Ubuntu is still *mostly* Debian packages, IIUC. In other news... Debian is approx. 18 years old.

After writing new pages for a site, I still to this day have to spend extra time getting it to work on IE7/8. All the other browsers (pretty much) work the same. But I regularly have to do things slightly differently so that IE renders pages the same as the other browsers. So, not so nostalgic for me!

I think a requirement (unstated, but implied) would be that you can run the server yourself. So I would guess that Ubuntu One is probably not what the OP was looking for.

I think by "paper", they probably meant newspaper. Unless they were just referring to a sheet of British A4 they found somewhere.

Apple *can* use GPL'ed software. Their business strategies are their own choices. So they may not *want* to. But they still *can*.

And even bigger question here is... Why does Florian Mueller FUD keep getting posted on /. as "news"? *Surely* the editors know by now that he's a paid opinionist and a troll?

I don't think this is true. The prestige and publicity gained from being the group to beat the challenge should be sufficient incentive.

No argument here!

With regard to the Digital Economy Act 2010:

The Lib Dems promissed to repeal it if elected.

The Tories said that if they were elected, they would drop any "flawed" legislation. Shortly after, Cameron said that "rejecting the Bill then or reconsidering the entire piece of legislation now would be an unacceptable set-back for the important measures it contains."

After the election, the LibDem-Conservative coalition released the Great Repeal Bill to undo some of the over-legislating of the Labour party. Sadly, the Digital Economy Act wasn't on the list.

I proposed something to Google that would certainly help with this issue. But they seemed more interested in bending over for the app. developers.

All configuration systems will take some time. All you are saying is that the autotools could be more optimal, which is hardly a "new problem that autotools creates".

And as for checking for strcpy() and then failing at link-time from a missing dynamic library symbol, the developer can check for dynamic library versions during the configuration. Short of having the configuration system parse the whole source code (in any language!), I don't see how else it can know what symbols it would need to check for anyway - this can only really be resolved at link-time.