Yeah, but when your "users" are more properly called "customers" -- or even more important, "potential customers" -- then some web dev's desire to preach the gospel must take a back seat to doing the job the way it needs to be done, rightly or wrongly.

It's fine to push for strict browser standards when the only people who will ever see your web applications are within your own organization. Public-facing sites are a different matter.

you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

Mr. Pottering can spell better than that. But I'm afraid that many of the systemd features are being written by people who spell that badly and with such poor grasp of synax. The poster also seems to have no idea of how often development kernels are run in older or slightly out of date to bring new features, especially hardware drivers, into critical, high performance environments. So the "lockstep" systemd and kernel requirements become a much larger issue, because systemd components have become locked to the major systemd release as well.

So go ahead then, because I think it's really silly whenever a new Muslim atrocity occurs, especially when it comes to women, that some apologist comes along and talks about things Christians did centuries ago.

The Christians and Muslims define Judaism as religious ancestors. Given the historical and archaeological evidence, I think it's a a well supported claim.

"Bringing Christianity to the heathens" was one of the rationalizations of the land grab on native Americans. So it's reasonable to count it as murder and genocide with religious justifications.

I'm finding it difficult to understand your comment that "Jews are that way all over the world" doesn't fit with the idea that Christians in the USA for the last 300 years have not engaged in harassment, even genocide. I raised the Jews as a specific target of US christian abuse: the abuse being global does not contradict that claim.

Black slaves were _definitely_ denied their own religions. Slaves were denied the time and place to practice their former beliefs, compelled to attend Christian churches, and on occassion killed for refusals to abandon previous beliefs and practices The "Santeria" and "Voodoo" traditions that arose in some locations are fascinating mixes of Christian and different African beliefs, but it was certainly not a peaceful melding.

If Slashdot's editorial duty is to emphasize news items based on their humanitarian importance, it fails with every article that isn't about death, poverty, slavery, etc. Of course, then it wouldn't be a tech website and we probably wouldn't visit it, so that all is fairly moot. This is about Dan Fredinburg because he was relevant to tech and known in our community (and he's certainly worth remembering as a person as well, regardless of what else is in the news). It's not here because it was the most important thing to happen in the past week.

I think it's on us to give the events in Nepal their due emphasis. Personally, I have donated to Doctors Without Borders, which is sending medical aid. I invite anyone else to do the same, and maybe to bring up the topic with family, friends, and coworkers.

But I am very glad and thank you for remembering the other Nepali. Maybe if we let the editors know that we would like them to setup a donation button or organize something in that vein so we can help out as a community, they would oblige.

Let's be frank, you're evil.