“Windows 7 has malicious features just like Windows Vista. These include features to restrict users (Digital Restrictions Management), a back door for imposing software changes, and perhaps also the spyware features discovered in previous versions. If you don’t want to be abused, defenestrate your computer.”

Richard Stallman (RMS), President of the Free Software Foundation (Join) in an Interview with Neowin.net.

“It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism – that we live in fear and under a police state[...]“

Dame Stella Rimington, former Director General of MI5

Found in a BBC News report Ministers ‘using fear of terror’

“We have not made any final decisions on how communications data will be collected and no decision will be made until after the consultation process.

“We do not recognise the term “Black Boxes”. It has not been used in any of our briefings or presentations”.

A UK Home Office spokesman talking about reports that the Government is to collect and store all internet traffic.

“Noodle lumps of the present invention, because of their quick restoration properties when subjected to boiling water, can conveniently be served to the general public as a very convenient ration-type lunch, holiday snack for outings and/or emergency food, thereby contributing greatly to an improvement in dietary life of the general public.”

Momofuku Ando (?? ??). Inventor of Cup Noodles, 1976.

“One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control,” he said. “It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenseless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.”

Richard Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Foundation.
From a Guardian article about Cloud Computing.

"NVIDIA’s fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property NVIDIA wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software"

NVIDIA Statement

“The NVidia driver is the single component in a KDE4 / Free Operating system stack causing us most of the hard-to-solve problems. In other words, nvidia.ko has grave technical shortcomings.”

Sebastian Kügler, KDE Developer.

“The great advantage of the Open Source development model is that it is driven by considerations of technical excellence, so if you give people enough information, they’ll not only assist you writing the driver, they’ll even help you design it.”

“[...] binary drivers totally negate the shared support and maintenance burden which is what makes Open Source so compelling. Additionally, there is also a drag effect these binary drivers have on the rest of the ecosystem: for instance, Fedora was under enormous pressure not to release Fedora 9 until there was a solution that allowed it to run with the Nvidia binary driver (Fedora chose to ship with a pre-release of the X windows system which Nvidia refused to support and because the driver was binary Fedora couldn’t simply fix the problems and ship anyway).”

James Bottomley. Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair and SCSI Maintainer. Linux Graphics Essay.

“Critically though, I think the BBC can, and should, do more to support the Free and Open Source community”

Ashley Highfield, Director, BBC Future Media & Technology

"Honestly, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the entertainment industry is an existential threat to the idea of free speech, open tools, and an open communications network."

Cory Doctorow. Science fiction writer, blogger, activist. [Link]

"We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft," … "Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market."

Gianpiero Morbello, Vice president of marketing and brand, Acer.
[Link]

Most major web based developments of any scale these days work on the presumption that interoperablity, open standards, and platform neutrality are givens. It is not clear why the BBC design brief did not specify these requirements or if it did what technical problems – given the expertise available – hinder them being implemented.

So long as the iPlayer is bundled in with Windows/Internet Explorer it continues to run the risk of breaching state aid rules – as the benefits it thereby bestows on Microsoft (with their somewhat blemished reputation for fair competition) come via the deployment of the public’s licence money.

John Pugh MP, in a letter to Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC