Precisely. I'm at a class reunion (never mind which one...), and the obituary board showed that a friend of mine from high school had died. Nobody knew what happened.

So I went to his hometown newspaper's website to search for the obituary. The chumps wanted to charge me $2/article for "archived" stories. The obvious problem is that I needed to sort through dozens of obituaries to find the right one (he had a fairly common name, and the date was "sometime in the past 5 years").

To heck with them - I just called his old phone number to ask his wife. He answered.

Glad I didn't pay all that money for nothing...

Actually, that was when many Americans volunteered to fight with the British against Nazi Germany. The American government, however, "didn't want to invade anybody", so they simply provided a variety of "lend / lease" supplies to the Allies and hoped everybody else would like us. You know, the policy recommended by the Anon Coward to whom I was responding.

Didn't work then. Won't work now.

Yep. Worked really well in 1940.

Not sure I understand about the flash drive. I'm typing this on Ubuntu NBR (Starling), and I've plugged in three file-oriented devices thus far (2 GB thumbdrive, 500 GB hard disk, and 1 GB SD card). In all 3 cases, they auto-mounted, and Ubuntu launched a file browser ("Nautilus") opened to the root of that device, with the device listed on the left-hand quick-access list as (for example) "500 GB disk". This was remarkably consistent and helpful IMHO. Did this not happen in your experience? Or if it did, what were you expecting / would you have preferred, exactly? Again, just curious.

You have to remember, this thing is more underpowered than the cheap netbooks that will barely surf the web on anything that has Flash.

Really? I received a System76 Starling netbook ($360 complete) for Father's Day this year. I normally have 10-15 tabs open in Firefox, while running Pidgin IM, a couple of OpenOffice.org documents (our spreadsheet budget and whatever I'm writing at the moment), and a couple of other programs. With all that, running a video on YouTube (for example) is acceptably smooth and quite watch-able. Not anti-aliased and scaled in real-time, of course, but perfectly fine for relaxing in my recliner.

Have you ever tried anything other than Windows XP on a netbook? Not trying to slam Microsoft, just curious.

Much of the OLPC software was written in Python to make it accessible, not to make it fast - that was the whole point of the "Show Source" button and the versioning file system with roll-back. Well, it was a nice dream...

The OLPC I played with at PyCon was acceptably fast. If only I knew more math, I'd own one. :-/

...but rather target the iPhone...

Well, certainly not the iPhone. Maybe Android or the Pre, or if you really want a head start (e.g., a long time with no paycheck), Chrome.

But custom corporate software is where much of the professional money is made nowadays.

Didn't Stallman and friends reimplement the commercial Unix libraries as free (GPL) software?

Gnu's Not Unix. I read that somewhere...

Wasn't he potentially violating patents?

All software implementations potentially violate patents. Mono just happens to likely violate those of a convicted monopolist who has called the GPL a "cancer" and claimed Linux violates hundreds of unspecified patents in order to FUD the credulous into paying Microsoft for inferior software.

Do the commercial Unix vendors holding those patents behave any differently than Microsoft (ahem SCO)?

Welcome to the 21st century. SCO does not own Unix; Novell does.

Mono is ... a very nice easy path for the majority of all developers in the world (WINDOWS Developers) to make the transition to Linux and GNU

Don't be silly. Mono is a very nice path to ensure that free software is dependent on real Microsoft patents, as opposed to the imaginary ones that Ballmer is always ranting about between chair tosses. It's the equivalent of George Bailey taking a job with Mr. Potter because "you won, George... you've beaten me". But Microsoft "sits around here and spins your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn't, Mr. Ballmer. In the whole vast configuration of things, I'd say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider. And... [turning to his aide, Miguel de Icaza] And that goes for you, too!"

If you're a Windows developer looking to make the transition to Linux and GNU, try something that's actually innovative. QT4 comes to mind at random. Or Python for quick IT apps (it works for Google). Or Android for phones. Now, welcome to freedom.

Oddly, I've had the opposite experience. It's the BSD zealots that keep insisting that their software is "more free" than GPL, because you can even make it non-free (and they believe that is a good thing, because it means more people may use their software). Most of the GPL zealots tend more toward "we don't care who uses our software, because it's freedom that's important, not popularity". This comes across (to me, at least) as much less strident, not to mention more convincing.

Like all anecdotal evidence, of course, this proves nothing - but it is my experience nonetheless.

focusing on ethics as a primary argument with most people quite simply is not going to work

Focusing on ethics is likely to work if your goal is to promote ethical software. It's kind of hard to imagine anything else working, actually.

Hate to break the news, but the nice police officer lied through his teeth to you. That law was overturned 30 years ago.

The current laws are quite different in Texas.

Texas doesn't even have a stop-and-identify law. Not only can you provide identity information verbally in Texas, as in most other states, you only have to provide it after you've been arrested.

So what IDE do you use for Python? I've used Eclipse and SPE with good success; we most frequently use Komodo at work. At PyCon last month, though, I won a 3-OS license for Wing, and have been really impressed at its introspection (much more challenging on a dynamic language than mere Java). Of course, it's not open source, but I'm not a purist.

nd I don't want to have to answer nine billion technical questions just to get it installed.

I'm sure someone can verify it, but I don't think Ubuntu asks more questions than XP. If you're a professional, you solve this problem by getting it preinstalled [dell.com].

I can. I can install the current Ubuntu in 3 questions flat: time zone, keyboard, and default or custom partitioning (or wubi if Windows is on the disk). I can even try the system before installing it, use the system while installing it, and keep using it after installing it - no reboots required.

With Windows, it's 9 questions and 2 reboots - and you get to watch a bunch of freaking ads while it installs. You can't try it before installing it. And you have the joy of typing in 40 random characters repeatedly until you get them right, to "prove" you're not a "pirate". Oh, and if you change the computer significantly, you get to call Microsoft and see if they'll let you keep using that copy, or make you buy another and start over. Hope you enjoyed it the first time.

No question - Ubuntu (and indeed, every mainstream Linux such as Fedora or Suse) is far easier to install than Windows.

But buy it pre-installed anyway. Nothing beats pre-installed for ease of installation. ;-)

I have been a Mac, a Microsoft AND and OS2. NEVER has customer service EVER helped with my problems.

In fairness to IBM (am I really posting this?), when I tried OS/2 Warp (was that version 2.0? they years they pass quickly), it worked great.

Except... about once a day, it would crash. Just crater big-time. No warning, no symptoms. Freeze.

I called IBM, and the nice technical rep spent a solid hour debugging my system. Not the usual script-reader ("Are you sure the power switch is on?") - we went through system logs, did various experiments, and swapped in and out drivers trying to find the cause.

It was almost like following an active thread in a good Linux forum... except the person worked for IBM, and we never did solve the problem. I was so impressed by the effort, though, that I refused the offered refund.