When a government minister is turning out to be incompetent or corrupt, why does the Telegraph need to resort to a petty smear on Jeremy Hunt’s tax position? They write:

Having coffee with Ben yesterday, we reckoned the rumours about  the PS4 sound pretty awful.

Firstly, that it will squash the market for second-hand games.  All games will be registered to a given user, whether they were downloaded or bought on disc. This is what happens with Steam on the PC. So trade-ins are useless – the the second owner of a disc saves themselves a big download, but they’ll still have to pay Sony again to play. The only reason customers are willing to spend £40 for an entertainment product is because they know they can reclaim some of that value through a trade-in. Before the UK’s game retail chains started going bust, that trade-in value is usually in the order of £28-32. So that gives you an idea of what most people are really willing to pay for a brand new game. Take that capability away, and Sony will see sales crash until they bring their prices down. It pulls a profitable rug from under HMV, and the last remaining high street stores for their games. It’s anti-consumer pricing model, and in 2013, it won’t fool anyone. Steam shows that at the right price, customer-locked games can work, but that price is a lot less than £40.

Secondly that it won’t be backwards compatible with PS3 titles. It’s a magnificent achievement that my first-generation PS3 can play all Sony-branded games dating back to 1995 – my PC can’t do that. Not everyone cares in the long run, but it affects when a consumer chooses to “jump ship” and partition their back catalogue. It’s not just the big investment in a new console with few games that makes people hold off. It’s the extra living room space, doubled-up controllers, even missing TV inputs, that makes even a rich customer hold off.  And Sony wanted the PS3 to be their customers’ main entertainment device. So they are not just asking people to upgrade their games machine, but for a lot of families, their DVD player, Netflix, iPlayer, photo viewer and so on. Wherever that “living room hub” strategy succeeded, Sony have dug themselves a bigger hole when it comes to upgrades.

Thirdly (the reason for the lack of backwards-compatibility, I imagine) – developers will have to re-tool for a more PC-like architecture. Those developers who are committed to a next generation might sigh with relief at a more conventional computer than the PS3 & PS2 ever were. But they also must partition their efforts and (at this stage) be funded handsomely by Sony for doing so – all of this adds to the cost that the consumer will be hit with when the thing launches.

It doesn’t help Sony to have unconfirmed rumours flying around their next console and they probably didn’t want this to be the first news about the Playstation 4; but still, what could possibly be in it for the customer?

The “living room hub” stuff was sewn up in 2011 – both major games consoles now feature all the online TV and films you could ever want, and a raft of smaller, quieter DVD players provide all of that for well under £100. Nobody except gamers need a Playstation or XBox.

Nicer graphics? There’s a graphics whore in any games buyer, but playing Call of Duty 3 on a 42″ LCD in Ben’s normal-sized living room, it’s hard to see a single pixel that hasn’t been buffed to perfection. We’ve hit the point of diminishing returns- better graphics needs a larger screen, and a larger room.  3D has been a joke that the entertainment industry foists on the film & game-buying public once a generation for the last 50 years. In the long run, nobody pays extra for stupid glasses and a headache.

Exclusive titles? Sony can’t afford more than a handful – one way or another they will have paid Naughty Dog for the loss of income they could have made making Uncharted for the 360, and that kind of loyalty won’t come cheap.

Using the PS Vita as a controller? Making it more expensive still? Look Sony, we understand copying Nintendo’s waggle-sticks 4 years too late, but if Nintendo told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it? Don’t. Please.

Technically,  this can be no more than a Playstation 3+. There is no secret sauce or innovation that hasn’t already happened on the PC. A few more pixels, a bit more speed, a bit more RAM, and (unless they are completely barking mad) those standard components had better come a lot cheaper to the consumer than the PS3′s £400 launch price – can they make a locked down PC for £150 at launch? That seems like a minimum.

But why go to the huge risk of marking it as the end of the line for the PS3? Why not put out a “Playstation 3+” – quadruple the RAM, slim down what can be slimmed down, and have games titles support an “enhanced mode” for owners of the new consoles? God knows that some developers can’t make their games work on the PS3 and no wonder with only 256MB RAM. Give developers a “plus” platform where they can make the same games with less effort, less cost. Customers can maintain their catalogues and upgrade their consoles when they’re ready. Sony can stop trying to think of big-bet “revolutionary” features, and concentrate on selling more hardware, and more games.

The reason Sony ought to be scared, paring back its plans? Apple’s £100 AppleTV  will   surely become a gaming platform before the PS4 launches, and legions of developers will jump on it with their titles costing pennies. They have investment in chip fabrication, graphics technology and whatever tiny technical advantage Sony might still have over a cost-conscious AppleTV will be obliterated by a tidal wave of cheap, accessible, fun video games. My friends at Revolution make more money per unit from selling their back catalogue to iPad owners for £4 than they ever did selling to Playstation 2 owners for £40, and I know they’re not the only ones. Sony will have to pay and pay and pay to get those triple-A titles, as many developers find they can go it alone, without publishing contracts.

I hadn’t even thought about the long load times, the clunky patches, the huge OS updates, and  the 10 splash screens that stand between a PS3 owner with a disc in his hand, and the experience of playing the game. Unless you pay them £40 a year, they won’t let your PS3 update its operating system automatically. They issued six huge mandatory updates in the last 12 months. Each one stopped my PS3 from logging into the network until I’d downloaded and applied it, costing 30 minutes each time, and stopping me from playing a game I wanted to play.

Sony should be sinking their money into fixing their rotten buying and playing experience, and enhance what they’ve got. They were still losing money on the PS3 two years ago, after the console had been out five years! Why would they not want to extend it just as it is making a profit? There just is’t enough value left in any wholly new video game console, for Sony or anyone else to ask consumers to chuck out their investment again. I’m certain it’ll kill Sony if they try.

Popular chat-room operator Twitter is complaining that Google are competing with them. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking – you’re on your own here, Twitter. People keep trying to improve your product, and you keep knocking ‘em back. It’s not hugely surprising that Google find your service easy to replicate and improve – there is just nothing to love about Twitter’s product any more.

So let’s start with search: Twitter have never actually published their users’ old tweets in a searchable form. If you want to look up something you said a year ago, you simply can’t find it. You can dig around the awfully slow search.twitter.com but after a certain number of tweets, it doesn’t let you see any more. Google made a deal with Twitter in 2009 to allow them to search tweets, but that deal has now expired and Twitter has just gone back to its pre-2009 usability with no explanation to users.

You can’t even download all of your own tweets – after 3200 they’re stuck in Twitter’s attic. At some point they might work out how to make money from your old data, and sell it back to you somehow, but I wouldn’t count on it. Even services like backupmytweets.com which offer this can’t delve past the 3200 tweet limit. It’s not even clear that Twitter have been able to keep old tweets.

[As an aside- to anyone thinking this is some kind of unearthly "big data" problem - let's assume Twitter has averaged 2000 tweets per second for five years - they've not quite been going that long and not always that strong, but from the "record tweet rate" press releases, it seems like a reasonable guess. That's ... 315.36 billion tweets. We know they are 140 characters, plus a little bit of linking and attribution information, is 200 bytes fair? So that is some raw data of around 58 terabytes. That's around 20 hard discs full - to contain all of Twitter, ever. The highest advertised peak data rate from Twitter on this basis is a pretty paltry 40Mbps or so, and the second-highest is about 15Mbps. Why can't we search this data again?]

Then they have been running pics.twitter.com since June 2011, and that doesn’t work. How often do you click on a link, see your browser jump through three redirects, and show a “broken image” link? (well, for me, a lot). twitpic and yfrog never seemed to have this problem, but now tweetdeck’s default has been changed to Twitter’s crappier in-house service.

And at some point in the last 12 months after “competition” from bit.ly, is.gd and all the rest of these utterly trivial add-on services, link-shortening suddenly became compulsory. So even if you post a nice short link to your followers, Twitter insist on bouncing it through their in-house redirect service t.co. This makes links take longer to load (and Twitter get to track your clicks).

So that’s the list of things that Twitter can’t do very well after three years: searching, publishing photos, and linking to other sites.

Right now Twitter are lucky to still have a user base that don’t care how unreliable the product is, because of a very sticky network effect. But at some point, a new Twitter will spring up,  or rather people will find a better piece of software or network to communicate on. Over the last 10 years, social networks change like the tides. If Twitter Inc. want to play for a bit more time (and a surge in loyalty), the best thing they could do is find a better way of co-operating with the companies that want to improve their service, and making money from opening their rather small amount of data.

This is the first year I’ve felt maybe more politically engaged and opinionated than I ever have. The Tories have worked tirelessly and unashamedly to benefit their rich friends. Labour is invisible, led by a robot with a faulty speech chip (he only communicates with other robots). And the Lib Dems’ only meaningful political statement would be to stick a knife into the coalition, demand an election and leave the Tories isolated, on whatever principle they have left.

But this year 38 Degrees and UKUncut have genuinely swayed UK politics, supported in their anti-tax-dodging campaigns by the investigative work of Private Eye (still worth a subscription, despite the 1950s prudishness). The support and change that these groups are achieving makes me really proud of the popular socialist majority in the UK – the majority of people who didn’t vote for the Conservatives in 2010, or 2005, or in fact in any vote since the second world war.

UKUncut’s work has got the Eye’s 2009 story about Vodafone’s £6bn tax dodge onto the front page of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph, and the total amount of unpaid tax from corporations estimated to be £25bn. It seems a huge step for the Mail, a Conservative-supporting, free market newspaper to come out against uncollected taxes from businesses (even if they didn’t contrast it to their favourite figure, the rather smaller estimate of £3bn in annual benefits fraud, the bill for “dole scum”).

Suddenly it seems hugely important that our tax office is fair, accountable to parliament, and funded to do its job. They are the engine for funding the UK,  and of all the government departments, surely no expense can be spared to ensure it runs smoothly and properly. We’ll see how that plays out over the next few months as its well-lunched chief is eyeing the door.

Since there’s a chance of taxation reform becoming a political issue, we’ve started to hear fresh complaints about the 50p tax rate for personal earnings over £150,000, which was introduced nearly two years ago.

Londoner Charlie Mullins, owner of a plumbing firm, argues on the BBC that it should be dropped. ”If you tax a man too much there’s going to come to a point where he says enough is enough and chucks down his tools.” – I think that might be paraphrased from Atlas Shrugged. Strolling through his call centre, he says he doesn’t need to work, and could take his entrepreneurial talent abroad, but wouldn’t. The problem with that argument is that he hasn’t made an argument. Charlie might be able to own a plumbing firm and live abroad, depriving the exchequer of some tax but you’d struggle to bring the call centre for a London plumbing firm to Singapore, and definitely not the plumbers.

In the mean time, Charlie would probably find his firm competing with locally owned, better-informed firms who are willing to stay in the country where they find a competitive edge. If he closed down his firm, London’s pipes wouldn’t stop bursting. Someone would be paid to fix them.

What percentage of English-born “talent” would really choose to take a job that necessitated them leaving the country? On a annual salary of £250,000, that’s £10,000 less take-home pay per year, leaving the best part of £140,000 take-home. Is that enough to leave the country you were born in for? Who exactly are these rich people who have so little personal connection with their home that they apparently threaten government policy with threats to up and leave, to take their business elsewhere? Because Charlie says has already told us he’s not one of them.

No British-born company owner, at the start of their business thinks, “one day I might paying myself £150,000 so the first thing I’d better do is move to Singapore and start my business there”.  Only after years of slog are you able to take home that amount of money, and if you own your company outright and pay yourself through dividends, you pay only 36.1%. The tax incentive to entrepreneurship and local business ownership is right there already.

So that leaves the £150,000+ salaries that are paid by large companies, and only to a tiny percentage of their work force. How many of Diageo’s 40,000 employees are earning that much? And how much does it cost a £10bn company to nudge its salaries north to keep them competitive in such a market?

High salaries are surely far more common in industries where the rich are paying to make themselves richer: fund managers, casino bankers, planners of complex tax avoidance schemes etc., arguably the very activities that caused a global economic crash. None of these activities make the country wealthier, only a very small number of people who happen to be in it.

So if this (or a future) government is serious about entrepreneurship, it can stop worrying right now about a “globally competitive tax regime”, and shake off its negotiations with big business. Nobody wants the UK to be subjects to the caprices of mega-corporations who are simply looking for the best deal for their HQ – what good did Ireland’s low corporation tax rates do for it? Surely it’s in a global company’s best short-term interests to locate in a country that has not just a low corporation tax rate, but where jobs are scarce and salaries low? George Osborne’s humiliation should have put the brakes on such a race to the bottom.

Anyone truly creating wealth and jobs will already never be troubled by the higher tax bands. In a properly-run economy, the personal and corporate whiners who threaten to leave are welcome to. They will be gladly replaced by people who want to live, work and incorporate in the UK, reaping the advantages of doing real work, not just high-stakes market manipulation.

Apple are getting ready to tighten the screws on the Mac App store;  that’s the main route through which Mac owners browse, pay for and install software, just like on mobile phones. Apple run the store, make sure it’s front-centre for all Mac owners, and take 30% of the sale price from developers who sell through it.

The news is that from March 2012, Apple will only be accepting applications which use a  “sandbox” mode of OS X. Again, much like mobile phone applications, a Mac application will need to declare before installation what files and system resources they need, and the OS will enforce this access.

I’ve not got a horse in this race (I don’t use OS X or sell software), but I was interested to read the opinion from Paul Olavi Ojala who pointed out that under this policy, third party applications have no way to take a screenshot, access Bluetooth, interact with 3rd-party applications or even access arbitrary files (at least not without popping up a standard system dialogue for every one). So if you want to do those things in your software, from March, you’ll have to do without the revenue and exposure from the Mac App Store, and do your own downloads.

As Macs get more popular, Apple want to stop malware from becoming a problem for their customers. I can see that OS X would be a more tempting target for virus writers: I’d bet Mac owners are both wealthier and more trusting of their computers than the larger demographic who run Windows. But Apple had to release an OS security update just to get rid of the first widely-distributed Mac malware earlier this year, and they probably don’t want to make a habit of it. Sandboxing might stem the damage from a compromised application, which is one attack route for malware but it wouldn’t have stopped Mac Defender which just tricked users into installing it. Users who got “infected” merrily waved it through with their administrator password.

And Wil Shipley made a very good case that the App Store screening process simply can’t stop “evil” Mac software from getting certified, and installed onto user’s machines with Apple’s blessing. Sandboxing isn’t a good enough mechanism to add much to OS X’s security at this stage. [as I was writing this some wag demonstrated this fact, and got some malicious software onto the iPhone app store].

But extrapolating from Apple’s behaviour, my off-hand extrapolation on Twitter was:

next stop: no installations on your own computer from outside the walled garden. A free desktop is much more important.

That is to say, I am certain that Apple will choose to remove “root” access from Mac owners after maybe one or two more OS updates. After that point users will have to install software only through Apple’s approved channel, and developers will pay their 30%.

Rob Hague responded with the “Apple would never dare…” defence:

developers, designers, and those who see themselves as power users …  must still be a significant source of profit for Apple, and so they’d need a good reason to abandon them.

A locked-down OS X would not be an abandonment of those users, but Apple already ask $99 a year for the privilege of being a developer. That didn’t put them off. So after a lock-down, why would that developer fee not restore the unlocked OS to those that wanted to pay for it? They know the developers will still have to pay, but the developer could never ask the end-user to pay that $99 just to make their app work.

Apple have, several times dared to screw developers in the name of user experience or profit – the ban on Flash, or the ban on selling eBooks or music through your app except via Apple. The existence of the Steam gaming store must pain them; the clunky but popular video game store has its tanks parked on Apple’s lawn.

I thought Apple would head towards a locked-down Mac when I first saw the iPhone, and I don’t think any differently now. Their computers have always been the easiest to use, but never had such enthusiastic software support. In 2011, OS X has a decent set of applications, games, utilities and easy access to the online services so many people rely on. It has a growing market share, and Microsoft has been unable to improve their own user experience in 10 years. Meanwhile, Apple’s computers march closer to matching Windows machines on price.

By locking users out of their own computers, Apple will improve their computer security a little. But the main benefit for them will be to offer their rivals (mostly Microsoft and Adobe) the choice of handing them 30% of their Mac revenue, or pulling out of the Mac market altogether. As OS X grows in popularity, I’m certain the question on Apple’s mind is not ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Corrections: I know Apple charge $99 to publish software, XCode is free or $5 or something. All they need to do is put a price tag on “root access” such that only nerds will buy it, and app developers must go through the App Store, and pay their 30% tithe. A bit like the restriction that you can only upload in-development apps to your iPhone over a cable, not over the air. Jobs gave a ludicrous justification for it last year.  It’s about income and platform security for the iPhone, and it’ll be the same for the Mac when the time is right.

Our old flat is part of a block of 16 flats, and I’m a director of the company that collects the service charges. The company is owned by 16 leaseholders, and spends the money on carpets, paintwork, locks, or whatever other maintenance needs doing on the building, about £13000 per year – small, easy stuff. So yes, I do 2-3 full days of work for “free” that means my flat becomes a nicer place to live. What other landlords do is none of my business, but they benefit from the time I put into the building too.

But I got a scary phone call last week – a tenant of a neighbouring flat had found his “furnished” place sporting a broken bed, worn-out mattress and no hot water. The landlord was not resident in this country, and the letting agent was pleading delays frequent delays to getting expenditure approved. In desperation (though they were exceedingly polite and lovely about a borderline illegal situation) they had called the number on the noticeboard to ask whether I could help.

I was horrified, and emailed the landlord, expressing extreme displeasure that a) I was dealing with his tenant on his behalf where his letting agent had clearly failed, and b) that he was running such a shameful letting operation. The young tenants had even expressed their belief that this was par for the course with landlords. I judged this landlord very hard, and got a barrage of criticism by return – I was “unprofessional” and should basically mind my own business. Yes I’ve got the corridors outside his flat repainted, locks and keys changed where they broke, paid builders & cleaners. He’d not visited the block in years, but I was the unprofessional one.

“Suck it up” is my attitude. My day job involves telling customers “no”, with almost-always polite reasons. I think it’s for the good of the whole block that somebody is looking out for the tenants and making sure nobody is living in actual misery. And doing the work on the block is easy stuff. But from reading around others’ experiences of property management, it seems no company is able to do it properly, professionally and profitably – it seems like one of those always slips, and this kind of unhappy tenant is par for the course.

The local firm that was used to run our block went into “retirement” when we decided to take over ourselves about a year ago. I’d had frequent run-ins with them over their competence and ethics, and I learned from another landlord in the block that this firm was even one of the better ones he’d dealt with. But because of the legal complications around leasehold, being appointing managing agent of a block company is an extremely secure financial position. It seems to take several large breaches of trust before shareholders in a block company would even meet up to talk about firing a bad agent. An incompetent company can keep themselves appointed by doing very little, just because nobody knows how to fire them, or even what being a shareholder in a block management company even means.

So in such a cynical climate I’m glad to run our old block for free, but see a business opportunity to redefine property management. Build a company that takes on a block, communicates with both landlords and tenants, collects money, fixes what’s broken – all the stuff you’d hope would be easy.

But a property manager need to educate, and enforce discipline wherever it’s needed, and isn’t afraid to tell its paying customers when they’re failing as human beings. Deference to paying customers and refusing to take on tenants’ concerns is the socially irresponsible status quo. Most landlords with one or two properties just don’t know what they’re getting themselves into and can legally maintain a good deal of apathy towards tenants. A good management company  ought to educate landlords as they manage; on the law, the real condition of the block, and the effectiveness of their investment. A good property management company ought reassure landlords that their tenants are being listened to, and that harsh judgements (even contractual penalties) will follow to those that don’t pay their dues, and take reasonable care of their tenants. A good property management company like this would be able to charge securely for their services, and afford to reject slum blocks where landlords don’t want to pay to do things properly. Their presence would be a tangible sign of standards in an industry that is notorious for not having any.

While I’m tied up with the day job, if anyone is interested in starting the Smack-Down Block Management Company, help push out bad landlords and make a lot of money out of it, I’d love to help.

If you hadn’t heard – tablet computers are the hot new thing! They are like laptops where someone has ripped the keyboard off. Anyone who tells you they do anything useful or creative on one is therefore lying, which means they must be toys, like a remote-controlled helicopter or a swingball set. But toys are fun at the right price, and Dixons are selling some “open-box” Advent Vega tablets for £130. So I bought one and fixed it.

You can see in about 10 seconds from turning it on why Dixons had so many returned – it does basically nothing. It has a web browser, but none of the Google applications, and no Android Market, so there is no simple way of putting new software onto it. The installation is a giant shrug.

But if you have a good two hours to screw around, you can fix it so it runs everything you expect – like a totally genuine Apple Flypad! The device actually has some reasonable hardware – a 1024×600 screen, dual core processor, multitouch, camera, bluetooth, HDMI port, blah blah blah. It feels quite nice. And Cyanogenmod is the Android that comes to the rescue – it doesn’t give up, even when the manufacturer has.

I won’t rewrite the perfectly good tutorials I followed, but they’re not all in the same place. Here’s what I did:

• plug the tablet into your PC, and the mains, turn it on!
• on the tablet, find the Settings application, the “Applications” menu, and “Development”, then tick the “USB debugging” box;
• install the android SDK which gives you the vital “adb” debug tool;
• follow the handy guide, but here are my notes on each section:
• Backup: you obviously don’t need one if you’ve only just unboxed it;
• Rooting: the “rooting” program didn’t work first or second time for me – the device froze and needed resetting. Third time it worked, but it still seemed to make the display freeze. That doesn’t matter, once you’ve rooted it just type “adb root” and carry on;
• Installing a Custom Recovery image: don’t mess around with the manual method, grab the latest RomManager.apk from my server, and install it by typing adb install -r RomManager.apk . You can then run the program directly from the tablet, and just tap “Flash ClockwordMod Recovery” to get that part done;
• Finally, installing CyanogenMod should be done from the recovery program, it’s a lot quicker. Once you’ve downloaded the latest version of CyanogenMod and the latest Google Apps (which are absolutely not optional), and copied them to /sdcard/, you can use the ROM Manager to “Reboot into Recovery” to begin the process and install the two zip files.

Reboot, and that gets you most of the way – the device will boot into a modern Android, hooray! With the Market, hooray! But you will also need the Vega screen calibration program which you can also install via the USB cable with adb install moduleap.apk once you’ve downloaded it. Run it once, and it will fix the screen calibration.

Finally you will find, when browsing the Market, that lots of programs have an annoying “This program is not compatible with your device” warning, and will forbid you from installing it. This includes Youtube, Google Maps, Adobe Flash and some other big ones.  You need to:

• download the LCD density changer from the Market;
• change the LCD density to 160, and reboot
• go to Settings -> Applications -> Manage Applications and find the Market application. Hit “Clear data” and restart it; you should be asked to reconfirm your acceptance of terms etc.

That should allow you to download what was missing. Though not everything works brilliantly on the tablet’s larger, 16:9 display. Some things get stretched horizontally, and some applications’ interfaces go a little wonky.

But it’s early days for tablet support in Android, and as new versions of CyanogenMod come along, you should find authors fixing their apps. I’d recommdn the ROM Manager Premium app, which lets you download and install new versions of CyanogenMod with “one click” and directly supports the dedicated hackers working on this project.

While finding links for this article, I also noticed there’s a second Vega ROM called Vegacomb knocking around. I’m not sure which is better, but had been using CyanogenMod on my phone for a couple of years, and trust it.

Super! Now I just need to find out what a tablet is for.

Richard Stallman told us what free software was in 1984, why it would be better, and made a moral case to shun software that wasn’t free. He took his ideas and produced the GPL - a uniquely subversive legal document. He spent years talking developers into the idea, on his own terms, and that influence (plus some crazy dot-com cash) caused an explosion of new free software from 1990-2005.

But users didn’t choose free software because of its morals. They used it when it was better value than the alternatives, and they could do a little maintenance themselves: internet providers, academics, and companies with smart developers and tight budgets. Now there’s few transactions that happen over the internet without some GPL-licensed code being involved along the way, and not that most people would care.

There was permanent economic value created by the GPL and Stallman’s focussed influence in promoting free software to developers. That includes Apple’s Safari web browser, Google’s free mobile OS Android and the MySQL database powering most zillions of web sites. Least importantly, my whole business and thousands more like it depend on this same software.

So it’s a huge pity that the man has always such an enormous ego and unshakeable fundamentalism; in his obituary to Steve Jobs, he calls Jobs “the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom” and amazingly, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone”. Jobs excited more people into buying into his vision of computers than Stallman; I can see a piqued ego at work. But there’s still more indirect users of GPL-licensed Free software in the world than Apple software. By a long way. The FSF has achieved far more than Apple, and with far less glitz, but Stallman appeared to regard Jobs as a rival and a nemesis.

Stallman has adapted. He recognised patents, web services, documentation and covered them all with a set of licenses that help implement his ideal of free software. But his pitch, and the FSF’s, hasn’t adapted. Their last visible campaign, Windows 7 sins, is a embarrassment on so many levels. The FSF’s only effective advocates seem to be working developers willing to attest to Stallman’s brilliance, and apologise for his public statements, like some mad old uncle.

Fully free software is a difficult idea, and there’s been a new wave of developers who’ve not found it as inspiring as it was 20 years ago. Richard Stallman is nearly 60, two years older than Steve Jobs, and still holds a uniquely influential position. I wish he would make headlines by reaching out to developers again, and not flicking bogeys at a dead guy.

Just practising for now. Normally I prefer to reinvent software, a bit worse, and with a few more bugs but there’s no time at the moment – WordPress is luxurious, easy, free software and turns my vanity domain into a lovely fun colouring book.