AFAIK, nobody's really put a license on their license, but I think creating a derivative license and applying it to your own work is fine; making a derivative license of the GPL and applying it to a GPLed work to which you do not hold copyright is not. But IANALATEIHSMBSI.

(I Am Not A Lawyer And Therefore Everything I Have Said May Be Safely Ignored.)

Since I'm the culprit who started this misunderstanding of "open source" I'll explain my misunderstanding a little more.

I've never read an open source license or agreement. I have a lay understanding from what I hear or read about it. And that is that it is open and easy for anybody to read and modify the source code of a project. This leads me to believe that an open source version of, say... UNIX, for example Ubuntu could possibly and probably be much less secure than Windows XP, Vista, 2000, any Apple OS, or SUN UNIX (Solaris). Why? Because any nasty hacker can get access to the code and add his/her back door that will allow viruses, worms, etc.

I recommend reading up a bit then, as you clearly do not understand open source at all.

TokyoDan, if your suspicion were true, then Linux would have never grown. In fact, the converse is true: Linux tends to be more secure. Even keeping things in proportion, Windows installations have been the least secure.

Very true. Therefore, any "nasty hacker" can have as insecure an OS on his own computer as he likes, but as most people don't like viruses, worms, etc., he probably won't. He can't make anyone run his backdoor, and he'll have a really hard time getting anyone to by non-coercive means. (Well, unless he's as clever and well-placed as Ken Thompson, but you're not talking about that sort of thing... and nobody's really that well-placed anymore, anyway.)

The question is, do you trust your upstream, not someone else who can fork some weird variant? With Windows, that's MS, end-to-end. Maybe you do trust them, maybe you don't, but there's nothing to do about it.

With Linux, your upstream is Linus, his maintainers, and GNU (for the compiler); for a distribution, say Debian, it's the Debian maintainers, Linus, etc., and GNU (for the compiler and all the GNU software shipped).

If I don't trust Linus and the other kernel maintainers, I can check the source code for backdoors myself, or trust that the hundreds of developers working on the kernel, or the maintainers of my distribution, would notice.

If I don't trust Debian, I can build all my packages from source (where I either trust the source or check it out myself); GCC is the only piece that's really hard to verify, whereas there's no verification of anything from MS.

And of course, all that is still totally unrelated to maemo.org's server...

Just to let you guys know. On this forum I did a search for "USB Dummy connections" and found a patch for Diablo that fixes the USB networking issue. It looks like it's going to work. I found the fix right before I had to leave for work and didn't have time to respond on this forum. Anyway it popped up the "new network connection" dialog on my mac. So it looks like it'll work. But I won't have time to really check it out until tomorrow night.
Thanks for you help and I sorry for stirring things up by saying bad things about open source and maemo.org in my irritation.

And eetimm...although I'm 60 years old, I guess I'm still not a big boy. But I don't feel so bad because of the way the really big boys (our business leaders, and government representatives) do things that their mothers hopefully taught them not to; such as lying, cheating, stealing, and talking all kinds of sh*t.

Dan...

I agree the really big boys don't always show great leadership with their behavior and it disappoints me greatly. However, as imperfect as I am, trying to do the right thing is what keeps me from being one of them.

You are completely right eetimm. And I try to do the right thing too. But sometime this world keeps me in a steady state of being pi**ed off.