I'm pretty much just leaving this comment so that I can hit my 5 quota, get out of the newbie pen, and claim my ripples in that "free ripples" thread
I know it operates differently than bitcoin, but I frankly don't understand why people are so opposed to it on principle. So what if a company seeds the network and makes some money. How if that any different ethically from someone making money off an exchange like mtgox? If anything, it should be seen as better, since there's still a finite supply of ripples (if I understand correctly), and so eventually they will all just be released into the system and the company will only benefit from running the service itself...
Oh man, I really need to comb over their wiki. I'm way too ignorant of how it works on the technical end of things :/