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Red Hat is designed with this kind of stuff in mind. In addition to just being dead simple with setting up a directory server and other typcal business oriented services, you have a great utility called Red Hat Network. If you need to install a fresh OS on 10,000 machines, no problem just attach them to the network, PXE boot and kickstart takes care of everything else (no more interaction is needed from you). If you need specific installation requirements for various sectors in your network, not a problem either. Are you curious to see how your systems are performing? Want to see everyone's runtime? Bandwidth uages? Applications? Uptime? Just about anything? It is a click away from seeing this information for all systems, or do it for an individual system, and it is all displayed in a nice graphical way. Do you need to install a certain kind of updates on the HR department but only for management? One click and you're done. Did you realize that over the past week you've been installing things on the accounting department's computers that you didn't need to? No problem, just roll back with a few clicks of the mouse. How about when you need to change a configuration file on the 10,000 machines, but you need specific changes for each department. Not a problem at all with Red Hat Network. Do you want to delegate administrating abilities to a few other guys, but want to limit what updates or the type they can install, no problem. Want to be notified if someone's bandwidth usage gets too high? Easy as pie, and you can set it up to alarm you about many different possible probes. You move a computer out of the accounting department and give it to a secretary, you want this system to be exactly like the other secretaries' systems (which is different from accounting's setup), this isn't a problem, Red Hat Network has exisiting state provisioning, you tell it you want it exactly like some box and it does it all for you.

I'm really only beginning to touch the surface with this stuff, even their site is modest, but when you get the software in your hands and start using it you realize how powerful it is and how much time and pain it saves you. Even crazier is that it can all be done through a really well designed web interface, administering computers has honestly never been easier. Some tasks it might only speed up by a minute or two, others by days. All of the things I mentioned above are done from one machine, your machine, on the network or actually if your using satellite RHN, you can administer your corporate network from anywhere in the world just the same. It saves you time by making you not have to write a bunch of custom scripts and hack together solutions, it gives you capabilities that you just won't be able to script up yourself, its flexible and easy as hell to use. One administrator can seriously administer 10,000 machines just as easily as 10. There is a reason that people pay for Red Hat, in addition to support, its easy to use, works on the largest array of hardware, has a great track record for security, but also is great for any kind of corporate environment.
Regards,
Steve

Calm down, dude. Stateless Linux and Xen are the actual names of projects included in Fedora Core. They are not buzzwords or marketspeak. "Open source server virtualization software" was slightly redundant, but it is also a plain English description of Xen, which is exactly what you're asking for.

Calm down, dude. Stateless Linux and Xen are the actual names of projects included in Fedora Core. They are not buzzwords or marketspeak. "Open source server virtualization software" was slightly redundant, but it is also a plain English description of Xen, which is exactly what you're asking for.

27 February 2006: Fedora Core 5 Release open, announced

MYTH - Fedora is unstable and unreliable, just a testbed for bleeding-edge software

FACT - This misconception comes from two things:

1. From http://fedora.redhat.com/: "It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."
   
2. Fedora has rapid releases, a short life-cycle, and a lot of new code.
   

As for the first item, this means that Red Hat uses Fedora as a platform to promote the development of new technology, some of which might end up in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This does not mean that Fedora is a dumping ground for untested code, it simply means that Fedora is a rapidly progressing platform.

For the second item, this does mean that Fedora is often running in uncharted innovative territory, but not that it is using too-new code. The programs in Fedora are generally stable releases or well-tested pre-release versions. There are guidelines behind the inclusion of pre-release software, and thorough testing is always done prior to Fedora Core releases.

Each version of Fedora Core receives updates from the Fedora development community that includes Red Hat for up to a year. Continuing updates from the Fedora Legacy Project may extend the life of a release to two years or more, depending on the release schedule. Refer to http://fedoralegacy.org/about/faq.php for more details.

We do everything we can to make sure that the final products released to the general public are stable and reliable. Fedora Core has proven that it can be a stable, reliable, and secure platform. Many businesses and organizations rely upon Fedora Core for both day-to-day tasks and, in some cases, critical infrastructure. Additionally, our well-managed packaging and review process adds an extra layer of safety not found in some other distributions. You can count on Fedora Core.

Stateless Linux (from http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/stateless/)

The Stateless Linux project is an OS-wide initiative to ensure that Fedora computers can be set up as replaceable appliances, with no important local state.

For example, a system administrator can set up a network of hundreds of desktop client machines as clones of a master system, and be sure that all of them are kept synchronised whenever he or she updates the master system. We provide several technologies for doing this.

The scope of the project is the entire OS, since we are trying to improve configuration throughout all packages. However, there are some packages which are specific to Stateless Linux:

        * readonly-root
        * stateless-common
        * stateless-client
        * stateless-server

They are actually behind their goals for releases. I've read elsewhere that it should be every 6 months.

"Produce robust releases approximately 2-3 times per year, using a time-based release model: A time for a feature freeze is set in advance, and an expected schedule for test releases is produced before the feature freeze date. (Important feature schedules will be taken into account when setting the schedule for Fedora Core releases.)"

http://fedora.redhat.com/about/objectives.html

You're right, it's not yet officially released but you can get the latest snapshot from the development site.

ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/gcc/snapshots/LATEST- 4.1/

Has MS sued anyone over Mono patents? No.

However look here and here.

You don't need to sue someone so stifle progress as evidenced by the fact their Mono patents are currently stifling progress by the risk of lawsuits where Microsoft could easily remove that threat.

I think it's good to note that GNOME is accessibility aware. Sun has spent a lot of time working on GNOME's accessibility infrastructure (e.g. gnopernicus, gtk's atk toolkit) and making sure that disabled people can work. Since GNOME rebranded as the JDS desktop has to work for disabled people you can bet Sun has spent a lot of time making the GNOME team sensitive to accessibility.

Turns out that having a toolkit that lets you pretty much tweak the entire gtk toolkit via atk has some interesting application as well. Check out:

http://people.redhat.com/zcerza/dogtail/faq.html

and see how a cool tool like dogtail can check for UI regressions.

This shows that GNOME does understand the importance of accessibility and is set for it from the ground up.

sri

I don't have a lot of experience with Windows, but Kickstart is one of the most impressive pieces of Linux software that I've used.

Network PXE boot, enter a configuration file location and sit back while Kickstart configures and partitions your server, downloads and installs all your packages, runs post-installation scripts to install updates and start all your services, and finally reboots your completed server. All without any intervention.

Not to mention that if you ever need to re-deploy that server, or deploy a similar server, you can reuse the configuration file to guarantee the server is identical.

Let me be the first to welcome you to slashduh, Mr Szulik!

Unfortunately, we only accept blatant astroturfing about iPods and new Google services here, and preferrably it should be masqueraded as "news stories" instead of user comments.

You obviously do not have experience with REDCRAP, but is just a dumb pawn for the fedora crap. If I pay for something, I expect it to work as advertized, even though this is software we are talking about.

Yawn. I'm glad I just got back from the bar and it's a slow evening. But you're right - I have no experience with Red Hat products at all. *chortle*

I have an RHCE certification and two of five endorsment exams for RHCA - I obviously never touched RHEL.

This is NOT about FOSS. This is about REDCRAP's support, which is allegedly what I get, when I pay them shitloads of money for free crap. Further more, if you have had some reading comprehension, you will note that I stated that support had already cnfirmed the bug as something that exists - if it's a known issue, and they want to know more about how it behaves, then they should fscking test it out, and then only go bother the customers.

OK. One more time: Acknowledging an issue != having an environment which easily reproduces it. If someone posts a dmesg with a clear BUG() invocation in it, I can see that's a bug.

It does not mean I can easily reproduce it. The two are orthogonal.

If you want your vendor to waste it's time & resources doing things you could do in half the time, go right ahead and find one who is happy to do so.

Hmm, valid point, I didn't check to see if fdisk actually exist. But neither did support mention this - and the question has been posed to them for more than 2 days now.

Funny, because it's mentioned in the RHEL Installation Guide in section 4.1.1, and was taught as part of the RHCE when I sat it.

Here's a link.

You have not had a chance to install REDCRAP lately have you? I'm not talking bout the pansy ass fedora crap, I'm talking about RHEL 4. *you* show me an install that's under 800Megs.

Friend, I assure you that isn't true. This week alone, I have installed over 30 systems running RHEL, including satellite systems.

A trivial bit of shell work shows us:

rpm -q -g "System Environment/Base" --queryformat "%{SIZE}\n" > packages.tmp
rpm -q -g "System Environment/Daemons" --queryformat "%{SIZE}\n" >> packages.tmp
echo $[`awk 'BEGIN{ size = 0; } { size +=$1; } END{ print size; }' packages.tmp` / 1024**2]
217

That's in MiB - 217MiB for Base + Daemons. That's not the minimal install size btw, simply the size of those groups. Keep doing that for any groups you want included, and unless you're on crack, you can fit it in well under the 1 GiB mark.

If you have any sense, you'll build a stripped down ISO with just the packages you need (figured that out yet?), and your kickstarts all set and ready to go.

There are instructions for that here among other places.

Some people obviously like to hear the sound of their own voices. Tell you what, I'll make it easy on you. Go install RHEL4 under 500 megs, with a working apache server, only using standard RHEL4 rpms.

Oh, so it's 500MiB now? It was 800 a paragraph ago, and 1GiB in your original post.

Please stop moving the goalposts.

And btw, how will adding to the standard RHEL4 rpms *reduce* your installed size?

*and accidentally takes off his own hand*

Thanks for the concern, but I'm still typing for the moment.

Oh, you mean they were not telling me the truth? They sold me a defective product?! They lied about a working smp kernel? OK, even if I grant you that they did not have a working smp kernel - WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INCLUDE IT ON THE FUCKING CD THEN?!

Oh, how

The reason Red Hat does not offer RHEL4 DVDs as a download from Red Hat Network is that there is a two Gigabyte download limit for files in Apache. FYI

P.S. Tried http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ lately? You can request features and submit bug reports for developers to work on. It is still open source, so if they don't move at a speed that is acceptable, you could always just suck it up and do it yourself....

Just as a note...

The reason Red Hat does not offer RHEL4 DVDs as a download from Red Hat Network is that there is a two Gigabyte download limit for files in Apache. FYI

-Runz

P.S. Tried http://bugzilla.redhat.com/ lately? You can request features and submit bug reports for developers to work on. It is still open source, so if they don't move at a speed that is acceptable, you could always just suck it up and do it yourself....

What I don't get is this: What's Red Hat Linux? As far as I know, Red Hat Linux is a discontinued product circa several years ago, and the only modern Red Hat platforms are Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in all of it's flavors) and Fedora. I would imagine that we're talking about the RHEL desktop, which isn't such a bad idea, though it would probably have to be an unsupported version. Fedora might actually make a bit more sense, since there are lots of other people running it without support, willing to help.

I'm not sure I understand turning down OS/X though. It's mostly open source, and the parts that are not can be replaced if the user wants (you can run pure Darwin). It is also much easier for the neophyte computer user.

ehh? Ubuntu? I think they should have used Suse.

ehh? Suse? I think they should have used Debian.

ehh? Debian? I think they should have used Manriva.

ehh? Mandriva? I think they should have used Fedora.

What the f*ck is your point? Go figure.

Wow systemimager seems pretty nice, thanks for the link.

Fedora does have some pretty excellent QA. As you can see from their schedule, in about two days they start development freezes and the next 3 months is pure testing and bug fixing (divided into 3 stages). I've never had any problems upgrading. Officially you are supposed to use the CDs but you can use yum too. If you're used to Debian, it may take a little before you get used to the Fedora way of doing things, which was frustrating for me at first, but its really not bad.

I probably did just get burned by a bad package, but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth :) #debian can be a rough place.

Not sure about enlightenment, I've only used it to see what new neat effects rasterman added, then go back to a regular DE. But as far as 3rd party repos go, DAG and FreshRPMS, are excellent places. For legal reasons, Red Hat can't host certain programs, so using a 3rd party repo is pretty typical under Fedora. That is one thing you'll notice that is different, but the default repos have tons of software too.

Saying Ubuntu doesnt take security serious enough was a little too harsh, but they do seem to have quite an abundance of security notifications and are a little behind getting out patches. I'm just used to Fedora getting out patches right away, there was an article a few months back on /. that showed Red Hat typically gets patches out fastest, followed by Novell who is sometimes 2-3 days later (in most cases its much closer though), and then followed by the others. As long as they all get patched in the end, I dont care :) But Fedora comes standard with SELinux and a great default policy, they also compile all major public facing services with code fortifying options, running with exec-shield and randomized memory mappings. This makes most of the security notices for Fedora meaningless anyway because often the problem cant be exploited. All of this is implemented without stepping on the user. Fedora takes security extremely serious which I like, and they implement it in a way that stays out of your way. I just find it wierd that a desktop distro like Ubunutu that claims to be a good desktop OS with ease of use doesn't implement certain security features for users, like SELinux, and then allow easy configuration of it like is done in Fedora. Ubunutu's security track record isn't bad though.

There are certainly things I don't like about Fedora, but its always worked well for me, nothing really worth complaining about. If you do give it a shot, just keep in mind that Fedora and Debian do certain things differently, it can be frustrating at first ;) Fedora has some neat things like the directory server and virtualization, you should check out their website. And yea I agree, distro wars are silly.
Regards,
Steve

Wow systemimager seems pretty nice, thanks for the link.

Fedora does have some pretty excellent QA. As you can see from their schedule, in about two days they start development freezes and the next 3 months is pure testing and bug fixing (divided into 3 stages). I've never had any problems upgrading. Officially you are supposed to use the CDs but you can use yum too. If you're used to Debian, it may take a little before you get used to the Fedora way of doing things, which was frustrating for me at first, but its really not bad.

I probably did just get burned by a bad package, but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth :) #debian can be a rough place.

Not sure about enlightenment, I've only used it to see what new neat effects rasterman added, then go back to a regular DE. But as far as 3rd party repos go, DAG and FreshRPMS, are excellent places. For legal reasons, Red Hat can't host certain programs, so using a 3rd party repo is pretty typical under Fedora. That is one thing you'll notice that is different, but the default repos have tons of software too.

Saying Ubuntu doesnt take security serious enough was a little too harsh, but they do seem to have quite an abundance of security notifications and are a little behind getting out patches. I'm just used to Fedora getting out patches right away, there was an article a few months back on /. that showed Red Hat typically gets patches out fastest, followed by Novell who is sometimes 2-3 days later (in most cases its much closer though), and then followed by the others. As long as they all get patched in the end, I dont care :) But Fedora comes standard with SELinux and a great default policy, they also compile all major public facing services with code fortifying options, running with exec-shield and randomized memory mappings. This makes most of the security notices for Fedora meaningless anyway because often the problem cant be exploited. All of this is implemented without stepping on the user. Fedora takes security extremely serious which I like, and they implement it in a way that stays out of your way. I just find it wierd that a desktop distro like Ubunutu that claims to be a good desktop OS with ease of use doesn't implement certain security features for users, like SELinux, and then allow easy configuration of it like is done in Fedora. Ubunutu's security track record isn't bad though.

There are certainly things I don't like about Fedora, but its always worked well for me, nothing really worth complaining about. If you do give it a shot, just keep in mind that Fedora and Debian do certain things differently, it can be frustrating at first ;) Fedora has some neat things like the directory server and virtualization, you should check out their website. And yea I agree, distro wars are silly.
Regards,
Steve

(let alone know where to get it [nsa.gov]?)

Getting SELinux is easy. Some distributions (notably Fedora and CentOS) have it installed and enabled by default, and I suspect that anyone who has done any amount of research into "hardening" their system has heard of SELinux.

I'm not sure where you got your prices....
Red Hat Linux ES is $349 for "Basic" and $799 for "Standard" per year.
Neither of these is $349.50 x 2.

Why Fedora is so often considered the default target distribution I don't know. Even the project page states it's an unsupported, experimental OS, and one now comparitvely marginal when tallied.

Must be a case of 'brand leakage' from a distant past, one that held Redhat as the most popular desktop Linux distribution.

Shame, I guess IBM is missing out on where the real action is.

Read the RHEL eula. https://www.redhat.com/licenses/rhel_us_3.html

"Customer may not modify, copy, make derivative works of, distribute, reverse engineer, decompile or export the RHN Code."

(Plus, it uses Oracle)

Lobbying for software patents: Bad.

Applying for software patents: Sometimes necessary today, but shouldn't be.

Bragging about granted software patents: Impresses stock market, pisses me off.

Using patents offensively: Bad.

Using patents only defensively: Ok.

We'll see what Google does...

He's going to provide support for 50 million computers at 10 cents each? Would be quite tough.

If there is no support involved, I'd like to provide South Korea with Linux for 50 million computers in the form of either CentOS, Fedora or Ubuntu for free and free with "community support".

What's the deal?

1. Microsoft's current operating system dominance. Like it or not people don't want to change. They don't like change, they don't like anything new.
2. Microsoft's dominance in the web browser, email and office suite arena. Everyone uses these products, web developers have to test their pages in a sucky microsoft browser and most business people use outlook for all of their email, scheduling, etc...

Red Hat has been shipping Xen enabled kernels for months now in Fedora and I believe they are available for RHEL too. They have had quite a few people dedicated to working on Xen for some time, and that is a *good* thing . Virtualization is the future, and its good that a big company like Red Hat is pushing it further. Xen and SELinux are two killer technologies that Red Hat has really made viable, so kudos to them for keeping open source on the forefront of innovative (or at least uncommon, but much needed) technologies. For a truncated list of other cool technologies Red Hat is pushing in OSS, check out the Fedora projects page, you'll see virtualization, and SELinux in addition to the directory server, stateless linux, and system tap (our answer to Solaris' dtrace, granted it still is under heavy development and is far from ready for prime time)
Regards,
Steve

isn't that what the open source business model is already doing? See Redhat subscription , MySQL subscription , SuSe Linux Enterprise 9 subscription

If I don't buy one of these subscriptions, my software doesn't get bug fixes, security updates, which means it is unfit for further use. Essentially it means I have to stop using the software.

Check out Knowledge Tree. They have a fairly polished webdav-based DMS, and are going to write a MS plugin for it as well (Plugin not open source). It has LDAP integration, and versioning. I plan to install it and goof around once I get my website back up and running, and get a couple of spare computers to hook everything up on.

Hopefully, I'm looking to get a Hula, Knowledge Tree, Fedora Directory, (I hate OpenLDAP, and I don't want to pay for Novell's) server, with pGina for Windows client authentication. I haven't tried OpenOffice with a WebDav server backend, but if that worked with revisioning, you have all the parts for a completely open-source server/infrastructure that meets the requirements that I mentioned. I just don't know if I'm going to have time to ever put it together, and some projects aren't mature enough to completely replace their MS counterparts. Hula especially, as right now it has only limited client support for all the applications, but it supports LDAP, and it's not a bunch of recycled parts with no management parts like Kolab. They should rename that project Kobble. But hopefully soon, all the parts will be production ready.

Man do I go off topic.

Netscape directory services have been open source for a while now.
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Main_Page

If you want desktop support software the company to look at is Novell, not realy Redhat. Redhat is good at what they do, Novell is good at desktop infrastructure.

For isntance take the NDS model, they made it possible to do the whole desktop enterprise thing with Windows, and Microsoft made their inferior copy of it called Active Directory. Novell was the pioneers and they still can be.

Novell is working on evolution, hula and a veriaty of other products (glitz and cairo for gnome for instance). Email, calendering, contact for the average person, for the average company.

Kerberos and LDAP works in Linux. I do it, and I am a fairly stupid person. It's a pain in the ass compared to Active directory, but that parts that matter can be done now. Hopefully somebody will make tools to make it easier.

IIS is also arguably faster, as it's running on a single architecture, on an OS designed by the same developer.

no really... http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/ from redhat seems to be what you might want.... take a look.

Have you checked out GFS from RedHat (formerly Sistina)?

They are going 100% linux on Red hat desktop Under the first phase of deployment, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been rolled out at approximately 500 branches in three months. Close to 500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and 5000 Red Hat Desktops have been deployed in this phase :) They are kicking out windows/dos desktop More info can be found at Redhat site Hope mods/editors get noticed this.

You seem certain that PostgreSQL can use more than one index per query. Well, a cursory search on Google comes up with this page. The "Red Hat Database" is basically PostgreSQL (I think!), and a little way down this page you can see this comment:

"Note that a query or data manipulation commands can only use at most one index per table."

Here's another link which seems to confirm this.

I believe I have seen comments somewhere regarding experimental support for multiple indexes in queries in PostgreSQL, but I am interested as to whether this is a mature technology, rather than new and/or experimental, or limited to special cases.

Thanks,

-Neil

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/development/i386/eula.txt

1. THE SOFTWARE. Fedora Core (the "Software") is a modular Linux
        operating system consisting of hundreds of software components.
        The end user license agreement for each component is located in
        the component's source code. With the exception of certain image
        files containing the Fedora trademark identified in Section 2
        below, the license terms for the components permit User to copy,
        modify, and redistribute the component, in both source code and
        binary code forms. This agreement does not limit User's rights
        under, or grant User rights that supersede, the license terms of
        any particular component.

First of all, it ain't hundreds, it's thousands.

According to this EULA, I am responsible to download thousands of source RPMs, extract them, and scan all the files for their copyrights and see if anyone (like TrollTech or MySQL) is trying to f*ck me.

Is it GPL or not? Can I use it for any purpose or not? Trolltech and MySQL are the obvious sore thumbs, but I only know about those via word of mouth. How do I know there are not others in the thousands of source files this EULA says it is my responsibility to examine?

What the hell happened to "No front or back cover text" in the GPL? Isn't that exactly what TrollTech and MySQL are doing to the GPL, adding additional clauses that change the rights given under the GPL? I'm USING their software, not modifying it and redistributing it.

If anyone wants to bitch about EULAs potentially hosing people or their employers, look no further.

Bob Young to Resign From Red Hat Board

OK so 98% of my userbase uses Windows. 2 % use Linux.

I can write Windows drivers for my device and keep 98% of my userbase happy. I can write Linux drivers for my device, and keep 2% of my userbase happy. If the cost of writing that Linux driver is more than I would make back in profits, why would I ever do it?


A sale is a sale is a sale.

Because you SELL hardware or support, not dirvers. Look at ATI, Nvidia and IBM.

Becaase you can make BOTH Windows drivers AND Linux drivers.

You may do it for bragging rights, protection from vendor lockin or because Linux is VAR friendly. You may have to support it for government contracts. You know, people do make money selling Linux, or at least try.

You will do it because your main competitor supports Linux and is now able to get into every large datacenter doing clustering, LAMP, etc that you have just been locked out of.

But I don't buy your profits argument. Security of your IP is a matter of driver arch, engineering and legalese so that shouldn't be an issue. You are in business for profit, not just marketshare, right? An unhappy customer is still a customer (with the potential to becoome a happy one.) If you have 98% of your (potential) userbase and your company is barely profiting, support for Linux is probably not your problem (but can be a possible solution.)

Additionally, there is a fixed engineering cost for driver development, namely the care-in-feeding of the engineers to do the work. If you aren't supporting the driver for people who bought your product (seen it with driver developers,) then the margin of profit on that sale is greater. If Linux is not your primary market, release scheduling is not a factor (seen that one too.) Alternatively, you can give your spec to an F/OSS developer and have them support it.

However, when my market is bringing in X kilobucks for each %, I will look seriously at fringe markets. If my company's userbase is bringing in enough money per user, I'll jump through serious hoops for 2% more. A sale is a sale is a sale.

because the license does not allow you to use code you wrote with the free version in the paid versions.

WRONG! Please mod parent flamebait.

You're confusing paid versions with proprietary versions. You can make money selling paid versions of Free and Open Source Software.

QT is licenced under the GPL, which is a Free and Open Source Software license. It forces software vendors to share the source code, but does not prohibit vendors from selling binaries.

Anyone (ranging from independent programmers to multibllion dollar companies) can create Free and Open Source Software built on QT and can sell the resultant software without giving a penny to Trolltech. Just look at Novell SUSE Linux, Linspire, RedHat and any other commercial distro that ships with KDE. These companies (and anyone else for that matter, including you!) can sell the binaries -- all they have to do is provide the source code to the user, so that the user can customize the software for his/her needs.

If you want to keep your source code secret and build proprietary applications that lock in users, prevent them from making modifications, restrict their rights, take away control of their computers, then naturally you need to pay royalties. In the world of spyware, DRM-infestation, and Treacherous Computing no proprietary software should be trusted.

In other words: If a company does the moral thing for the users and society, the company gets a freebie. If they're unscrupulous, then they better pay up.

I seriously doubt you have to worry about apt replacing ports ever. As slick as apt is to use on the x86 platform, I hear from my friends lucky enough to run 64-bit x86 Linux systems that there are all sorts of problems when trying to get apt working properly in that environment.
For instance when browsing the web, some of the plugins out there are only available in the 32-bit x86 flavor, not 64-bit. Fedora can use yum as the dependency checker and even my friend the die hard apt user has switched his systems to using yum for updates. Perhaps yum will become the new open source standard.

Ahem. Office Standard $333 at Amazon. Office Student $125. Average of these 2 prices: $229 .

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/528 734/104-5098651-8249553

Regarding MS OS being a higher percentage of the overall cost of a PC - hardware costs have fallen dramatically. The cost to develop software is higher than ever before. No big surprise here. By your logic, since the cost of the physical CD media has dropped from $2 to $0.20, software titles should have dropped by that same factor of 10. You know it doesn't work that way. The fact that the media is 10 times cheaper does not mean you can pay your army of games developers 1/10th of their former salary. If anything, as software complexity rises, costs rise as well. To assert that software costs should track hardware costs is simply silly and you should know better.

And regarding my missing the whole point, I think the shoe is squarely on the other foot. As products evolve the list of standard features expands. Things that were add-on options become built-in. This is done for many reasons - cost savings, reliabiltiy and better integration being among them. As an application developer I can really appreciate knowing that if I build an application that requires audio playback, or web-page viewing, I can use built-in facilities in the platform. I don't have to design, code and test for every possible combination. Or worse, arrange for installing these utilities with my application. This leads to a dramatically better end-user experience, and a more robust product. Now, there may be many reasons why Microsoft chooses to integrate those facilities, and one of them may have to do with locking in users, but you cannot deny the obvious, tangible and substantial benefits to application developers, who are then able to pass those benefits on to their end users.

Continuing with the car analogy. My car has built-in sunroof, built-in tinted windows, built-in heated seats, built-in security system, built-in halogen headlights, a built-in stereo, etc etc. All of those things started out as add-ons. That is simply the way products evolve. Designers build in more and more features to differentiate themselves. Just because Microsoft is way better at it than most is no reason to pretend this is a bad thing.

And by the way, if you want to talk predatory, let's talk Redhat Linux - Standard Enterprise Edition - $1499 ($2499 for the Premium Edition). That's up quite a bit from free.

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/compare/server /

Yeah you ahead, compare to slack and debian because they are the best representatives of the distros business, first time people etc. are directed to.

Put this in your pipe and smoke it:

http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
http://www.mandriva.com/
http://fedora.redhat.com/
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/

If the competition gets too hot, he - or the future owners of the intellectual property - can just renege on Redhat's non-binding, non-perpetual patent "promise" to "refrain from enforcing the infringed patent" [my bold] against FOSS competitors.

Remember when SCO was FOSS's best buddy? Companies change hands, good intentions blow away in the wind, but patents sit there for 14 or 20 years, hissing and spitting venom at all who stray too near.

You make console homebrew in your spare time. You ported Lumines to the GBA. You've written up 400 things at everything.com. People glow about you on wikipedia. You've contributed to open source projects.

Send your portfolio to one of the dozens of companies that do Game Boy development. Most companies don't publicise their openings, so send it anyway.
http://thq.kenexa.com/thq/cc/Home.ss
http://corporate.infogrames.com/hr.html?action=job s_all
Nintendo
Activision
EA
etc...
While you're at it, try Red Hat. They like to hire people who have contributed to open source projects, and have cool / geeky hobbies.

While you're doing that, learn to drive a car. After years of playing arcade racers, you should feel right at home. Then get your ass out to California, New York, Boston, or possibly Austin, where actual software development takes place. My girlfriend's recruiter keeps calling and calling... It's really quite different than the way things were 3 years ago. Hell, I'm turning down work, and I haven't looked for a job in two years.

If you distill everything you've done down, your resume must look impressive. Just get out to where jobs actually are and get your life going... Though definitely apply everywhere you might want to live, whether or not you are currently there. Lots of places do some degree of covering moving costs or offering signing bonuses. And scraping together enough money for a plane ticked from friends is a lot easier when you have a good-paying job waiting on the other end.

BTW, when applying for minimum-wage jobs, lie about your education. Always pretend to have the appropriate education for the job you're targeting. Usually that means "some college," or even "College degree," but never "BS in computer science from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology." People don't like to hire people for minimum wage jobs who aren't going to be trapped there. Be slightly more impressive than the average min wage worker, but not much beyond that.

IBM, HP, Sun and the like are making lots of revenue from GPL licensed software, as are many other companies. Sure, they arent purely software-orientated, but it lets them sell a lot of hardware with very nice margins, and followup support packages that gives them an ongoing cashflow. So it does them very nicely.

RedHat are doing very well also, and.. are you ready for this..they _are_ a software company! Their bottom line is looking great, they are acquiring products and even open-sourcing them when they have previously been under a closed proprietry license like their directory server, so they have cash to burn. How does this correlate with your 'throat slitting' crushing despair and gloom suicide-pact outlook? Thats some great poetic dramatisation by the way, the family-destroying comment amused me greatly - oh the woe of open source! :)

Incidentally, nothing about the GPL prevents you from selling software licensed under it, you are perfectly free to do so, as a person or as a business. You must oblige by the stipulations of the GPL of course ( like making source code available ), but if you want to sell Debian DVDs then go ahead!

In related news, Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 2 yesterday.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2005-O ctober/msg00031.html

I think that they (Novell) looked at the approach that Red Hat has used and thought that it makes sense. RHES has less frequent releases, designed to be more stable, while Fedora is updated much more often. Novell is just doing the same thing with SLES and SUSE Linux 10.0.
Compare:

SUSE Linux 10.0 Comparative Features and Benefits
Enterprise Linux or Fedora?

So if you want a more stable release, then both Red Hat and Novell want you to pay for it. If you use the free versions, you get new features more often, but sacrifice some stability. And you aren't forced to upgrade immediately. It's still more stable than some other operating systems.

These features led RedHat to PostgreSQL for their RedHat Database [redhat.com] product

This really isn't a surprise. MySQL has both licensing problems, and feature problems in the competitive high-end markets. PostGreSQL has none of these issues, and can hold its own in a comparison with Oracle or SQL Server. These features led RedHat to PostgreSQL for their RedHat Database product, and I see little reason why they wouldn't attract Sun as well.

The only thing that slightly bothers me about their strategy is that Sun has been pushing their Java Systems hard. If they actually wanted to bolster that strategy, they'd have three major options for a Java Enterprise Database:

1. Cloudscape/Derby - This product makes the most sense from a technology and licensing perspective, but the fact that it was an IBM product (even though Cloudscape was originally a separate entity before being acquired) taints the software in such a way as to make Sun look bad if they used it.

2. Daffodil - This database is an excellent choice, but it would require the acquisition of another company, a move that the Sun shareholders might question. It would also bring quite a bit of flak in Sun's direction as Daffodil is an Indian company.

3. McKoi SQL - An excellent choice for a Java database, but lacks brand recognition. The feature levels and scalability of the database are still considerable questions. The GPL license also allows Sun less freedom to modify the database in comparison to the BSD license used by PostgreSQL.

As for the choice of Sunbird, I think it's simply a matter of "why not?" It's not like there's any particular leader in the market, and Sunbird plays nice with Firebird/Mozilla.

I have had a fair amount of experience with linux clustered filesystems (primarily with block based ones not file based). The performance, reliability, and feature set for each of the ones I have looked at have varied greatly depending on your application and hardware. Some samples of clustered filesystems available for Linux:

Polyserve
  - closed source / proprietary
  - supports Oracle RAC
  - distributed locking manager
  - supports up to 16 servers
  - has load balanced NFS
  - supports SuSE and Redhat
  - requires a SAN
  - block based I/O
  - limited hardware support
Redhat GFS (formerly Sistina GFS)
  - open source
  - supports Oracle RAC and is also supported by Oracle
  - distributed locking manager in 6.1, single metadata lock manager in 6.0
  - can work with or without a SAN
  - SAN requires pool driver in 6.0, or open source LVM 2 in 6.1
  - supports up to 256 servers?
  - works on other distributions, but good luck getting it to work
  - is available in Fedora Core for those not worried about support
  - block based I/O
  - extensive hardware support
IBM GPFS on Linux
  - closed source / proprietary
  - supports Redhat and SuSE
  - lots of servers, don't remember if there is a theoretical limit or not
  - quasi-distributed locking manager, RTM for more details
  - block based I/O
  - supports IBM hardware + some smattering of major competitors
  - requires a SAN (preferably one of IBM's)
Lustre on Linux
  - open source
  - distribution agnostic
  - lots of servers
  - lock manager is not very good
  - does not require a SAN
Panasas
  - closed source
  - file based I/O
PeerFS
  - closed source

Honestly clustered filesystems can be more trouble than they are worth. With the exception of Redhat GFS and a smattering of others that aren't as advanced, there are few open source options for implementing a 'true' clustered filesystem. Most of the setups I have seen end up having so many moving parts that they are often very fragile. Having said that if you want to get started try GFS. It is a decent introduction to the clustered filesystem world:

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/4/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/GFS-6.1-0.pre22.6.i386 .rpm