I think the Free Software community ought to share in celebrating with Microsoft their wondrous success in selling 88 million copies of Windows Vista... albeit from a different perspective.

The Dell Thunderbird supercomputer, named MegaTux, has 4,480 Intel microprocessors running Linux virtual machines with Wine, making it possible to run 1 million copies of a Windows environment without paying licensing fees to Microsoft.

One of the inescapable facts of free software is that it involves a lot of law - far more than innocent hackers might expect when they settle down for a light bit of coding.

A 3D printer has been prototyped which can create real copies of its own component parts, a self-replicating machine. The people behind it have kept costs down to less than a thousand bucks and are developing it under a GNU public license. They say you will be able to get the machine to copy itself and then give away the copies for free.

"...Created and maintained by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, the same organization that maintains the GFDL, the GPL allows licensees to freely distribute copies and modifications provided a number of requirements are followed. One major restriction is that any derivatives or verbatim copies must be licensed under the GPL too (the GPL has a viral clause, similar in spirit to the GFDL)..."

I sometimes happen to be in a dialogue like this:

X: According to GPL, you can sell copies of your software at any price you want, right?

Me: Right.

X: But your customers can in turn sell copies of your software at any price they want, right?

Me: Right.

X: So, the only way a GPL developer can make money is by charge for development of their software?

Packt Publishing has once again generously offered a few copies of the recently released "Object Oriented Javascript", by Stoyan Stefanov (@stoyanstefanov). After finishing the book last weekend, I can promise you that it's one of my favorite web development books. Stoyan does a fantastic job of making Javascript seem attainable.

In a recent post at Pcmag titled "CSI Redmond: How Microsoft Tracks Down Pirates", the author tells a long, suspenseful and obviously MS-sympathetic tale about Microsoft's epic battles against "criminals and pirates".

"...Free software is software that respects its user’s freedom. With free software the user is free to use the program as they wish. They are free to study how the program works, and to distribute copies of the software. They are free to improve the software and to re-distribute copies of the improved version, to support their community..."