We don't get to chose what software goes in them places.
As for BIOSes, well, there's linuxbios. I'd be using it myself only my motherboard isn't supported.
That's a common problem with Linux in general, and before you start I know it's not the developer's fault.
So there's no non-free software on my harddrive then.
Well I'm being very pickey here but it has a microcontroller in it and maybe even a PLA so the answer is yes, not forgetting your graphics card BIOS and possibly your sound card, odds on they'll be proprietary sofftware in your PC somewhere, like it or not. :p
To each his own. :cool:
I think it's a shame how there used to be many platforms around then annd now one platform dominates everything, bring back the good old days I say.
I'm beginning to think that your concept of competition is somewhat skewed. So competition is only fair when one person or entity benefits from it? What about the others?
You have a very good point, but it's a cut-thoat world out there, it might not be fair but that secret algorthim your company has could be the differance between life and death, the same goes for a drug company's secret ingrediant.
Edit:
There are other ways to compete with other companies other than by having trade secrets in the code, customer service and support are also sometimes considered to be equally (if not more) important. My original point was that if all of the companies opened their code they would no longer be competing on the technical merit of their software since (in theory) each piece of software should have equal capabilities.
Again, you're conveniently setting aside the argument that you don't HAVE to use the GPL in the first place.
Yes, this is true, I just wanted to convince people that forceing it would be a very bad (if not even evil) idea.
Would it be good for sharing your programs with the world? Yes. Do I and others here advocate using it whenever appropriate? Absolutely. But nobody's forcing anybody to use it. That argument is a fallacy on its face, since possibilities do not a problem make.
I would also recommend sharing code too, but (as you know) it isn't always good business sense to do so.
Yet you argue that if people were to gain in the competition through reinterpreting other people's work - or even compiling source code - that is somehow wrong.
Of course it isn't wrong and this it's healthy and can happen in the proprietary world as well as the free. The difference is in the free world people work together and in the proprietary they are in competition - this is the communism argument again.
By that standard, shouldn't Sun be out of business?
The open source model might work for well Sun but it would be a complete disaster for Microsoft, because of this people say "force the GPL" as it would solve one problem but it'd also create many more.
Also, don't argue that proprietary licences aren't the problem we're currently facing, that falls flat once one realises that PC adoption exploded before IBM started patenting everything could get their grubby little hands on. The difference now is that Big Blue is Big Billy; though the faces may have changed, the song remains the same.
This could be argued both ways, Adobe, Apple and Opera aren't causing any problems at the moment and they all use proprietary licences but Microsoft is, which is to do with their license. I think the answer to this dilema is proprietary licences aren't the direct cause of the problem, the way Microsoft is using them is.
Define compatibility as anything but interoperability with any known system, or the capacity to be checked for said ability, and see how far that gets you in serious development circles.
This is true, once you've reverse engineered something in order develop your product in a manner that'd make it compatable, you've efectively given your product the same capability.
The funny part is that at least Apple learned from their mistake and used a FOSS backend (just because BSD isn't GPL, that doesn't make it proprietary) 
. Hopefully others will begin to see the mistake in not allowing compatibility checks, which the EU was smart enough to notice before ramming through their own DMCA.
The laws are a very big problem here, you can sell someone a TV and you can't impose any restrictions on them reverse engineering the hardware but you can with the software. I think the EU has used the words "reverse engineering for compatability purposes" to keep the software companies happy.
That's hardly a trick question, nor is it relevant to the discussion at hand. Who cares if a microwave's plans are public domain so long as standards exist to provide competing manufacturers? The issue here is that software was traditionally open to reinterpretation on-the-fly, something which firmware just can't handle by design. Again, nobody seems to notice that BIOS and firmware companies directly compete with one another (and yes, even code-share).
What do PLAs have to do with the GNU? Wow.
That was all aimed the free software fanboy crew who keep saying "proprietary software is evil, either open your code or go to hell". They do their level best to avoid proprietary software as much as possible yet they forget it's embedded in to the very hardware they're using whether they like it or not.
Sure there is, use FOSS whenever possible. The problem is proprietary software, not firmware and hardware. Nobody ever faked a security video at a tribunal over a missing ROM chip.
I can see closed proprietary hardware systems being a potential problem in the future - Apple owning the largest market share could cause this. So far Microsoft has been the only company capable of destroying the competition by using their trade secrets and I really hope they won't achieve this with the Xbox 360. :eek:
