Go back and look at Android circa 2005, and you'll find it was nothing like what shipped. Back then it was just a rip off of the BlackBerry. It was only when the iPhone was release that Android change who it was copying from.

http://gizmodo.com/334909/google-android-prototype-in-the-wild

If that was the definition of a monopoly then every company would have a monopoly on their product.

Well I hope you add to your list that nintendo should not be allowed to be the approver of all Wii & DS software, Sony should not be allowed to be the approver of all PS3 &PSP software and Microsoft should not be allowed to be the approver of all X-box software. However that type of closed system model has been going on for years with little outcry.

If that's true then they will have a good case for discrimination then.

I get that many people don't like the closed model of the iOS platform, but that doesn't mean that it's illegal. I think what really incenses some people is that they believe open is the one true way, and Apple being successful with a closed platform is an affront to their core beliefs.

As was determined in the Psystar vs Apple case, you can not just define a market as you please. Back then Psystar tried to claim Apple was a monopoly on OS X compatible hardware. The judge quickly threw that claim out as the market is personal computers. Similarly you can not just claim Apple has a monopoly on iOS software distribution, the market is mobile software and Apple does not have a monopoly on that.

Your other point about discrimination, as far as I'm aware Apple applies the same rules to everyone. If Apple let some developers flout the rules and not others then that would be discrimination, but simply having rules is not discrimination.

After a lot of flag waving, I bet this "new" OS will be a cutdown, pre-configured distribution of windows.
When non-techincal people are speaking it's worth taking what they say with a grain of salt.

because it's made available under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, see Open Standard, as opposed to Open Source.

HTML5 does not specify Ogg Theora. In fact HTML5 does not specify any codec, you know like it doesn't specify what types of images a browser should support. http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/02/184251/Browser-Vendors-Force-W3C-To-Scrap-HTML-5-Codecs

Mod up parent!

If you don't already, you should right articles professionally. Your comment is better than most of the tech press stories.

Nokia has a webkit based browser for their phones. Clearly Apple & Nokia have a large install of phones currently able to use h.264 via hardware acceleration but can't add support for other formats as there CPUs aren't powerful enough to decode in software.

Adobe must be ecstatic with this.

Mozilla isn't a penny-less organization working out of someone's garage. They earn a non-trivial revenue stream from the google searches in the browser and could easily have got a license from the MPEG group. Then we could have had a true standard for video for the web, one that's already in common use.

For real people that aren't watching copyleft movies in between sessions of tux racer, this will mean the continuation of flash video ironically in h.264 now increasingly.

Except it isn't just Apple blocking it. Nokia also sided against Ogg Theora, but then I guess that wouldn't be sensationalist enough for the /. crowd.
Neither is h.264 Apple's codec. apart from patents apples only other contribution was to give the MPEG group the MOV container for use as the MP4 container file format.

The problem people seem to have is that they seem to have a hard time understanding that something can be a published standard and still patented.

Here is the Patent declaration by Microsoft to ECMA body

"This letter is to inform you, in the event that ECMA adopts an ECMA Standard for C# Programming Language and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), Microsoft Corporation will grant, on a non-discriminatory basis, to any party requesting it, licenses on reasonable term and conditions, for its patent(s) deemed to be necessary for the implementation of the ECMA Standard."

Note that what is reasonable is at Microsoft's discretion and can have a monetary value which would be the kiss of death for a free project.

I think you're wrong. Downloading something is the act of making a copy. Therefore when you download something you're actively committing copyright infringement. You might be confusing this with buying a bootleg copy of a DVD from someone. Since you did not create the copy but bought it from the seller. Therefore buying the bootleg DVD is not illegal but creating bootleg DVDs is illegal.

I'm not a GNOME developer, but presumable because GTK+ is meant to be a portable layer. Mixing GTK+ code with Xlib code is going to create a big mess. I looked at GTK+ once a few years ago when it was version 1. There was an intermediate layer between the two called GDK for low level drawing of widgets.

However it begs the question what the supposed limitations of GTK+ are. I don't think it's lack of widgets.

I predict this will be a raging success on the scale of JPEG2000

What nonsense, Glasgow and Edinburgh are the 4th and 7th biggest cities in the UK by population. Scotland sends SOME of its politicians south because that's were the UK parliament is. This is like saying the UK sends all it's politicians to Belgium (EU parliament), in that it's blatantly untrue and misses the real point. British does not equal English. Perhaps the real question should be why not Scotland?

London 7.2 Million
Birmingham 992000
Leeds 720000
Glasgow 560000
Sheffield 512000
Bradford 467000
Edinburgh 450000
Liverpool 440000
Manchester 420000
Bristol 380000