The author mentions on one occasion that he read the GPL v2 once and didn't understand it. And then he goes on to write an entire article about choosing the right licence for your FOSS code.

Thats a little like me telling people that they shouldn't program in Pascal and that C is the best... even though I tried to program in Pascal once but just didn't get it.

Is it just me?

Get them to submit their address - and then use google maps to determine their longtitude and latitude. From there is is fairly straightforward to calculate the distance between a fixed location (town hall in your village) and their address. If it is more than 50 kms, then they can't subscribe.

1. Mobile phones these days are computing platforms. The reason why Microsoft dominates the desktop market is because the vast majority of software runs on it (hey, Macs are cool too, but they don't have the range of PC software). Apple's iPhone has already claimed that victory - to beat the iPhone, one needs to provide an easy way of uploading software, and, IMHO, a way of verifying the quality of the applications.

2. Apple has the advantage that it could leverage off the existing developer base for the Mac - that is, the development environments aren't completely different. Try releasing any computing platform in which people have to learn *another* darn computer programming framework/language and see how you go. Computer languages take *years* to grow to a critical mass.

3. Every technology marketer is saying "blah killer" at the moment. Can you honestly imagine the Palm marketing executives saying, "our phone is pretty powerful, but we really will have to see if the community adopts it and develops worthwhile applications for it". At the same time, all the little journalist worker bees have to get page hits in this new online news world. "iPhone killer" turns up constantly, because it gets clicks. Your here and I am here aren't we :-)

Never happen. I recently purchased a domain from someone who has my companies .com namesake for around US $4k. Prior to the transaction, the owner offered to lease the domain to me, and we refused outright. The reason is of course, who wants to build a brand around a domain name, (hopefully) get a whole bunch of traffic going to your site, and then in 2-4 years, when the lease runs out, have the domain owner either (i) increase the rent by 1000x or worse, (ii) offer to put it on the market. Developing businesses and website traffic is hard - I would be really surprised if they want to give you the opportunity to bend them over the barrel in a few years and get the vaseline out.