Spontaneous Monotony

Although it’s a Linux distribution, and therefore obliged to be distributed under the GPL, the Linspire operating system actually contains many proprietary components such as an MP3 codec, various plugins (like Flash) etc. and therefore you don’t get the full experience unless you buy it. Whether you think this obeys the spirit of the GPL or not, they are giving away the ‘electronic download’ version of Linspire 5 between now and Tuesday (Labor Day in the US), because of confusion caused by a distro of the GPL components which called itself ‘freespire’. [EDIT] The server for actually ‘ordering it’ (ie their shopping cart system) is pretty screwed at the moment, but once you refresh enough to get to the account registration stage it’s fine, as they offer BitTorrent download as well as their FTP server (incidentally you can get the entire thing from BitTorrent indexing sites without registering but doing it this way gets you access to their support etc.)

To aid the passage of comments, I have TypeKey authentication enabled. In short, it’s a ‘centralised identification system’ (not unlike Microsoft’s Passport, except without the security and privacy screwups). It’s run by SixApart (the people who create Movable Type and Typepad, and recently bought LiveJournal), and the main advantage is that (instead of having to register a separate account on every site) you can register one account which then works on every TypeKey enabled blog in existence.

In fact, since the registration process for a TypeKey account is pretty much spambot-proof, I feel comfortable disabling moderation for anyone who signs in with TypeKey, meaning that your comment will appear immediately because I do not need to check to see if its posted by a human.