Seriously!

Even if the outlets aren't more expensive than existing tech (which I seriously doubt), you'll still need advanced tech on the source end to turn power on/off to each outlet, so that's going to be an additional cost per outlet. Great. And you'll need to run each outlet in a star topology, which is going to get REALLY expensive what with the cost of copper shooting up so much.

Then you'll have the problem of people who have trouble charging their devices. If they're nice, they'll walk away. If they're mad, they'll kick the outlet or shove a pencil or something in there. If they're really made, they'll shove in a paperclip or other metal item to cause bridging or other fun electical side effects, either immediately or later when some other item is put into the outlet.

And how much are those damages going to cost? Well if you hire an electrician to come out and work on the thing, I assume you're going to have to pay at least $60 just to get him out there and start working on the circuit. Hopefully you won't have to shut power off to any of the other nearby outlets at the same time.

So how much energy is going to be "stolen" by that guy with the laptop or cellphone at the Starbucks, anyhow? Well let's see:

Wikipedia puts the average cost of electricty in America at $0.1102/kWh. A quick googling seemed to say that laptop chargers draw between 15-70W; I assume cellphone chargers are much lower than that. So even if we plugged in a power-guzzling larger laptop for 8 hours at the coffee shop, it would cost at most 70W * 8h * 1kW/1000W * $0.1102/kWh = $0.062

Six cents? It's going to cost less money than is sitting in the leave-a-take-a-penny tray?

Compare that to the price of hiring an electrician: Even with my totally-lowball estimate, if the electrician takes just 1 hour at $60/h to fix the outlet, and the outlets cost only $2 (for which you can't even get a GFI outlet), you could let people charge their laptops for free 8 hours a day for 1000 days and not spend as much money.

It's going to be hard to sell people on using them.

Is the primary issue that vendors of the miniature-sized versions of all of these chips and integrated boards aren't as open about releasing specs as we see in the desktop/server market?

There are a lot of different goals that a project like OpenMoko could have -- Open Hardware, a fully FOSS stack, over 2 days battery life, small form factor, etc... so I guess one of the first things to do is to define the goals of any particular device or family of devices.

For me, I think the idea of a fully-open phone system is pretty slick on its own, so I'd even consider buying an open system if they put it in big box and used higher-power components that would have to be plugged into the wall. The thing is that until we even get that model working, we don't have a starting point for improvement. Once you have a hacked-together phone working, then iterate, iterate, iterate until you get to something that can fit in your pocket, or that has a battery that will last a whole day without a recharge.

Do all of those things first, and for a price under $100, and you can establish a solid community of geeks willing to pay for a phone w/Open Hardware.

Here's the deal: I really want to encourage and support the OpenMoko folks, but with the original Freerunner I just couldn't justify buying something that didn't have even solid telephony features, didn't have much battery life, and wasn't in a price range I could even afford (as a student).

Look, all the geeks know that we don't have all of the parts figured out yet, and last I heard Welte is still working on the first fully-FOSS GSM stack, so it's not just as simple as putting the pieces together and selling enough units to hit your $100, 200, or 500 target price. But the thing is that $100 is a small enough number that I and most of the full-time-employed geek crowd out there can probably justify getting a v0.1 TotallyOpenPhone each year for the next 3-5 years. But we've got to convince both ourselves and our significant others (for those of us who have been consed) that this is a good or at least not-bad decision.

So how do we convince ourselves? Easy -- we say that this 2nd GSM phone can serve as a "backup" for our first phone, you know, if anything happens to it, or if we accidentally drop it down a flight of concrete stairs or drop it into the churn while making fresh butter in the morning (I don't care what Kilgore thinks; the smell of fresh butter is much better than napalm). This logic is excellent; it works even better the less you think about it.

ARMed with our bullet-proof logic, we can now easily divest our pocketbooks of $100 and hand it over to whoever is brave/smart/crazy enough to make a run of Open-Hardware phones. We give them the money now, and then -- here's the genius part -- we tell them that there's more where that came from, if they make us a better phone next year. If it's a much better phone with many more features, we might consider paying $150 or $200 for it, but we let them know that what will allow us to buy it (remember that part where we lied...umm... convinced ourselves that it was a good idea?) is the requirement that it be a solid, low-cost device.

$1000 is just way, way too high a price for a product like this. Unless there's a solid strategy to drastically cut the price of the phone each year over the next 3-5 years, I just can't see enough product shipping to make the business sustainable. And we really, REALLY do want it to be sustainable. We don't just want one Open Hardware Phone. We want to see competition and innovation. We want to see a marketplace of Open Hardware.

That's actually a very interesting question! I assume that the restrictions on the "Home edition" software (let's shorten it to "HE") is on the software, not the resultant files. These kinds of restrictions (you might see one from your ISP or your phone company somewhere in their litterature) are often just to restrict people from using the software, the service, or the physical object (e.g. a hand mixer or a stove) in a commercial setting.

The general idea with most of these restrictions is that the given service (e.g. a long-distance phone plan) or the given hardware (e.g. a blender) is designed to be lightly used by a home user. If someone takes a blender designed for a few smoothies every third week and puts it in a bar, the motor might not last a day. If you get a long-distance plan and use it for work, you might be on that phone circuit for 6 hours a day, 6 days a week!

Similarly, Microsoft distributes the HE software as a kind of "Word lite" for end-users who aren't going to need all of the features of the full version of MS-Word. As a method of making it cheaper for families (or for OEMs to put onto computers targeted for the home), the software is restricted so that it can't be used commercially -- in a business. I'd have to see the exact license terms to be sure, but that's roughly my guess as to what that's about.

Now I think the whole thing is just kind of silly. I mean, install LibreOffice on the computer and be done with it. Use the same software on Dad's laptop, little Bobby's drool-proof tablet, and Mom's 8-core gaming rig. But most people don't understand that there's an alternative...

There are a lot of differences between a piece of software licensed under the GPL and under this license from Apple. Things like who can create or distribute derivative works, restrictions on what you can produce using the tool, what you can do with the tool (e.g. share it, copy it), and where you distribute the output.

But let's make this really simple. Here's the big difference:

The license from Apple was designed to retain control over both the software and the content created with the software, and to place that control in the hands of Apple. I mean, that's what it's saying, right?

The license from Apple wasn't designed to empower the content creator. It wasn't designed to empower the content consumer. It was designed by a profit-driven corporation (Apple) to create and establish a locked-in market of creators and users that would be tied to Apple's software and Apple's market.

And oh wait, did I mention that Apple wants to do this with our education system? With our textbooks? Who in their right mind would think it was a good idea to put more restrictions on that?

The GPL was designed as a clever hack on copyright to empower people to create and share software and to empower the recipients of GPL-licensed software to share the original software and derivative works thereof in a "share-alike" commons. It was specifically designed to pass along to end users (who might also be creators/modifiers) the rights necessary for them to share and distribute their work, and making sure that they retain those rights, even if the upstream authors "change their minds" and wish later to rescind distribution rights based on use purpose, distribution mechanism, etc...

I mean, look: Apple might be a powerful and well-staffed company. And it might make amazing tools in both hardware and software, but the question I think that we all need to be asking ourselves is whether it's ethical to support a company that is encouraging people to create their own content in a manner that prevents them from distributing that content without a permission slip from Apple. And it doesn't just stop there -- is the IBA file format even open at all? Is Apple going to sue us if we try to write/read the file format without using their software under their terms?

How about this: If any big company wants to create a new file format, they publish a spec of the file format, along with a copyright/patent license, somewhere easy-to-find on their website. Someplace like www.big-company.com/fileformats/newformat/v1/{format_v1.blah, format_v1_license.blah, ..} would be nice, but I'd settle for just a few docs that could be (1) indexed by google, (2) slurped up by archive.org.

Yeah, whenever you turn off a system with a processor inside it, all of the electrons have to flow back out of the processor, and over the next hour or two it can heat up even hotter than when the processor was operating.

Easiest way to deal with that is that if you have a 2-prong device and it's not one of those polarized plugs, you can just pull it out of the outlet, flip it around, and plug it back in the other way for an hour or two. That will send the electrons flowing the other direction through the circuit (and the processor), and then you'll have a much smaller cool-down time.

Let's say that Google de-lists a bunch of sites that the *AA's don't like. At some point a non-zero number of Internet users will not longer rely upon Google as their search engine (at least not for these materials), and will look to other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo!, or if they want to kick it old-school, HotBot, Askjeeves, or Altavista.

But the the *AA's go after search engines s_0 ... s_i (sorry, no better subscript), then these disaffected users will now go even further afield, to find sites from other search engines. Some might even go to a (hypothetical) website like HowToDownloadSomeCoolShitNotInTheSearchEngines.com that just has a static list of urls of music/video/goat/meme/whatever sharing sites.

At that point, the *AA's will say that they need to cleanse the HTDSCSNITSE's of the web of links to the prohibited sites, at which point we've basically gotten to urls that are "illegal" to link to (cf. 2600 DeCSS circa 2002).

F(uckity uck uck uck)

I hope that some of the network/systems analysis companies out there are taking accurate notes about the state of what's accessible via IPv6 and IPv4. I think we'll see an interesting sort of "avalanche" graph when we reach the tipping point. Or not -- perhaps there will be enough dual-stack that we'll just have a slow deathmarch of sites available by IPv4, with a few less year after year?

But to step back and wax lyrical about the whole problem, the reason that IPv6 hasn't taken hold yet is because it just hasn't gotten enough of an IPv6-only install base clamouring for support on their popular websites.

Having major websites and hardware manufacturers on board is an important piece of the puzzle, but it's nothing compared to money. Get enough people inconvenienced that they will take their eyes and their money elsewere (directly, or through advertising revenue on sites, etc...), and every site that cares about their viewership will hop on the IPv6 train. Of course, this means that Bob's website that features his personal Banana Sticker Collection might not get IPv6 support until his ISP drags him to an IPv6 address, kicking and screaming all the way.

That whole idea a year or two ago about putting out a big zip file of porn, but only available on IPv6, was kind of a hoot. AFAIK it never came to fruition, but I liked the creative thinking there. Has anyone else had any crazy good (or just crazy) suggestions about how to spur IPv6 adoption?

Due to the truly amazing amount of information in your post that is inaccurate, I assume that you are either
1) a troll, or
2) 13 years old ...nevertheless, I'll provide some answers. Maybe it will be helpful for the OP.

If you don't trust me, how about the US Copyright Office?

You go on...

While the EFF are a bunch of hoopy froods who protect our rights in cyberspace, they are certainly not the first people I'd contact about a GPL infringement. They're not even the 4th or 5th on my list.

Here's my list:
1) GPL-Violations.org - Volunteers, knowledgeable folks who will answer your questions pretty quickly
2) The SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) - Volunteer lawyers (much slower to respond due to demand, but they know their stuff)
3) The Software Freedom Conservancy (if you want to align your FOSS project with a "non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects.")
4) The Free Software Foundation, if you have a specific question about some of their GPLed software
5) Bradley Kuhn, Harald Welte, etc..

Jesus... It's amazing what crap a first poster can say.

Have you even read the text of the GPL(v2) ?

Here's an exact quote from the on the FSF's website:

When you mention a "distribution fee," I believe that you're talking about clause 3(b) of the source requirement of the GPLv2 (relevant section italicized):

Section 3(b) is talking about a requirement to provide source code to people you've already given binaries. You can still charge them a bunch of money up front for initial access to the program.

It's not always easy to understand parts of the GPL, and the GPLv3 made the whole darn thing a bunch longer. I totally understand that. But if you're going to talk about a FOSS license on Slashdot with any authority, please think about what you're saying and be able to back up your position.

Hi,

I need to run off in two shakes of a lamb's tail, but I took a quick look I don't see the GPLv2 (or any GPL license) mentioned anywhere in your code.

I suggest that you

1) Put a copy of the GPL (v2, v3, etc...) at the top level of your project. I usually make a file LICENSE.txt that explains that the project is using the GPL, and then put a copy of the GPL at the end of that file.

2) Put license headers on ALL of your files, so that even if they get separated there is no confusion about either the license or the author. They should look like this:

Here's a quick link to more information: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html