Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

tbf, I agree with what you said. Another thing that made me cough during the keynote is when Alex^[1] said that Flash did address the problem of video codecs. I'm sorry it does not. It just move it in the wrong direction, away from freedom.

The main problem with video (and sound) codecs is that they are patent encumbered. Therefore most of them can't be redistributed without violating some obscure patents in some obscure country. That's what Ogg (Vorbis and Theora) is addressing, the problem with Ogg being that no proprietary vendor has the courage nor the interest to push it forward^[2]. As for moving to Flash it is even worse: there is no reliable Free Software implementation of the technology^[3], the video codecs are even more encumbered (hello VP6), not solving the distribution problem (actually the Free Software implementations relies on the same code as the one I mentionned above, causing the same headache) And the current non-Free implementation of Flash is not even re-distribuable in its binary form, nor does it run on more than one variety of Linux arch: x86^[4]. And given how reliable Adobe have been providing non-Free Linux support for Flash in the past^[5], I'd guess pushing Flash is like putting all your eggs in the basket whose handles are about to break.

I don't use Linux because it is cool, I use Linux for the freedom it provides me. If I wanted to be cool, I would use MacOS X on a MacBookPro, have an iPod video with the latest "cool" song and video DRM'ed purchase on iTMS, would have bought a locked iPhone I couldn't use as a phone, and spend my time on MySpace, youtube, instead of trying push Free Software forward with all the other Free Software hackers.

According to CUPS.org, Apple has purchased the company behind CUPS and the Copyright of CUPS source code. Apparently this does not affect licensing of the current version of CUPS, still under GPL2/LGPL2, but I wouldn't be that optimist about the future. Note that in the past Apple had already paid a premium for a license exception that allowed them to evade the GPL2, and even though they published their modification to CUPS itself, they never released the whole stack as they would have if it at been GPL2.

Time will tell... but I'd recommend starting to mirror everything just in case Apple pull the plugs.

Note: this is a pessimist view. But it just remind why at one point copyright assignment might not be good.