Comment Re:open source ipad (Score 1) 199
OK, the difference between a for-profit and a non-profit is that the non-profit does not pay anybody dividends. A non-profit is legally forbidden to reward its investors (who are called "donors"). So, actually, it's completely different, since the entire purpose of a for-profit is to pay dividends to the investors.
A monolith on the moon certainly isn't going to pay anybody dividends in proportion to their investment. Either no investors get paid, or everybody gets the same "dividend" (even those who didn't invest), depending on how you look at it. Either way, it's a non-profit.
WRT OpenMoko, I don't know about their "original mission statement", but they were quite clearly attempting to make a phone with an open hardware platform. And now the company is making another hardware platform unrelated to phones. It's a company full of hardware designers who produce hardware as a product for sale. So I think it's fair to judge them on that basis.
Finally, the difference between taxation and theft is that taxation attempts to take from all in order to enable collective purchases, while theft does not exist to enable collective purchases.
It's really pretty simple.