It had always been that way through history. All performing artists (actors, musicians, dancers etc) were paid for their live performances (surprising, huh?). The advent of technology that enabled the recording of performances gave the illusion that one (studio) performance should be enough to make a living and be rich. However this was a situation that worked only temporarily. It worked because the demand for the creations of the artists was high and the mass-copying machines were too expensive and controlled by few distribution companies.

While this situation worked, laws were passed to extend copyrights. The distribution companies were able to pass the law because nobody in the society cared. It was a case of company defending their copyrighted work from other companies. The average Joe couldn't think of a vinyl copying machine (and those who could knew that they wouldn't be able to afford it), so he didn't really care to object extending copyrights. It seemed fair at that time. However now the technology for copying performances exists, so the game now is the (super-extended) copyright holders vs the society. The copyright holders are so gonna lose and they know it. They just try to make a buck while they can.

And the artists? Well, since the artists have already been deprived from the copyright of their work, it's all over touring for them like the old days. Not that they don't like it.

It would be more accurate to say: "plenty of sun, excellent food and enough wine so that every woman you meet looks beautiful".

Compiling isn't really a good option for a production server, unless you are really desperate for a specific piece of software or you're mad enough to run Gentoo on it. When you compile something, you undertake the cost of updating it each time a bugfix comes out or some dependency breaks it.

The balance between new stuff and stability is very delicate. IMHO, the Debian folks have lost it, leaning too much towards stability. This is wrong, because it makes life of users difficult when it is practically infeasible to guarantee perfect stability. See Bug#411487 as an example. Insisting on supporting only python2.4 for mod_py, didn't save debian from a conflict with php5-mhash which went undetected.

While I'm happy to see that libapache2-mod-python at last supports python2.5, I'm very dissapointed that debian developers didn't include python2.6. Do we have to wait another 22 months for it?

If the debian folks think that python2.6 could cause problems they are free not to make it the *default* python. But not including it at all is insulting for the python development team. Most important, since python2.6 is considered a stepping stone to python3, it is also very inconvenient for those who want to start migrating their code to python3.