Two relevant anecdotes from when I was in college:
1) In an artificial life course we got to propose our own semester project. One guy wanted to write a worm, but the professor was afraid that his tenure would not be enough to protect his job if the worm got out of hand.
2) One faculty member that taught a computer security course used to make the offer that anybody who could successfully access his gradebook and change their grade could have the higher grade. He stopped doing this after students switched from trying to electronically break in to just casing his house.
I don't know if angry ninjas were actively involved, but I remember a few years ago they basically froze development to do a code audit. Something about making sure they were able to prove there was nothing in the code base that had been reverse engineered and that all the code was either freshly written or had been copied from publicly-available sources. http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Audit
I had the same experience with ReactOS as several other posters... I installed it on a VM, saw all of the screenshots on the site of "look what we can run!" and tried to replicate some of those, and basically had one crash after another
A patent covers the method, not the implementation. If the patent is expired and the code is not covered under copyright, you can use it. If there are other patents that cover it that aren't expired, then you'd still be exposed to trolling.
(IANAL)
Let the Microsoft bashing and the Facebook bashing continue for no good reason!
FTFY
FTFY. At least, in this case. I mean, sure, bash Facebook's privacy debacles, and bash Microsoft's patent strong-arming, but there's no real reason to bash them in the context of this article.
And now I will get modded down for daring to disagree without posting as AC.
That's what happened for me with Wave. Eventually I got my wife on it and we used it to plan some travel, but none of my other friends really used it. (Of course, the bigger problem with Wave was nobody really knew what to use it for, even once it opened and they had people to use it with.)
Plus has worked out much better for my social network, though: one of my friends got an invite and the majority of our network got added in the ~12 hour period that invites were open. One of our friends remarked that we're clearly not the norm and that while most of her computer science grad student friends had gotten full networks, all of her non-computer science friends on Plus basically only had her in their circles.
System restarting, wait...