It depends who the laws are meant to serve- people or companies. If, as I understand it, laws (& gov't) are meant to serve people, then why shouldn't a group of people making a statement about a particular law be relevant? I'd prefer my gov serve citizens and not give a whit what Big. Co.'s agenda is.

The real question for this audience is whether or not we have the right to reverse engineer any devices up our asses.

I guess we should all consider ourselves fortunate to be enable to pay for the privilege of using their products. (Yeah right.) Either MS is truly delusional regarding their "Rights as Vendor" or somebody needs their bottom spanked over a poorly worded press release.

They probably thought of it but considered it an inappropriate use of the network. Remember, the Internet originally wasn't meant for commercialization and there was great resistance to it right up until the early 1990's.

"We're approaching a situation where the PC type software-OEM model is viable in the mobile space" That point has come and gone and the platform which achieved it is on track to dominate the market - it's called Android. I'm highly skeptical MS will be able to dethrone Google's darling given the history of MS on mobiles and Android's ability to evolve faster. Much faster.

Embrace - Extend - Extinguish is obviously a good strategy for getting large market share and maximizing profits. However, I don't think it's a great way to keep market share over the long term, especially if you rarely innovate, are expensive and, on occasion, a sub-par value. Your customers will eventually notice you're serving your share holders disproportionately more than you're serving your customers. That's when they're likely to leave.

How is it different from commercial software? At least when F/OSS dev's piss you off you're not paying for the software or commercial "support" which allows you to open a bug ticket. Sorry, there maybe some crab grass on both sides of the fence but at least I'm not getting fleeced on the F/OSS side. Ever pay $200 for a single pay-per-incident ticket with Vendor X and not get an issue resolved? It happens.

The hostility from the MS fanboi's toward the *nix fanboi's reminds me of Big Tobacco's stance toward the American Medical Association regarding carcinogenic properties of cigarettes, respectively.

Tapes are useful as a removable & portable media. RAID arrays generally are not as portable. The RAID array won't do me much good when my house burns down- off-site media is the protection in this case. Large external hard drives are a suitable substitute which MAY lower the $/GB of off-siting content in certain scenarios (relative to even the most recent tape tech). I've been using Hitachi G-Drives in place of LTO and have reduce the media cost.

I'm sorry, when did you start?