But you can run GIMP and Iceweasel on the n900 if you want to take a little bit of interest/effort to do so. We still have not been told what applications you are missing. The n900 has one application no mobile has - a full LXDE install of Debian. With that you can do so much more than any mobile phone - you could manage a corporate network if you needed to, from a device in the palm of your hand.

But, if you want to pretend it's a Nintendo or Playstation thingy. Nah.

I did post-grad business studies, as well a masters in IT, and the only good things I have seen come out of the industry are free. The rest tie you up so you can hardly use the things you already paid for, and then you have to keep paying to use what you have already. DRM? That is a brick wall you end up throwing your device at to try and get it to work with things you already paid for, but it won't unless you pay more to use them. Unfortunately, instead of boycotting this crap, people fall for it and it becomes a fact of life.and ending up with some Jobs-worth telling me what I can and can't do with what I have bought. Hell, you don't even get a copy of windows with a PC any more - it is on a partition on the HDD, and you have make your own recovery disks, and if that fails to restore after a crash you have to pay to get your system back. What you get is permission to use a piece of software.

Open means 'you can use this any way you want to' and 'you can send some money if you want to support this' and 'you can even improve this if you like'. Problem is, we do tend to think it is free. It isn't, but we enjoy making use of other people's work without paying for it, so haven't paid for it yet.

The worst thing that happened with linux-derivatives like OS-X and mobiles is the way distributors take the work and corrupt it by locking it all down again. That is because they are not interested in the product, or the software, or the customers - only the money they can derive from these.

I have found there are mainly two things I need to use non-free software for. One is MS.Word, because Endnote is the de-facto referencing package, and it doesn't ship for linux. The other is Adobe Elements, which although I prefer Gimp, can support higher bits and allows me to use astronomical plugins (also, most of the commercial astronomy programs only ship for Windows/Mac, and cost a fortune). Stuff like CS4 is seriously overpriced. It is quite refreshing that Orrorery runs on the n900, and if that isn't good enough, you can just about run Stellarium for Debian (albeit tiny and slow - it is a hungry application that comes with its own database).

Rant-off.

Mish