I've been doing business without having used Outlook in all my life. And I know plenty of others.

Why? There's email without domains. Plenty of businessmen use google apps, or other alternatives for their stuff.

Isn't there any developer mode or something like that?

Because they're giving these ones out for free?

Knowing Cisco and knowing networking are completely different things.

I've known a few Electrical Engineers whom I've asked about tecnical information on IPv6 routing. They insisted I didn't need to know that much (I was building my own routing box), that if I used cisco just enabling a checkbox would help me do what I wanted, there was no point in doing thing myself.

Of course, all of them cisco certified.

You do realize that gstreamer is a library?
Using that argument, firefox doesn't support HTTPS either, since it uses openssl for SSL.

I deal with this by simply avoiding countries that have software patents.

Well, firefox, doesn't play the video actually, flash does.

In case it won't run on your PC (because you've insuficint CPU, or not the SINGLE arquitecture they support), then firefox won't play anything flash-based, because flash won't run.

It's really a matter of principle. Plenty of people care about openness, that's why we have free software and all that. The same applies here.

Sure you have to pay someone. You just don't do it directly, you pay the hardware manufacturer, who, in turn, payed someone else.

It's not always the best that wins, but rather the one with the largest company backing it up, or the one with better marketing.

It's not a service, it's a standard being drafted by the IETF, which would allow any xmpp or sip server to federate to the other protocol.

Plenty of distributions are already ahead of you and have moved over to MariaDB anyway.

People started caring about gtalk's inner workings when they realized they could not longer see a lot of their contacts (the non-google ones) in the new "hangouts" clients.

Jabber precedes Skype. XMPP precedes Gtalk.

Seems like most of your claims are invalid.

Also, there's a new XMPP<->SIP federation standards in the works (it's still a IETF draft though).

a) There's GPG for XMPP, which is not so uncommon.
b) They intend to federate to XMPP, so, all this applies to IMPP.
c) SSL isn't end-to-end.

As for binary blobs, there's jingle.

Yeah, but good luck trying to find an exploit on the OpenBSD kernel to access my stuff.

I think GP was trying to state something on the grounds of "why do you have such a preference for FLOSS software, but work building propietary software?".

I really disklike the how we inhereted all that "inheretance" stuff from the monarchy. The son of the rich are rich, and it's a right of blood.
Wow, kings and princes weren't the same, right?

Copyright exists to motivate author to create works of art, not to make their grandchildren richer.