Every time rms is brought up, someone hauls out this phrase "extremely narrow definition of free"

Really? Narrow? *Extremely narrow?!?? How many licenses are considered free?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html

Software is free if it respects the four freedoms. They're clear and, in my opinion, not the slightest bit narrow.

Nine times out of ten this comes from someone who prefers "permissive" licenses to copyleft ones. But these *are considered free by the FSF.

Are you just tweaked that rms and others *prefer that copyleft licenses be used? That's nothing to do with how "narrow" their definition of free is. It's a pragmatic argument about which intelligent people can disagree.

But this "extremely narrow" business serves no purpose vis-a-vis intelligent disagreement. It's a rhetorical whack meant to associate principled advocates of free software with limitations,restrictions & unfreedom.

In between the two assertions
1) [GGP] The R&D is worth $40B
and
2) [your synopsis of slashdotjunker] The R&D is worth $0

Stand 39,999,999,999 non-straw-men.

This is one of those rare recursive offenses:

The penalty for singing or thinking a product jungle is singing or thinking a product jungle

They're totally spoiling my launch party! After I spent all day organizing my "Activities" and picking my favorite "Features" to share with everyone! Now they'll all go to someone else's launch party the day before.

The hell with them, I'm installing FreeBSD then.

"As soon as I got rid of PulseAudio? It started working."

You lucky bastad!
As soon as *I* got rid of pulseaudio, my sounds stopped working entirely. And my wireless. Headscratcher there:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1258063

"...a balance struck between the rights of creators and users"

A nice idea; maybe start by listing these?

Be careful, as soon as you say "creators have a right to get paid" you've left the free-market camp. Not that the free-market camp is the only good and true and noble one, but that's beside the point.

When being-paid is thought of as a *right, rather than a hit-or-miss result of free market activity, you have to turn in your libertarian badge.

I'll start with an actual right I believe creators have: attribution.

I would say that the current POTUS is nominated by *someone every year, as a matter of course.

In this day and age are there still people who think that the laws apply equally to everyone?

Bzzt. Wrong answer, sorry. People get drunk together because they are comfortable with each other, not the other way 'round.

I stop reading any of these posts when I get to the word "zealot". Saves a lot of time.

One is not a zealot for thinkng that copyleft is a good mechanism for making sure that software remains free.

Parent is the best and most succinct encapsulation of the sensible-people-vs-"zealots" confusion I'v seen in awhile.

Great-great-great granparent, which I stopped reading at the word "zealot", is dead wrong about

"the fact that the GPL wasn't written with commercialization in mind certainly seems like it fails to be useful to a business"

Sounds so logical but is false. Usefulness-to-business is an unintended conquence of thousands of things, including lots of free software.

"give IE users the finger and tell them that their browser, and by extension (usually) the organization that forces them to use that browser and doesn't give them the ability to install anything else, is/are obsolete."

I don't necessarily agree with giving anyone the finger, as it's impolite. But telling them the truth is, overall, a good thing.

"what is the likelyhood that every community will have some citizen blogger covering the courthouse, the city council meetings, the school board meetings, etc. These are all things that local papers cover quite well."

Dude, what city do you live in? I'm moving. Here, without alteration or editing, are the Top News Stories in my local paper as of right now:
"Adopted Children's Trips to Homeland Helps Affirm Heritage"
"Veteran Recalls A-Bomb, Enola Gay"
"3 GCISD Schools Advance in Ratings"
"Muhm: Community Involvement Key to Victory"

Meanwhile, in my city, several multimillion-dollar development projects are underway which will impact the political balance of power and the economic texture of the whole place.

All I see is a bunch of bubbles with "@"s sprinkled all over them. To really get off the ground, this "HTML5" doohickey needs a real video tag with a real codec and plugin from MacroMedia, and good, effective DRM.

"Diller predicted there will be three revenue streams: advertising, subscriptions and transactions. "

Uh-huh. And the things funded through these methods will continue to account for about 0.2% of the things people do and look at on the web.

A lot of this idiocy comes from the use of the metaphor "content". If music and other artistic works were called what they are -- *expressions of human creativity -- a lot of this would go away.

It's obvious, of course, that people generally don't make objects, products, "contents" (of containers, presumably) and hand them over to others without getting paid for them.

But the idea that people will not express themselves creatively -- will not write, sing, and talk about the things that are important to them -- without getting paid for it is .. um.. less obvious*

*i.e. false