I did some research and it appears I am late to the game in experiencing this fault (my macbook was purchased third quarter of 2006); countless other people have described the exact same crack in the MacBook’s. So, I called Apple. They confirmed that this is a known design flaw in earlier MacBook’s and that I can take it to an authorised service centre for a free-of-charge out of warranty repair. I have contacted a repair centre, and will update my blog with the outcome (free positive publicity!).

I would say I prefer my IBM Thinkpad (x60), but frankly I don’t! The damn thing is burning the skin on my palms. Again, a known issue. This website documents the problem.

I will stick with the MacBook a while longer - I hope!

UPDATE: I dropped my Macbook off for repair on Tuesday (remind me to take the A22 to Croydon, not the congested A23..) so all looks fine so far. Congrats to Apple.
UPDATE II: I collected my MacBook this evening from Amsys in Kenley, Surrey. It looks good as new, as a result of a new top case being fitted. My personal thanks to the staff at Amsys and Apple who dealt with this out of warranty repair (at no cost to myself) in an excellent manner.

I am pleased to report I passed this course.

My certificate can be validated on Red Hat’s training section. Now, to attempt the courses that make up the RHCA.. !

Here you can view the very beautiful Virginia Water. One day, I may find the energy to walk around the whole lake!
 

Notable pieces from Bruce’s essay are outlined herein:

And that brings me to our first mistake: for a time, there was a conflict between Open Source and Free Software evangelism. My intent has always been for Open Source to simply be another way of talking about Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people, and that it would eventually lead them to a greater appreciation of Richard Stallman’s arguments. This has come to pass, and I hope you’ll continue to make it so. One only had to witness the attendance of the GPL 3 committees to see that the importance of FSF’s work was appreciated by the largest of corporations.

For me, this is the single most important message to make people aware of: Open Source is a ‘business-friendly’ term to spread the philosophy and principles of Free-Software. The GNU foundation does tremendous work in enabling, and preserving, software freedom’s for users. It is of great sadness to me that people I talk to are at times completely unaware of the term ‘Free-Software’, instead thinking that this software is ‘Free as in no-cost’, rather than ‘Free as in Freedom’. Richard Stallman is owed an extremely large debt for his vision in creating the FSF and ensuring software freedom’s for all.

In contrast, we have not yet achieved the penetration that we might have desired on user desktop systems, at least if you don’t count the fact that Free Software provides a large part of Apple’s MacOS today, and critical elements of Microsoft Windows as well. Both companies have been forced to develop strategies to live with us, some of them less comfortable than others. Today we are seeing much of the value of software move from the desktop to the network, an area in which we are already entrenched. This can only lead to the expansion of Open Source on the systems in individual user’s hands.

This is a very realistic point: GNU+Linux penetration on the desktop is growing daily; users are realising that proprietary software and vendor lock-in is something that they no longer have to be part of - they can possess software freedom with GNU+Linux - primarily first on Server, but now on Desktop. The next decade will be pivotal in ensuring GNU+Linux on the Desktop penetrates to the masses.

One recent phenomenon has been the appearance of government officials openly on the stage at conferences concerning Free Software. Of late, it’s my turn to speak when the minister has finished his greeting, and they are always announcing some national government initiative concerning Open Source. OK, I speak outside of the U.S. a lot, but even in the U.S. we are seeing Linux (and presumably the GNU system)

Free-Software is here to stay: it is used both by Enterprises and Governments. Ignore the FUD from Proprietary vendors who tell you that Free and Open Source Software bears a heavier risk than using proprietary software.
Remember also, when you are using a ‘Linux’ machine, you are more than likely using the GNU System, be your distribution from Red Hat, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo, Slackware et al. Go and tell people about the GNU System!

Microsoft remains a problem, as the bastion of the old way of thinking about software, and as the epitome of the old school of dirty corporate fighting. Their current strategy seems to be to poison us with money, most recently by making patent agreements with a number of Linux distributions. These agreements go against the spirit of the software licenses used by our developers, and were perhaps intended to dissuade developers from contributing their work. To this end, Microsoft poured more money into Novell last year than Novell’s annual profit - indeed Novell would have had no annual profit without Microsoft.

A very articulate observation from Perens.

Perens closes by stating that:

So, you can see that the future will present its challenges for Open Source. We could never have forecast how big we would become during Decade Zero of Open Source. But we’ve built tremendous strength, to the point that we can consider much larger tasks. Join us now, as we enter Decade One.

Please do take time to read the original article located at Perens’ personal website.

NB: Notice Concorde in the background 2 minutes in!

David has written an excellent article, which I hope people can take time to read and digest.

First we have to resolve which BSD and GPL licenses you refer to.
The original BSD license is an all permissive (non-copyleft protected) license that is incompatible with all versions of the GPL. The revised (1999 onwards) BSD license is an all permissive license that is compatible with all versions of the GPL.

Therefore the FSF recommends calling simple all-permissive licenses compatible with the GPL “X11” licenses instead of “BSD” ones. (OSI says “MIT” licenses, but MIT has released under lots of licenses so its not ideal.)

Which is more free, X11 or GPL? They are equally free. X11 style licenses are free software licenses. The GPL licenses are free software licenses. Being a free software license is a binary value. At the important level, it is nonsense to say one is more or less restrictive than any other.

In the details, there are differences though.

Revised BSD is “more free” than original BSD because it is GPL compatible; you are free to distribute combined versions of such with all the GPL software out there, and that is very useful. Its a very secondary kind of freedom though, compared to the kind of freedom that defines free software.

The GPL has clauses to ensure the software remains free for all users of the software. Copyleft is the main example of this as it was in GPLv1; GPLv3 has other clauses like those about Tivoisation. To me these are protections, but proprietary software developers call these clauses “restrictions” because they restrict them from restricting everyone.

There is tonnes of bullshit around the web that says stuff like “From the perspective of the user, the BSD license is actually more “free” than the GPL: you can do whatever you want with the code, including wrap it up and make it proprietary.” But by “more” they mean “less,” by “users” they mean “developers” and by “including” they mean “especially.”

It is less freedom from the perspective of users because X11 licenses allow middlemen developers to make proprietary versions, so not all users will have freedom. With GPL, all users will have freedom. What you can do is freedom; when what you do effects others, it is not really freedom by power. The GPL restricts the amount of power you have over other people, it does not restrict your freedom. [0] So if you are making your software free, the GPL does not restrict you at all.

Since GPL software cannot become proprietary, the GPL makes for more freedom, overall.

However, there are exceptions to that. For example:

• The Xiph media formats are non-copyleft, to promote wide adoption of the format.
• A non-copyleft TCP/IP implementation was neccessary to build the Internet. [1]
• Font software is different to regular programs, and so the Open Font License is more suitable than the GPL for most fonts.

The FSF publishes the LGPL, a weak copyleft. A weak copyleft means that someone can link their proprietary software to your free software, but must keep your parts free. Sometimes - rarely, today - it can be strategic to release software that permits this, but it is not generally recommend. So it could be said that all-permissive non-copyleft free software licenses are more restrictive than the GPL, from the perspective of users, because some versions of the software will be proprietary.

However, I think its better to reformulate the question: Which license will result in the most freedom for all users? Usually this is the GPL, but it depends on the situation.

[0] Bradley Kuhn - CTO of softwarefreedom.org and previously Executive Director of FSF and a very cool guy who I met last time I was in New York - wrote about this in “Freedom or Power?”

[1] Programming languages are typically non-copyleft, although I think thats a shame - Perl was originally GPL, and if it remained GPL, all perl software would be GPL. I don’t know the exact circumstances why it switched, although I’d like to.

Here’s a recent image of the graph [it updates every hour].

 
Three things strike me first off about this graph:

• The lack of a bell curve. Though, I would explain this by noting that given the percentage of people able to obtain very close to the 8128 maximum sync rate is 37.8% - not the fairest, or most even, distribution of spread. Remember, Enta is a professional ISP attracting net-savvy users; I would hazard a fair guess that a lot of people specifically move to a location that is in good reach of their local exchange - I know i did. When BT releases 21cn i would expect a bell curve to exist around the 6000-10000 mark. Only time will tell, mind.
• As referred to above, Which? magazines continued insistence that broadband provider’s are setting too high a customers’ expectation as to speed’s possible on their ADSL line appear to be inaccurate. Setting aside the reasoning for the graph’s data in point 1, there is a significant proportion of customers on a very acceptable BRAS profile.

  My personal opinion is that Which? magazine is making an issue where there is none. I have never experienced an ISP stating that they will provide 8mbit services, but rather can provide, if your line is suitable. If I was a cynic I would state that Which? are creating publicity for themselves by writing these reports. Unfortunately, I am only adding to their publicity.

• Not directly related to the graph, but to the ISP publishing it: Enta have taken an exceptionally positive step in publishing this data. At a time when ISPs are under-fire (see above), they have chose to make their data public for the world to inspect. Well done, Enta!
   
  NB: I fully recommend Entanet reseller, UK Free Software Network.