The kid admitted the stunt was meant to embarrass a teacher he disliked --- and a three day suspension for a previous access violation taught him nothing.
The problem is that a substitute was teaching that day who had no way of knowing whether or not this "harmless prank" would escalate into something that could cost the man his job.
Pre-Trial Intervention, which, under Florida law works something like probation, will leave the boy without a criminal record --- if he has the sense to stay out of trouble.
Who the hell works on the 99% of open source software that isn't popular, and why do they care? Because they do.
Show me some proof that anyone cares enough to drive GNU/Hurd to a 1.0 release.
Richard Stallman founded the GNU project in September 1983 with an aim to create a free GNU operating system. Initially the components required for kernel and development were written: editors, shell, compiler and all the others. By 1989, GPL came into being and the only major component missing was the kernel.
In 2010, after twenty years under development, Stallman said that he was ''not very optimistic about the GNU Hurd. It makes some progress, but to be really superior it would require solving a lot of deep problems'', but added that ''finishing it is not crucial'' for the GNU system because a free kernel already existed (Linux), and completing Hurd would not address the main remaining problem for a free operating system: device support.
Microsoft, on the other hand, saw an opportunity and happily licensed their code to all comers.
The MS-DOS PC was a commercially viable platform before the cloning of the IBM PC BIOS.
Microsoft entered the 16 bit market with a full suite of programming languages that made the transition from the eight bit world of CP/M remarkably fast and painless. It's a part of a part of the story the geek tends to forget.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.