I don’t know how much of a problem this is in practice, but be glad if you can run Linux instead.

There’s an amusing thread on /. about whose interpretation of the license is right or wrong - among other topics. Most posters miss the point entirely, though. It doesn’t matter whose interpretation of the legal situation is correct - the only issue that matters is whether or not the author of cdrecord can convince the relevant people at Debian that they can legally distribute his software; failing that, they had no choice but to remedy the problem, which in this case led to the creation of a fork from the last unencumbered version.

Interestingly enough, Fedora reached a similar conclusion.

There’s precedent for this pattern, other “characters” have been deemed to difficult to work with, to the point where it’s less painful to rewrite or fork their code. It will happen again.

Without a doubt, piracy results in lost revenue, although credible analysis is hard to come by and piracy as the default culprit for lagging sales is getting old. The people commenting on the story make a number of valid points. PC games have increased in price, while not offering much in return other than eye candy. The PC is a fragmented platform, which drives up development cost at a time when game publishers are squeezed to develop on the cheap. Intrusive copy protection and in-game product placement are not likely to boost sales. And so on…

I myself am somewhat of a curmudgeon when it comes to games. I never cared for the types of games I associate with consoles and that well is poisoned beyond recall; on top of that, I’m not willing to spend money on (more or less) single purpose hardware, when I have plenty of perfectly good general purpose PCs around. I haven’t had all that much free time to play games in recent years, but I would make the time if there were games that I could get into. The Sims and other god games are fun, right up until the point when the inevitable micro-management spoils it. FPS and real-time strategy games don’t much interest me and decent adventure games are few and far in between. So what’s a gamer to do…

It’s hardly surprising that old hard drives contain all kinds of juicy information. I’ve said for years that old disks acquired through ebay or the like are ideal for forensics target practice. Having said that, it nevertheless amazes me that free and readily available tools like Darik’s Boot and Nuke aren’t in universal use.

So Microsoft tries to do something about kernel rootkits. Criticism abounds and reasoned comment is hard to find, not that the source of the latter is particularly friendly towards Microsoft.

In nutshell, it’s perfectly okay to flame Microsoft for not hardening their kernel in the first place. If the fix doesn’t close all the known holes, then there’s another obvious problem. Clearly, purveyors of third-party security products have a vested interest in being able to install their wares, but if they already complain about a partial fix, what would they say about a fix that left both them and the malware writers high and dry? Looks like they are between a rock and a hard place, doesn’t it?

Update: More media coverage: Windows defense handcuffs good guys

I still don’t know that the security vendors have a legitimate grievance. However, there is the problem with Microsoft entering the security market. A partial fix that appears designed to deal a major setback to competitors, while leaving the door wide open for the bad guys deserves a few raised eyebrows.

To state the obvious, it’s up to the copyright holder to chose the license under which their product ships. It is also obvious that closing the source on a previously open-source project is certain to antagonize a subset of users and perhaps a sizeable one at that. Tenable spun their decision one way, the people that kicked off the OpenVAS fork have a different view. I haven’t kept tabs on either Tenable or OpenVAS; perhaps they’re both doing well, perhaps not.

Speaking for myself, Nessus 3 as closed source doesn’t work for me for philosophical and pragmatical reasons. It seems increasingly geared towards a clientele that is shopping for an off-the-shelf product and while I don’t know how much the open-source user community contributed back to the project, there is less incentive to contribute to a commercial project.