Please re-read the original post, they are not replacing dpkg/apt.

Could you link to me where you are getting you Windows server pricing from ? According to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/buy.aspx Their cheapest is $501 with a 25 cal limit and the datacenter edition is $4,809 per processor plus cal licences needed on top.

Canonical wants to get into Mobile devices. Most of that hardware has closed source display drivers for Android (and iOS devices are totally off the radar). They want a GFX stack that is compatible with those drivers, to more easily get compatibility. They can't get that with Wayland. Cheers, Nick

I co-started and co-ran a niche forum for approx 5 years that quickly got popular and needed dedicated hosting. It is/was a community site, we presented funding options to the users (as we did any major change), to start with donations worked, but we started getting a high proportion of non registered users after exposure in a couple of national magazines. What we found was paid sponorship worked. Sponsors offered discounts, had permant/rotation (depending on how much paid) placement on places on the site. Were allow to post sales/discounts/group buys deals and be part of the community, posting advice, competition prizes, free stickers etc. Was such a sucess that one sponsor paid for a whole years hosting up front. But the main thing was these were businesses that came reccomended by the users of the site or we thought would offer value to the users of our site and that is IMHO the weak point of generic 3rd party advertisers, they really are third party, relevance can suffer and they seldom can provide back to the community. We worked hard with sponsors to develop relationships with the community and themselves and it was quite clear that it in our niche it was mutually benificial. But the clear thing is as we setup the discount deals, allowing sponsors to post, at every step we ran these ideas past the community, sometimes a one month trial to get feedback, but one thing that over five years never changed and that was a strong dislike for using a 3rd party ad service.

Having been threatened "legal action" from Microsoft for software I sold on Ebay, I can confirm the above is correct under UK consumer law.

No. You are purchasing a box and disk from a retailer. The payment is with the retailer, not MS. You might not even ever open the box and find out if there is any license inside, so how could you of purchased a license ? (This also brings into question the legality of a license that you can't see at the point of sale and terms that the consumer can't negotiate).

From: http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-office-365-home-premium-what-happens-when-subscriptions-expire-7000010498/ "For users with an Office 365 Home Premium subscription, as the expiration date of that subscription approaches, users will receive notifications inside the Office applications and via e-mail to remind/nag users about the approaching expiration date. Once the subscription expires, the Office apps will enter a "read-only reduced functionality mode." This means users will be able to view or print documents, but won't be able to create any new documents or edit existing documents. Users who want to regain their full Office capabilities will be able to purchase a new subscription (via Office.com) or a set of predesignated retailers. Users also will have the choice of simply using older, existing versions of Office or to just use the free Office Web Apps on SkyDrive for basic editing. If a user has stored documents created/edited with Office 365 Home Premium in their SkyDrives, these documents will still be downloadable once subscriptions expire. Users can save SkyDrive documents to another computer or drive at any time, according to Microsoft. (With Office 365 Home Premium, users get an additional 20 GB of storage on top of their existing SkyDrive quotas.)"

Further to this, will you ever get back the CPU time it takes to compile ?

If you read the Daily Mail article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2250809/Victory-Mail-Children-WILL-protected-online-porn-Cameron-orders-sites-blocked-automatically.html you will find that the truth is that David Cameron "is backing alternative proposals to allow parents to tailor exactly what they can and cannot see". Sadly due to the continuing illiterate editing by the Daily Mail this was somehow equated to "Victory for the Mail! Children WILL be protected from online porn after Cameron orders automatic block on sites"

This is the "beautiful cathedral of Unix"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg I think not.