My belief is that projects like CentOS are there because people want to skate on the backs of people and companies who have spent time and money making a good product, just because they don't want to pay for that hard work. I believe this is the flaw in the GNU license, and not open source in general.

As opposed to what, BSD? The GPL is viral in that all derivative products must be contributed back to the community, whereas a less strict open source license would allow CentOS to keep the modified source to themselves as long as they gave due credit. I'm not a fan of the GPL, but this is a complete misrepresentation.

"Granted, they've been very creative with things like the MsPL but people see through those ruses pretty quickly." Yes, total ruse. Except that the MSPL is an OSI-approved open source license. There's plenty to bash MS on, the MSPL isn't one of those things.

Wow, this is a perfect example of completely misunderstanding memory-CPU tradeoffs. No. For a non-trivial amount of data, it is never cheaper to recompute the data, at access-time. It may be faster overall, as you might be able to use the freed RAM in a better way elsewhere, but it will never speed the accessing task up.

If you recompute the data constantly, it has to hit RAM and then read it back, unless you're dealing with a dataset small enough to be stored completely in cache, in which case this is a nonissue anyway. More caching is never a bad thing, so long as you set smart defaults for how the caching is done, and you allow the users to configure it. More RAM, in the hands of a smart developer, is a Good Thing (TM).

That's the firmware for the application CPU, but I don't believe the GSM baseband chip's firmware is open.

You don't even need to go the FPGA route. The baseband firmware on the iPhone has been patched for an unlocking, there's nothing stopping someone from patching it to change the IMEI built into the phone or the IMSI it "reads" from the SIM. Change these and the phone can become any other.

When you're in a position of power for a long time and an alternative comes along, what do you do? You assert control in any way you possibly can. Not that that's a good thing, but that's the way it goes.

Helluva drug^Wengine

There's a bird virus going around. They used to sing in a way that let me know what was going on, but now even the birds are pushing g3n3r1c c14l15.

And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (TM).

That was my first thought, too. Mediatrons are finally coming.

If you use Privoxy, the majority of those ads will go away, and you can do custom filtering for fun and profit easily.