In that video Harry Reid isn't talking about riders, he's talking about the practice of earmarking or congressional directive spending.

Riders are awful and should be banned through a constitutional amendment, earmarks however are an entirely different matter as the person you replied to pointed out.

I can think of much more despicable examples of war profiteering that most certainly don't involve game publishers...

I'm much more troubled by how much the general population (which mostly consists out of non-gamers) couldn't give a shit less about anything that is happening in Afghanistan. If you want to complain about something desensitizing folks look no further than the constant barrage of reality television shows.

Are we still allowed to call people Grammar Nazis or has that too been deemed too politically incorrect?

While you do make a valid point (be careful about what you run) and I personally can't actually understand the code provided I have to say that sometimes you have to put a little trust in others. Do you inspect and thoroughly understand every update that your distro suggests? Considering the fact the tool is distributed through Ksplice's website, you have to be seriously paranoid to think Ksplice would even dare to do anything like that.

A few years ago I was working for a consultancy agency where the employees were on the road a lot and I set-up a local private StatusNet installation (then Laconica) to enable them to more easily share "stuff" with each other (mostly sharing news and general thoughts). It was and still is a big hit. So, I can certainly believe people would be using Chatter.

You're the editor, you should feel free to edit the story. :-)

Hi, I'm one of members of the RabbitVCS team, the project commended in the linked article by Abdulrahman Idlbi for our decision to "work around" the export ban, though I am not entirely sure if we deserve all of the credit given. I do not speak for the rest of the team, though I do believe they share the same opinion on this matter as I do.

Early September 2009 Bashir Al-Noimi informed us of the problems he had in trying to access our project website at Google Code (and by extension, our software) from his home country of Syria. At the time, the renaming of the project from NautilusSvn to RabbitVCS (and the migration that would follow) was already on our agenda, Bashir's issues only accelerated the process. You can read about Bashir's experience at his blog (translation).

Over the course of several weeks we worked out the various possibilities on our wiki. In the end we choose to take the path of least resistance and decided to keep most parts of our infrastructure at Google, apart from the export restrictions with which we disagreed, we were (and still are) satisfied with the service itself.

As a result we still use Google Code for our repository (Subversion), issue tracker, code reviewing tool and file hosting and Google Groups for our mailing lists. Though we also distribute RabbitVCS through our Personal Package Archive (PPA) at Launchpad (which we use for our translation efforts as well). So it should be possible for people from countries affected by export regulations to at least gain access to our software.

If anybody approached us regarding the same matter in the future we'd gladly work together with them to make sure that they can use our software and contribute to our project, among other things by mirroring our repository and setting up an issue tracker that people who cannot access the Google Code project can use.

While I do not blame Google or Geeknet Inc. (formerely SourceForge Inc.) for following the letter of the law, I do regret that they have not taken a meaningful stand on the issue and instead opt to let their Terms of Use speak for them.

I'd be interested in hearing Chris DiBona's thoughts on this matter (currently open source engineering manager at Google, previously a Slashdot editor). As he is also a key individual in upholding Google's Term of Service at Google Code as indicated from the JSMin predicament.

As for the commentary by the story submitter that the blockage violates Section 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups of the Open Source Definiton (OSD). I'd like to point out that the OSD actually specifically mentions export restrictions under Section 5., saying:

Some countries, including the United States, have export restrictions for certain types of software. An OSD-conformant license may warn licensees of applicable restrictions and remind them that they are obliged to obey the law; however, it may not incorporate such restrictions itself.

So I do not believe that there is a violation, though I do feel that the export restrictions go against the spirit of Open Source. Perhaps Bruce Perens (who hangs out here :-) could comment on this?

Best regards,

Bruce

Kroah-Hartman Attacks Canonical, Linux Magazine (September 19th, 2008)

Zimmerman [Canonical] objected primarily to Kroah-Hartman's definition of "Linux ecosystem," finding it "odd" in that he included GCC, binutils, X.org and Glibc in with the Linux kernel. Also, "He disregards most of the desktop stack (including GNOME and KDE), all desktop and server applications, and most anything else that is recognizable to an end user as 'Linux'." Not least of all, Zimmerman accused Kroah-Hartman of failing to acknowledge his link with Novell, a key Canonical competitor.

While I don't know how much Canonical employees (or people sponsored by Canonical) contribute to other projects I don't think it's fair to limit the contributions to those before mentioned projects.

Also from Canonical Contribution Chronicles, Linux Magazine (September 23rd, 2008):

In Amanda's blog, she asks, "What constitutes a contribution?" She says, "They [Canonical] focus on building a usable, more polished, more designed, better branded and better supported Linux distribution for the consumer market. By any one’s measure they have been successful in that endeavor. By my measure that is a very valuable contribution to the greater Linux movement."

It's a collaborative real-time editor for documents (in the broadest sense of the word).

Canonical would still need to build a user interface on top of the server component, so while it is a good idea there would still be quite a bit of work for Canonical to do as Google has not and most likely will not open source their own Wave implementation. Then again, let's not forgot that Google Wave in the current state is completely unusable for both communication (chat, discussion etc.) and any form of collaboration (specifically collaboration on documents). EtherPad on the other hand actually nails it regarding document collaboration.

So integrating EtherPad support into Ubuntu One would be feasible in the short term, at least to allow users to work together on Notes. It would be double as awesome if there was an effort to integrate support for libinfinity (from Gobby) in Tomboy (which already synchronizes with Ubuntu One). Then for collaboration over the web you'd use Ubuntu One's EtherPad functionality and in your desktop you can easily collaborate from within Tomboy.

It is true that at the moment there is indeed a "need" for proprietary software in quite a few areas. However, only in a sense that there is either no free/libre alternative, the alternatives are of lesser quality (where quality is obviously subjective) or (and this is quite often the case) the consumer has becomed locked-in.

However, there is no inherent need for software to be proprietary, the only reason that proprietary software still exists is because the producers (read: software companies) are in a lot of cases satisfied with the status-quo (a proven business model, at least in the sense of making money) and the consumers are not aware there is a better alternative (which would, among other things, lead to higher quality software).

Outside of the IT-industry, where Open Source has essentially already won (it's just that not everybody realizes it yet), this is still very obvious. It's in those areas where vendor lock-in is still the name of the game.

However, as soon as new innovative business models are popularized across the board, in which the advantages of Open Source development outweigh the advantages of keeping your software behind lock and chain, it'll be the end of proprietary software. This process will accelerate once consumers become aware of the advantages (for them) of Open Source development.

Let me see if I get this right. You're trying to use your inability to figure out how to make a living through other means than developing proprietary software as an example that "free software just doesn't work"?

You're so wrong it's not even funny. I advise you to read Stallman's essay Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”. Here's a quote from the essay that gets to the essence of what we're talking about here:

The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

As I understand it to Stallman the primary goal of Free Software is not "better software" in terms of say stability, usability etc., it's "better" in the sense that it's the most ethical.

P.S.

I'd like to point out that I personally don't think Stallman is entirely correct in his description of the Open Source movement, as the goal of Open Source has always been the same as Free Software (among other things see Bruce Peren's "It's Time to Talk About Free Software Again"). However, regretfully the term Open Source has in a lot of cases, as evidenced from this entire discussion, become diluted.