I remember when they added user accounts I signed up pretty much right away but no one else I knew was registerting so still stayed mostly anonymous. By the time I went back to start posting under an account I couldn't remember for the life of me what I had used. I would be willing to bet there are a lot of old unused low uid accounts like that.

The GPL does not requite that you redistribute the source for free, it requires that you don't charge more for the source than the binary however.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#CompanyGPLCostsMoney

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee

He's not obligated to provide the SDK license, nor is he obligated to provide access to the AppStore. He's obligated to redistribute the GPL'd source code which he is. Hell, he could charge another $2.99 for the ability to download the source code if he wanted and that's all perfectly fine. Also, you are seriously confusing the concept of the why GPL'd source code is free. It's not free as in there is no cost. It's free in that you will always have access to the source and the ability to modify it as you see fit, so long as you also extend that freedom on to others.

Just because it's GPL does not mean it's also $0.00.

The submitter has done absolutely nothing wrong, and the original dev shouldn't have released the source under the GPL if he felt that the app should never be charged for. He should have released it under a non commercial license that explicitly restricted the sale of the software.

In general I would agree with you that the less competent should go, but that's not what the H1-B program is about. The H1-B program was designed to bring in foreign workers to fill openings where there were shortages of native workers with the appropriate skills. This is the argument used by companies like Microsoft and Intel to get the caps increased. They simply couldn't find people to fill these slots.

Keep in mind we are talking about the situation where a company is down sizing. Not dealing with promotions, firings, etc. If you have two employees that are up for a promotion and there's only one slot then absolutely performance is the only thing that matters. If you are being evaluated for competence or performance and need to be let go due to incompetence, again that's the only thing that matters. However, when the company is downsizing there is no valid argument that they can't find the skilled workers. There are more skilled workers than can be employed at that point, and the justification for the H1-B is now gone.

Microsoft just let 1400 workers go from their Licensing division in Reno, NV. Those are almost entirely non technical staff and would fall into the "financial services" folks they said they would lay off. It's also extremely unlikely there were any workers in that portion of the layoffs that had an H1-B.

Now, I would agree with the senator that if two people are being considered for a layoff and one has an H1-B and the other is a citizen, the H1-B should be let go. The reason being that Microsoft and the other tech companies argued that they desperately needed the cap on H1-B's to be increased as they couldn't find skilled workers in the US to fill the positions. At a time of layoffs, in the situation I described, that would obviously not be true any more.