Your comment makes no sense at all, please try again sober.

I'd hazard to guess that most authors don't make a living writing books.

But no, I'm not an author, I'm a reader, a book buyer, the source of the money that authors will see some small portion of. As a consumer, I'd rather put up $5, $10, $15 to have my favorite authors write their next book, instead of paying a publisher $20 after it's done.

Forking is very different, because it's not just producing a copy, it's using someone's trademark.

Cory Doctorow, who this whole article is about, has been releasing his books as free electronic downloads, and he still makes a decent amount from physical sales. Jono Bacon, author of "The Art of Community", has been doing the same. There are many many more examples of authors doing this. Just because Steven King didn't get the results he was after, doesn't mean the concept is flawed.

I'm okay with that, an author shouldn't expect to make a living solely by writing books, until he has written something good enough to make people want to pay a living wage for more books. Plenty of new authors take time off from their day jobs to write, it's not a new concept.

Guess what, most artists of any kind don't get to take time off from their "real jobs" until they become well known.

If it makes you feel better, we can modify my list to include writing a short story, then raising funds to write a full-length novel based on that.

The point I was making is that instead of getting an advance from a publisher who wants a return on investment, authors would get an advance from their audience who want the finished work itself.

Yes, but if you drop a physical book into the bathtub, you don't lose your entire library, just one book. It'll probably cost between $5 and $20 to replace the physical book, compared to $200+ to replace a digital reader.

Who says authors have to make money by selling books? Here's how I see the future for authors:

1) Up and coming author puts his first books on the net for free, hoping to gain readership.
2) Author requests donations from those who like his book (yes, we're at "Profit!" at step 2, but it's small so stay with me here)
3) Author gains a good sized fan base and a reputation (think Dean Koontz)
4) Author announces a future book, and sells "access" to parts of the writing process to his fans ("Profit!" again)
5) Author now has a run-away hit series ala Harry Potter or Twilight (or, god forbid, another Dan Brown book)
6) Repeat step 4, only with more Profit!
7) Author sells movie and merchandising rights for big Profit! (this is where authors get rich nowadays anyway, not from book sales)

Etherpad doesn't have a client, it runs entirely in a browser windows. There is already discussion of getting an instance hosted by Ubuntu, but it will have to be checked out by their security team before it is made official. Also, Debian and Ubuntu are trying to phase out Sun Java in favor of OpenJDK, but OpenJDK wouldn't compile Etherpad when I tried it, I had to use Sun's JDK.

It's Scala and Javascript, not Java.

Technically Etherpad is Scala and Javascript, I don't think there is much Java to it.

Did you miss the part where they said that etherpad.com would be shut down in March, with public pads likely being shut down even earlier?

From what I read, the infected packages were on gnome-look.org, not a repository.

Ubuntu 9.10 makes it easier to add repositories, which contain signed packages, which you can trust as much as you trust the owner of the repository. This means that I can go to winehq.org and easily add their repository to my sources. It also means that if someone hacks into their repository server, and uploads a virus-laden package, it won't install on my system, because it wasn't signed by winehq.org.

Your point is that in order to get Windows to run on a low-cost, high-efficiency platform, manufacturers will simply switch to a high-cost, low-efficiency platform?

In which case they won't be ARM netbooks...