of case law wherein a toolmaker has tried to claim that use of their tool gives them rights to the things created with that tool, and have been shut down. I am not bound by a license from Canon for pictures I take with my camera, nor do I share authorship with Microsoft for something I write in Word. The toolmaker has no rights over what the tool user does.

So while they can not prevent someone from making proprietary software with GCC, they sure don't have to make it easy on them. I'm willing to bet if you submitted a module that would help enforce some DRM standard (binaries that won't run without a license file, perhaps) they would un-graciously decline to commit that module to the main tree.

Stallman and pals are under no obligation to incorporate everything anybody wants into their project. They can say no for technical reasons, for philosophical reasons (like they did here), because it's Tuesday or for no reason at all.

The only reason for them to commit the changes Apple wanted was to aid their less-free tool endeavors. The reason Apple wants to make open source projects under permissive licenses rather than libre licenses is so they can embrace, extend, extinguish. This is not Stallman's first time at the rodeo. We've seen this before. You "partner" with the open source community to bootstrap your project, get lots of talented development for it, pull talent away from competing projects, and once everybody's dependent on your ecosystem, start closing it off (or replacing) one piece at a time until it's just your monolithic, closed product. Why on earth would you want to help them do that? No, Apple, if you want to contribute to GCC, come work on GDB, under the GPL license, and we're happy to have you.

When the white man shows up on your shore, where nobody owns land, you don't teach him to grown corn and let him carve out "just a little plot..over here...no bother..." in exchange for some baubles. You tell him to take his ass back to England, no matter how pretty the beads are right now. We'll stay savage, thanks, but free.

Ehhhhh no, it was kind of the other way around. Here's a good article about the rebranding of "Open Source" away from "Free Software."

In the Beginning, everybody understood the "free as in beer and free as in speech" thing. To be honest, it's a wonderfully geeky nomenclature. Free has two (primary) meanings, both of which apply to our software! Using that one word saves bandwidth! But geeks are very poor at branding, or expecting other people to understand their precise use of words.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Tim O'Reilly and pals redefined "free software" to mean what you think of today as "open source." They kept the "free as in beer" (design methodology) bit but jettisoned the "free as in speech" (social movement) bit because all that commie talk doesn't fly when they're trying to make a buck.

The FOSS community is not unaware of this, and has tried to counteract this with the word "libre," meaning "free as in liberty." But the damage is basically done. And besides, they were the Free Software Foundation first. Why should they have to change? They're not the ones who suck.

No, like I said, the initial naming was good. It was Free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. That one word worked perfectly. Again, this is before the words were muddied to appeal to business interests.

They only call it "GNU/Linux" when you're talking about...GNU/Linux. Again, precise definition. You call your system "Linux" but all those commands you're typing, cp, mv, grep, are GNU. Linux is just the kernel. Android, however, is...the Android variant of Linux, and GNU makes no claim on it and doesn't expect you to call it GNU/Android because there's no GNU in it.

No, absolutely not. What's really important to them is the principle of copyleft. That no, they will not compromise when it comes to the principles that free (libre) software must stay free (libre). Today candy, tomorrow shackles. In this world where freaking everybody compromises their principles, it's nice to see somebody who says "nope. Nope nope nope. This is what we believe, and we're sticking to it."

Did you read the rest of what I said about "embrace, extend, and extinguish?" Stallman takes the long view. I honestly have no idea what you're going for with the Apple bit. Apple closes their shit off, won't let you install what you want on your device, spies on you, hands that info to the government...they can take their "benefits" and cram them right up the ass of Steve Job's dessicated corpse.

1) Planet with liquid water and a magnetic field. Those seem a touch rare.

2) Sex slaves. Aliens love butt probin'.

3) They're dicks. Some kids burn ants with magnifying glasses.

4) Entertainment. Some interesting documentaries have been made about the phenomenon.

5) We're annoying the shit out of them. (Great, chilling book. And free online!)

"I spend 90% of my time pretending to work to obtain food."

So what you're saying is our political and economic leaders are, in fact, space lizards.

Maybe gamma-ray bursts only look like they're coming from distant galaxies...

Well, they get a planet with liquid water and a magnetic field to block radiation.

And sex slaves for all their butt probing.

And maybe they're just dicks? Some kids like burning ants with magnifying glasses.

And the "but somebody that advanced would have an advanced morality, too!" argument is baseless, as we have no example sets from which we can draw inference.

So great, I'm stuck in the configuration of quantum states where I'm a nerd posting on /. instead of the configuration where I'm Batman having a three-way with Kate Upton and Katy Perry on my space yacht. FML.