I have updated the license for the content available from this blog. This document convinced me that the insistence on non-commercial content reproduction only does not make the most sense for a private person. Until further notice, I hereby change the license for the existing content and also for new content created from now on to CC BY-SA 3.0.

I am not a pirate, neither in the fashionable political meaning nor when it comes to software. The latter may or may not correlate with rumors claiming that Mac users are a lot more willing to pay for software than users of other operating systems.

Being a software developer myself, I’d feel bad about not respecting the work and intellectual properties of fellow software developers.

Like I mentioned before, I figure this habit makes me an unlikely follower of the pirate party (which is currently booming here in Germany) although, with respect to many other personal traits, I may be predisposed to support the pirates’ approach to politics.

I sense an unholy tendency on the Internet towards the usage of user accounts signed up for service A for the mere purpose of being able to use service B. The latest exhibit in this category that appeared on my personal radar is Wavii that requires a Facebook¹ account. There is no other way to use the service other than having a Facebook account.

I have tried to get warm with a dedicated podcast client on iOS before but the experiment did not take a happy ending. It’s not that I ended up particularly unhappy with the functionality. On the contrary, there were some nice features that clearly distinguished Instacast from, say, Music.app in terms of listening to podcasts.

However, I also experienced a very unpleasant drainage of the battery on my iPhone and that turned out to be the deal-breaker.

Jeff Atwood posted an article about how important it is for every developer to understand the sources of third-party code that contributes to an application or framework. And yet, he admits how hard it is to do so.