Whoever wrote this article doesn't understand the difference between BBM and email. RIM has said that BBM is delayed out of the Feb. release and has said nothing about email. BBM and email are two different things.

It is free as in freedom. The question is who is the freedom for. You're looking at it from the wrong point of view.

The GPL attempts to ensure the freedom of the end-user while BSD gives freedom to the developer. The origin of the GPL stems from frustration over having to deal with (as a user) bugs and lack of features in closed-source code:

By ensuring that users have the right to the source code (GPLv2) and the right to run their own modified source code (GPLv3), the GPL gives freedom to them.

No, you just entirely missed the point of the comment because you focused on one line and tried to be pedantic.

The point is that I, as a user, cannot take the code and make a fix and apply it on my system. Sure, I can put my own compiler on there, but if there is a bug in the GUI layer that causes it to hang when I enter suspend I cannot go to the git repository and apply a fix and run with it. I'd have to wait until Mr. Jobs has blessed the next version of OSX and hope that they've fixed my bug.

Now, I'm not positive Android in most forms holds true to the "no freedom has been lost" part because the vendors don't allow you to flash your own code image without doing a good deal of hacking and violating your service agreements.

A sample size of one is surely not statistically significant enough to make an argument on.

You must go to a mechanic that regularly pokes holes in your radiator too.

Open and configurable has nothing to do with this. A sufficiently intelligent malware could have made things as bad as a virus on Windows. Think of a malware that infects your libc to catch certain system function calls (such as those done by the "remove instructions") and redirects them to innocuous behavior. Even on a system that provides SHA1 checksum verification of all libraries and binaries installed through the package manager, you are still susceptible to a ill-behaving fopen/fread. The only way around something like that would be to boot from a clean boot disk with a known-good libc, which is pretty similar to the only way to be sure to clean a virus off Windows.

The fact of the matter is if you have root access and you run programs without knowing what they do, you are exposed to nasty things irrespective of what OS you are running.