> While not impossible to get into the radio, the FCC (I could be talking out of my arse here, so someone with more knowledge can confirm or deny this general memory of mine) doesn't want the entire population walking around with fully open phones, even if the companies would supply them. They would fail to get licensing. If you're not sure what you're talking about, why are you making claims that defend bullshit policies? Factually, there are several software controlled radio products that run fully free software and don't have significant problems from the FCC.

Very simply, because the OS developers are usually pretty smart and when you try to outsmart them and fail you look like a tool. And you're going to fail. If I knew that everyone who I posted a response like this would pay up, I'd bet you $1k that you'd fail and make mad cash.

or someone WILL get hurt.

That sucks.

But banning dangerous equipment just because people frequently and predictably get hurt is absurd. Anyone who wants to can go down to any hardware store and every aisle has five things that they could seriously injure you with. Mostly they don't, and if they did you'd file charges.

It allows Apple to *attempt* to get the developer to re-reimburse the cost, but any judgment against Apple is still a judgment against Apple.

You are absolutely wrong.

The PS3 was advertised as having a set of features, including the ability to run an alternate OS. The alternate OS feature was explicitly publicized and reasonably well supported by Sony when the PS3 was released. This isn't some third party hack - the PS3 was being promoted intentionally as a Linux based Cell dev kit.

Anyone who purchased the PS3 in order to use both the alternate OS feature and the online gaming feature has been defrauded by Sony.

maybe it is time to switch to a console

Why does everyone insist on making irrational choices here?

For single player video games, the best option - by far - is to pirate PC games. A pirated PC game downloads overnight for $0 and just works with absolutely no bullshit. In 20 years, you might have to run it in a VM for the old operating system, but it'll still run.

With that option on the table, buying games is silly and even considering doing the console thing is absurd.

Really? Does that even sound like a vaguely logical argument to you?

For someone who has a flaky network connection, turning stuff that should work offline into online only stuff is bullshit. This should be completely obvious.

Correction: Exactly one person will buy the game. He will pay cash.

At that point I just wouldn't do it since it could be a huge legal hassle and risk for no real gain to me.

Put the source on the CD, and you don't have a problem. It's not like it takes up a lot of space.

Have you, perchance, heard of BSD Unix?

I wouldn't argue too loudly that it's entirely impossible to code your way out of copyright liability for being a derivative work.

It would amount to free software developers giving away their code as charity to proprietary shops, who would then sell it for a profit.

Who would buy it? One guy so he could rip out the license enforcement malware and share the result with everyone else?

Sure, lots of people would have a bunch of binary blobs on their computer until people realized that releasing blobs was a waste of time, but if any of them were actually important it wouldn't be that hard to re-create source for them.

The busybox source is a 2 meg file. In order to comply with the license, you either need to
A.) Provide that file on a CD (or similar) in the product box OR
B.) Provide a written offer to send a CD for like $5 on request

Neither of those is especially difficult.

If you compare the Perl6 timeline to the Haskell timeline, you'll see that things aren't really going all that slowly. Building a good implementation of a complex programming language takes time.

Right now China has a per-capita GDP of about $6000, while the corresponding figure in the USA is more like $50,000. The per-capita GDP of the USA + China is about $14,000 - about the same as Mexico.

So... when everyone in china "gets rich" we can all live like Mexicans?

That's also ignoring the increasing divide between the rich and the poor. In an economy based on "intellectual property", it's not people who work for a living who get rich. It's people who invest in the correct government-granted monopolies. Only entities with money will make a ton of money.

And, just to be clear, you're better off buying scratch tickets than hoping "luck out" and be the next Bill Gates.