This is going to be a difficult, uphill battle for Hawaii given their recent growth in production of locally sourced, volcanic S(O2)...

Lots of people will view this as a sellout, but it isn't. The primarly difference between ESR and RMS is that ESR is pragmatic, and RMS is 100% principled and doesn't allow his principles to be modified by pragmatism.

ESR's stance is that the end (more openness -- and that means more Freedom, too) justifies the means (deal with more proprietary software now).

Lots of people will also claim that there is danger of a slippery slope here, that if we allow *any* proprietary software, then we won't know where to stop. I simply don't think that's true. As Linux increasingly dominates the marketplace and the world wakes up and realizes that Software Freedom just makes more sense, then we'll see a shift away from the new-old way of doing things. (The old-old way was when code was delivered to the customer with the compiled executable(s).)

I believe we'll see the same sort of progress in DRM and music/movie/etc. copyrights and the related P2P battles. As artists wake up and realize that the Internet enables them to survive in a different way than the current studio systems allow, many of these issues will morph and the current battles will go away. Why do you need a studio pushing your single in stores and on radio when the Internet can simply bypass these traditional advertising means and 'Net-based word-of-mouse advertizing can do all of/most of the work?

Of course, these processes will take years, and I think Linux-on-the-desktop will be the first one to see significant progress.

Especially if the community heeds ESR's advice now.

Is it me or does the line from the article:

1. Lowering soldiers' core body temperature might keep them from overheating.

sound like they are discussing the issues surrounding overclocked soldiers.

Alternatively, you can build anything using nothing but XORS.

This is false. With only XORS, the only functions that can be computed are parity functions -- those that depend only on whether the number of active inputs is even or odd.

Centrallix - http://www.centrallix.net