It's as true are "black is white" and "the moon is made of cream cheese". In other words there's no arguing with someone who rejects reality.

If you had a nationalised health service, supplied to all paid through general taxation, you wouldn't be having that problem.

Fuck me. You don't really believe that do you? OK here's what happens a company earns money from doing business. That money does of course come from their customers. But once it's been earned it belongs to the company. And they pay (or at least should pay) tax out of that money that they own.

Now then, using your argument, one would also have to say that employees don't pay tax, their employers do. Yet employers are companies and employees are customers.

Here's a graphical representation of why your argument is stupid.
http://bumblr.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/snake-eating-its-tail-funny-pic.html

My question, which you couldn't answer, included the proviso that the tax could be at whatever level. Unless you're advocating an anarchy there will always be tax, and the problem of multi-nationals cheating everybody by not paying their share.

Of course they do. This kind of condescension to fellow professionals IN THEIR SPECIALIST FIELD is exactly what I'm talking about. You illustrate the problem perfectly.

Regressions in code is your field. Regressions in UX is theirs.

The problem is that you make the mistake of thinking that features should only be added, not taken away. That doesn't even follow for code, let alone UIs. You haven't been coding long if you haven't seen plenty of APIs calls go from current to deprecated to unsupported to gone.

And why? Either because a piece of functionality is no longer needed. Or because someone came up with a better way. Am I talking about code or UI? Both!

Actually, looking at your username, are you even a coder?

NeXTSTEP is the second most popular desktop OS in the world right now. As everyone who programs in Cocoa is constantly reminded. For sure it's had a change of name and a change of owner. And it has of course progressed a lot in it's 25 year history. But it's still the same NeXTSTEP.

For sure it's a shame BeOS died. And it was indeed due to a succession of bad business models rather then anything to do UX. I'd have a lot more enthusiasm for the OSS movement if they'd concentrated their efforts on Haiku rather than Linux.

Do you think the multinationals should pay their share of tax or not? Or do you believe that tax burden (at whatever level it is set) should be born by small-businesses and individuals, whilst the multinationals pay next to nothing?

See the difference in pay between interning for a commercial software company and an OSS project.

You say that now. After your attempt to find any evidence for your claim failed.

a) ARM doe an awful lot of things that are not OSS. They are a chip design company.

b) Being a graduate from university does not say that you haven't been contributing to OSS for free for years. In fact quite a lot of OSS work is done by students.

So, pics or it didn't happen. I mean FFS, if there's so much evidence of OSS jobs going to OSS newbs then find some and show me. It can't be that hard if it's as common as you claim.

This is a Defense Department announcement, not an Apple one. There's nothing to indicate Apple have done anything, other than sell iPhones and enterprise licenses to all comers.

Apple might have done more, but there's no indication here. And there's certainly not any sign of a serious change of direction. Those enterprise licenses for iOS have been around for years, allowing enterprise customers to install their own apps and have control of their iPhones, without going anywhere near the iTunes App Store.

Sure they don't do enterprise servers for OSX any more. But that's a whole different story.

No, only it's financial results that tell you that. Stock price variations tell you nothing more than investor sentiment.

There's a peace symbol on Apple's website? Where?

I'm with you drinkypoo. I was a great fan of Elite back in the day. And actually believed there were economic consequences to what I chose to buy. And that there were missions to go on, meteor storms to find, and something exciting in the other galaxies, if only I could get the powerup I needed to get there.

(On my version (BBC cassette) there were none of these things. Only there was no way of knowing that in those pre-www days.)

One's imagination and hopefulness filled in the gaps.

But we're older, wiser and have experienced more sophisticated games since then. I feel sure there is a good game to be made in this genre, but neither David Braben nor the community efforts have succeeded in the last 30 years. Who knows maybe Braben's up-coming remake will hit the mark. Never say never.

Right. So that's an example of what I was describing of people doing years of unpaid work on OSS before they get a paid one.

Suppose people who wanted to work on Windows had to spend years of unpaid work contributing code to Windows before Microsoft would give them a paid job. There'd rightly be an uproar! They'd be called all kinds of evil. Not praised for at least paying a small minority of their programmers.

You are saying that someone who hasn't already had years working on an OSS project will get a paid job with one of those companies.

Pics or it didn't happen.

Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha. You're screwed.

English comprehension and logic aren't your strong points then. My sentence points out that a job will pay you. Implicit is that they'll pay you from day one. It doesn't say that there are no paid jobs that are doing OSS projects.

The fact is this is about newcomers to an OSS project being treated badly by those in the clique. Those in the clique might have paid jobs doing the OOS project. Those who are new would take years to get there, but more likely never will. The vast majority doing this stuff being unpaid. Those that are, mostly got in to the project early. And they aren't going to step aside to make room. Anyone going in to OSS thinking they're going to be paid eventually might just as well join a Ponzi scheme.