As a follow-up, the resulting binary packages are also simple. They are a perfectly vanilla xz-zipped tarball (Really! download and extract the package for bash) containing:

1. The files in the tarball relative to /.
2. A small metadata file recording e.g. dependencies, any configuration files that should be backed up.
3. (Optional) A small file containing bash functions that will be executed before and after installation, upgrades, or removal.

That might be the intent, but, for a lot of software patents, at least, the language is too vague and broad to for things to work out this way. They're written with the intent of catching as many possible technologies in the same net; disclosure is not a concern.

+1 idealist. If only...

I was thinking about taking the programming course at my high school (I didn't know the horrors of Visual Basic at that time). The teacher heard that I knew perl, and asked if I could help out with a script the school had been having trouble with. I thought that sounded like it might be a fun project (I'd never been able to touch production code before), and said I'd come by after school to take a look at the code. I showed up, and the teacher gave me a ten-page printout of this convoluted perl script, and told me that I could just circle any problem I found and write notes in the margin when giving it back...

I decided not to take the programming course.

What a terrible and uninformative website. The front page is a bunch of vague fluff, and the "about" page is two youtube videos with absolutely no summary. I'm intrigued by (what seems to be) the basic idea, but I'm not sure I want to invest half an hour watching these videos when nothing has been communicated in the text. Also, an interview page with questions that open with "A quick look at your resume shows that you are by far an ingenious person" is... not encouraging.

My guess is that it has to do with the rise of github and bitbucket, together with version control systems that aren't completely dependent on a central repository. Sourceforge used to be the go-to place for coordinating open-source project development, but not so much anymore.

More likely the field has just moved on to new problems and methods, and the GP doesn't know enough about these new areas to have noticed. In a lot of domains, we've gotten about as far as we can get with deterministic, rule-based algorithms, and the vast majority of research on statistical methods has happened since the beginning of the 90's. Bayesian methods in particular have proliferated only in the last five years or so.

What are you talking about?? Customs only cares about expensive gifts, expensive items you intend to sell (including counterfeits), and items that might introduce invasive species or diseases. I'm an American who has been in and out of the US several times with my laptop, and I've never encountered any problem with customs. "abroad" is not some scary, law-less pit of oppression. Try getting out sometime.

And how is that any less arbitrary than the GP, particularly in the absence of reliable evidence that there was anything special about Jesus? I agree that metaphysical questions about the origin of morality are hard, but falling back on religion only pushes back the question one more step.

The earth is round!