"""Kobo's books are sold in ePub format, which means you can put them on a lot of different devices without having to convert them. Moreover, in Canada, there are licensing problems that Kobo doesn't seem to have."""

Yeah this is not exactly true; Kobo uses EPUB with their own proprietary DRM on top of it. I know this because I have worked on that code.

(There is no DRM standard for EPUB so all ebook sellers use their own weird standard. What Adobe does with EPUBs is also not a standard. They love to call it that but it really is not.)

It basically comes down to this: you can read your Kobo purchased books on any Kobo device or on a device that supports Adobe EPUBs, like the Sony e-Readers.

There is however no way to grab the EPUB, unzip it and read the HTML. That is because Kobo has to deal with the same DRM requirements as Apple or Amazon.

This is true. But consider this: VLC for the iPhone is a free application. So you are not able to give me a copy directly, but I can download a free copy from Apple without any problems. I know it is not ideal but at least there is a very simple mechanism in place to distribute free software very easily.

You forget to mention that VLC is distributed under the GPLv2 license. So there is no anti-Tivoization clause.

There are a bunch of things wrong with this slashdot article and also with how the original VLC developers are handling this. It is easy to blame Apple for everything, but consider this:

* There are three parties here: The VLC Team that wrote the VLC code. The commercial iPhone developer Applidium, who turned VLC into an iPhone App. Apple, who is making the application available.

* Applidium submitted the application to the App Store. Apple approved the app. The VLC Team is sending a copyright infringement to Apple.

* VLC is licensed under the GPL2. If the GPL2 license is incompatible with the App Store then why have the developers of VLC for the iPhone (Applidium) submitted the app? They should never have done that in the first place. They are the ones to blame for uploading software that cannot exist on the App Store under its current terms.

* The application is currently on the store, which means Apple has approved it. So obviously from Apple's perspective there is no problem here.

* Apple has actually changed the rules to accomodate for GPL2 licensed software after the GNU Go debacle: if a proper license is already attached to the application then Apple does not enforce its own default EULA for apps. This change was made in June. A month after the GNU Go thing happened.

* Apple kicked out GNU Go because the FSF requested them to do that. People keep screaming that Apple removes all GPL software, but this is simply because people are telling Apple to do that. What else do you expect them to do?

* It is probably fair to assume that Apple will remove the software after the copyright infringement claims made by the VLC team. But this really has NOTHING to do with the GPL. This is simply how Apple reacts to these kind of allegations. They remove the software and let both parties know so that the parties (in this case VLC Team vs Applidium) can work out a deal or whatever.

Diplomacy has never been a strong point of the VLC team and because of this in the end will lose:

* End users will not be able to use VLC on their iPhones and iPads.
* Applidium just wasted a huge amount of time on this project.
* The VLC team will not have an opportunity to start a dialog with Apple to maybe relax the rules.
* Apple will lose an interesting app on their store.

Yay for GNU GPL zealots.

PowerDNS does scripting.

You can write DNS logic in Lua. You can use it to write backend that capture spelling mistakes, do redirection, catch and act on NXDOMAINS, etc.

Thanks to the Lua/scripting support, a lot of companies are replacing their legacy commercial Nominum servers/licenses with PowerDNS. I performs same or better on simple modern hardware while not costing a truckload of dollars.

Sounds like you guys took a good look at PowerDNS, which has this functionality for many years.

I switched to PowerDNS a long time ago and never really looked back at Bind. PowerDNS is awesome. It is fast, modern and has much less of a buggy/exploity reputation as Bind has.