People often conflate proprietary software with commercial software, believing software can only be sold if it's proprietary, because a proprietary license is the only thing that prevents people from using software without paying.

In fact that is not the case at all. On the one hand, proprietary software is used all the time in violation of its license, as the industry's own figures demonstrate.

So clearly proprietary licensing is no guarantee of payment, therefore the license itself is irrelevant to selling software for profit.

On the other hand, Free Software is sold all the time, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Indeed the GPL permits this, and the author of the GPL, Richard Stallman, actively encourages it.

Andrew Orlowski, looking like The Picture of Dorian Gray

I know, it seems puerile to blog about one's comments being rejected from other blogs or forums, not that this happens to me very often, mind you. After all, their blog/forum, their rules. Right?

But still...

This one is rather poignant, and deserves some attention.

For those of you who read the The Register, you'll no doubt be aware of a long-term contributor called Andrew Orlowski. To describe Orlowski as having somewhat right-wing tendencies would be, frankly, a bit of an understatement. His politics and opinions are highly offensive to anyone with even a modicum of common decency, which may be why, for the entire duration of his 11 year tenure at The Register, he conspicuously remained the only contributor to completely disable comments in his articles.

Until now.

One of the best things about the Internet is the fact that not only is it a tremendous source of information, but it also provides us with a very fine-grained control over that information. For example, unlike broadcast and print media, we can automatically filter out adverts and other nasties, using indispensable software like AdBlock Plus and NoScript.

But there's another type of "nasty" that isn't so easy to filter out ... media hacks with an unsavoury political bent (putting it politely).

Take El Reg for example. Most of its articles are informative, entertaining and have a decidedly liberal leaning, but there are a few exceptions, most of which seem to be penned by a particularly unpleasant character by the name of Andrew Orlowski.

Life isn't easy when you're an Ubuntu fanboy

First there was "Bansheegate", the scandal that saw space tourist, multi-millionaire tycoon and Linux opportunist, Mark Shuttleworth, deny the Gnome project 75% of the Amazon affiliate donations they would otherwise have received, courtesy of a Banshee plugin, by altering it to syphon the money into Canonical's bank account instead.

As of two days ago, the UK Advertising Standards Authority's powers now extend to the Web:

From 1 March, advertising regulators will be able to punish companies that publish misleading claims on their own websites or on social networking sites.

The Advertising Standards Authority says it will police rogue online advertisers through complaints from the public.

Its chief executive Guy Parker tells BBC Radio 5 live Breakfast's Rachel Burden that it is necessary to ensure "advertising is legal, decent and truthful".