To sum up Apple's objections, they felt I had given a year-old story a fresh coat of paint and sensationalized it for an audience that wasn't affected by it. Yet no story is more timely, or more broadly relevant, than this one.

The meeting started sliding downhill when Apple asked, "Has anybody ever written to you about this? How many people actually recompile their OS X kernels?"

I do, for one. I rattled off some of those groups that value open source in its fullest sense. I included academia, high-performance and high-throughput computing experts, and shops that want to roll in system-level enhancements before Apple gets around to packaging them.

Apple pushed back, saying that as eclectic as my readership is, the subset I described is only a "fraction of a fraction" of the geeks (Apple's word) who are my regular readers. Issues that matter to so few, and to me, shouldn't be projected to a larger audience in 48-point type. I go on the defensive whenever a vendor suggests that any portion of my readership is an underclass because of its numbers. It is our fraction of a fraction that is the bellwether for the next leading edge. My readers don't gaze at my torch or carry others'. They're too busy lighting new ones.

It strikes me as odd that anyone at Apple could fail to connect with that ideal or see its economic practicality.