I didn't purchase my Palm Pre to play games on it, but I'm not closed to the idea that, should the right game come along, I might play games on my Pre / phone. It all depends on the gameplay. For all we know, a new type of gameplay might still be created, one that would fit phones perfectly (has some elements of RPGs or tamagotchi coupled with GPS?)

FPS games might prove challenging, but vehicle simulators might not be too bad. There've been videos of Need for Speed Undercover allegedly being ported to the webOS / Palm Pre platform.

By the way, the point isn't that one has to pay but that one doesn't have to go and search for someone who would do the change if you couldn't. The majority of consumers of software out there don't develop.

Another reason is that commercial software's development may be influenced by monetary incentive in a predictable manner. Unless you have the capacity to develop or find developers who would, open source software development is limited to the whims of the developer community. With commercial software, you know there's a company who'll take your money in exchange for fixes. With OSS, you can ask nicely, make suggestions (and sometimes even be laughed at or ridiculed for your requirements), but there's no guaranteed way to get a fix or a custom patch.

I remember wanting to be able to scroll through tabs in mozilla (it wasn't even firefox, then) using the mouse's scrollwheel and that request was marked WONTFIX. We needed to be able to do something unique with Oracle BRM (then Portal Infranet) and the company gave us the patches and apps we needed. No fuss, no muss, but we did have to pay.

I was thinking the same thing. The article was just too light on details. Even if I wanted to test my systems and even fix them, I wouldn't know where to begin. The article also doesn't mention if the people at Sun, Apache, Gnome, etc. were informed of the specifics of the vulnerability.

Since XML is handled by these projects using libraries (libxml2 in Gnome and Xerces, Xerces2 and Xalan for Apache), wouldn't fixing these libraries effectively fix the "millions of these applications"?

Gnome has done a good job of adding bindings for many languages (Python, C++, perl, etc.) and to some extent, it even allows GObjects to communicate with one another (dbus). Of course, the holy grail of having all object communicate with each other while running under their respective VM (or natively) is still a ways away. I'm not even sure if that's a goal.

I'm seeing release candidate versions of bash 4 in the SRPMS dir for Fedora testing. It should be easy to rebuild it on Fedora 10 and install it, but I'd like to know if it would break existing scripts.

Does anyone know if it has any backward compatibility issues?

We used to license a RADIUS server written in Perl by the name of Radiator. They would give us the source code of the entire software, but we had to pay for it and could not redistribute it. We were free to contribute fixes (and often did) without expecting anything in return, regardless of the fact that we paid for it.

You might want to check out their license.

joe here too. Moved to it 'cause of WordStar