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did anyone check out the "papers" section? while i'll certainly try to keep an open mind and judge the final project on its merits, it's hard to take something seriously when its website is gussied-up with a bunch of papers, pretending to lend an air of accademic support for this project

all those papers were either given at microsoft headquarts, or the HotOS conference, which was an invitation-only do sponosored by Microsoft's reasearch department.

i really want to be open minded. microsoft *has* been responsible for some real innovation, and *does* have a few products that work really well. hell, singularity might even be cool. i just get a little doubtful, and certainly turned off, when i see that it's leaning on a pile of pseudo-academic support for credibility.

This sort of event provides motivation for overlay routing schemes, which can compensate for major outages along various routes of the backbone:

http://www.usenix.org/events/nsdi04/tech/full_pape rs/subramanianOver/subramanianOver.pdf
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~farnam/pubs/2005-hwj-in focom.pdf

Does anybody know why ReiserFS 3 hasn't been ported to any of the BSDs yet?

I was curious about this too. As I understood Bill Van Etten who spoke at LISA on Nov. 18, 2005, naturally ocurring genes have hundreds or thousands of inert codons. The laboratory version eliminates those, and it is this "efficient" version of the gene that gets patented. The follow-up question that didn't occur to me then was: so why couldn't I put a few inert codons into the gene and declare myself non-infringing?

Umm, I think you're putting words in my (post) there. I never claimed to run them singlehandedly. Actually, I never claimed to run any at all! Debian, however, is about the only OS I would consider running single handedly after 100+. That + rdist, cfengine and maybe some other goodies. See you at LISA!

The UFS filesystem used by Solaris provides a data "snapshot" feature that prevents such data loss, NTT Labs says, but filesystem operation must be suspended to use the feature, reducing performance. NILFS, in contrast, can "continuously and automatically [save] instantaneous states of the file system without interrupting service," NTT Labs says.

The BSD original Soft Updates and snapshot implementation has a *minimal* impact on operation. See McKusik's paper Running Fsck in the Background.

I find your sig particularly ironic. You'd be right if you believe this line they are feeding people who ask about the incompatibility. But if you scrutinize their answer a little, you'll find that something is fishy about it. I for one, give Microsoft's story little credence :)

The /GS option basically causes the compiler to insert extra code into each compiled function. But that extra code does not need to cause a change to the library format. All it does is add additional instructions and data in the object file. You could actually write your own code that does exactly the same thing, without using the /GS compiler switch. The compiler switch makes it lot easier, because otherwise you'd have to add this code to every function you write.

But it should not change anything from the linker's perspective. It should be able to link an object file regardless of whether this extra code is present or not (and libraries are just collections of object files). From the linker's perspective, it shouldn't matter whether this extra code is generated by /GS or was written by hand by the programmer.

Sure, Microsoft may have chosen to implement the /GS switch in a way that's not backward-compatible -- but they didn't need to and if they really did care about VC6 users, they would have opted to use a backward-compatible approach.

Want proof that this can be done in a backward-compatible way? Read about StackGuard a patch created circa 1998 that brings this exact same functionality to GCC. It is available in some hardened versions of GCC. Another similar GCC patch, ProPolice is also in other hardened versions of GCC (that used by OpenBSD and Hardened Gentoo Linux, for example). Eventually, one of them will be chosen to be included as a standard feature of GCC. Both generate "protected" code that is compatible with unprotected libraries compiled with other compilers.

A previous poster mentioned cfengine briefly. If I understand cfengine correctly, it may be just what you're looking for.

Also, if you're the sort who can/does go to conferences, the LISA '05 conference (Dec. 4-9 2005) features several sessions on cfengine by Mark Burgess. (LISA is the "Large Installation System Administration Conference", put on by USENIX and SAGE. There's also a conference BLOG, and this is the link to the tech program info.

A previous poster mentioned cfengine briefly. If I understand cfengine correctly, it may be just what you're looking for.

Also, if you're the sort who can/does go to conferences, the LISA '05 conference (Dec. 4-9 2005) features several sessions on cfengine by Mark Burgess. (LISA is the "Large Installation System Administration Conference", put on by USENIX and SAGE. There's also a conference BLOG, and this is the link to the tech program info.

A previous poster mentioned cfengine briefly. If I understand cfengine correctly, it may be just what you're looking for.

Also, if you're the sort who can/does go to conferences, the LISA '05 conference (Dec. 4-9 2005) features several sessions on cfengine by Mark Burgess. (LISA is the "Large Installation System Administration Conference", put on by USENIX and SAGE. There's also a conference BLOG, and this is the link to the tech program info.

A little bit of research reveals this:

Many features of a DBMS are highly advantageous from the point of view of an IMAP server. The obvious performance differential between the database options and both UW and Courier indicates that email storage is indeed a problem well suited for a database solution. Indexing capabilities give Cyrus and mySQL an advantage over Courier and UW when scanning headers and searching header fields. mySQL's full-text index provides a particularly expedient method for searching through message text, although it adds significant maintenance cost to operations such as adding and removing messages. A server-side buffer cache also improves performance by speeding up searches on recently accessed data. Although UW outperforms Cyrus by a small margin on some full-text searches, mySQL demonstrates clearly that a DBMS can search email much more quickly than a file-based solution. Most importantly, these results offer desperately needed empirical data comparing the performance of these three storage implementations.

http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa03/tech/full_pape rs/elprin/elprin_html/

I don't suppose anyone's come across any newer research (or implementations using this approach)?!?

My slides relevant to this discussion can be found at http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/ and http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/sistpni/.

And yes, Nick Christenson has been a long-time friend and co-author of mine.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want some referrals.

My slides relevant to this discussion can be found at http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/ and http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/sistpni/.

And yes, Nick Christenson has been a long-time friend and co-author of mine.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want some referrals.

I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman when I interviewed with Mathworks a couple of years ago. I was taken aback by his humility, and the poor guy was embarrassed when I requested his autograph :) He has a former license plate in his office that reads "YACCMAN".

Whether they intended it or not, and whether they like it or not, this very web page is evidence of a successful viral marketing campaign for Apple's products.

Critics and skeptics have made a lot of good points about the impossibility of piracy as a means to success for Apple's market share. In posting these good points, they contribute to the buzz that is quickly spreading across the 'net. As the buzz buzzes, greater numbers of geeks and hackers become curious and try out OSx86.

While this may not turn into direct sales from the geeks and hackers, those who like Apple's OS may very well recommend to friends, family and possibly even the procurement department for the enterprise whose network they manage, that the next computer purchased be one that runs OSX. Innocent bystanders who come across the Internet buzz may also suddenly be moved to consider Apple systems, when previously they had not.

Anyone who has been to a system administration conference knows that they are about the geekiest place on Earth. Although it may not be the geeks who sign the checks for big hardware orders, it is they who recommend what to buy. Technology companies are well aware of this fact, as evidenced by the vendor exhibitions at these conferences.

Apple should be very happy that people are spending their time to try out their OS, hacked, stolen or otherwise.

Re: your Alpha rig: It'll run Linux, and it'll run NT4. Run NT4, and it'll run anything a Pentium from whatever era that Alpha came from could run, and at about the same speed.

My Alpha does have NT 4.0 on it. The only commercial software I was able to install was Borland C++ Powerbuilder. Other that I did install some shareware programs, Coffeecup HTML and two or three others though I don't recall what. Maybe Paint Shop Pro but I'm not sure. Everything else I tried to install I got an error message saying the cpu was wrong. And yes I used DEC's FX32! and tried to keep it updated.

Falcon

Face it, Linux has a head start and is enjoying far more corporate support (due partly to the fact that Linux is licensed GPLv2, which compells big companies to share back their improvements).

Anything that uses X-Windows will not get widespread user adoption.

In order for ordinary end users to begin accepting BSD on the desktop, one key thing needs to be fixed: the Delete key. Seriously, it's a major function on the keyboard, and although there's backspace, there's no reason why the Delete key's true function (to delete text ahead of the character) isn't present.

Delete is supposed to be an erasing backspace. Note: back, not forward.

Emacs gets delete right, some web browsers get delete wrong.

I found one glaring omission was journaling file system support.

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/usenix99/mckusick.html http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/usenix2000/general/seltzer.html

Does Linux support FFS with Soft Updates?

Face it, Linux has a head start and is enjoying far more corporate support (due partly to the fact that Linux is licensed GPLv2, which compells big companies to share back their improvements).

Anything that uses X-Windows will not get widespread user adoption.

In order for ordinary end users to begin accepting BSD on the desktop, one key thing needs to be fixed: the Delete key. Seriously, it's a major function on the keyboard, and although there's backspace, there's no reason why the Delete key's true function (to delete text ahead of the character) isn't present.

Delete is supposed to be an erasing backspace. Note: back, not forward.

Emacs gets delete right, some web browsers get delete wrong.

I found one glaring omission was journaling file system support.

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/usenix99/mckusick.html http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/usenix2000/general/seltzer.html

Does Linux support FFS with Soft Updates?

Sort of like Strider HoneyMonkeys, only working for the Dark Side. (This was a Work In Progress report at USENIX).

There is a great tutorial on using rrdtool to find anomalous traffic, written by one Jake Brutlag and presented at LISA back in 2000:
Aberrant Behavior Detection in Time Series for Network Monitoring

Basically comes down to prediction based on exponential smoothing, shouldn't be too far over the head of your average IT geek :)

Yeah, nice CPU, difficult for software authors. I read a paper recently wherein the authors managed to reduce L4 microkernel message passing (up to 8 bytes) to 36 clock cycles, which is far faster than any other platform. But this was done by hand, and the compiler blurted out a routine that required 508 cycles. The gulf between what you can really do with an Itanium, and what normal software writers can do with it, remains huge.

Helevius

Helevius

Starting at HP labs, Ratnesh Sharma began work on the problem of cooling server farms two years ago.
Then work with the university of Virginia evolved from that research. Finally, in work done with Duke U. it paid off in the form of software tools that were reported at Usenix'05 [you can ignore password pop-up if you go thru the google cache] as saving 25% of cooling costs, thats can be over $1000000/year for large data centers by dynamically distributing work load to machines that are running cooler by using temperature data as input to the load balancer. [if you can get at the usenix art., Duke has basically the same paper on line. Or just read the the Usenix abstract]

• The Canadian version of this law will be enforced in the same way, and
  
• whether this might cause the organizers of these events to change the venue in future years.

Look at http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2005.html and see the number of papers by Microsoft Research. SOSP 2003 (occurs every 2 years) http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers.shtml has papers by Microsoft. OSDI 2004 - http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi04/tech/ There are many other prestigious conferences that MSR puts many papers into.

Jim Gray (databases), Butler Lampson (systems), among others all work at MSR.

Your facts are incorrect.

Microsoft Research has been working on efficient, decentralized, and fault-tolerant P2P systems since 2001. See the paper about their DHT (Distributed Hash Table) called Pastry, which was co-authored with Rice and is still under active development there. Note that the Kademlia DHT, which followed roughly a year later and is now used in a variety of P2P networks (eMule, the new decentralized BitTorrent network, etc.) employs a variant of Pastry's routing algorithm of longest prefix matching.

They still have quite a presence if you look through recent NSDI or IPTPS conferences. Note that this paper is for IEEE INFOCOM, which is big.

- shadowmatter

"The idea of running a system that costs absolutely nothing on the software side is a powerful one"

Indeed, and the risk is the nature of the people promoting Linux: the community [Note: I hate that word, it makes it sound like Linux was planned all along rather than just being the collective efforts of many individuals who had very specific needs of their own] aims not to coexist with other technologies, but for total replacement of every other OS out there. Whether it's the range of platform (read: any) that Linux runs on, the range of applications that Linux is envisioned to run (even those clearly counter indicated for such an OS, like avionics or weaponry -- see the talk by Dan Klein on this: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa04/tech/talks/kle in.pdf), the "Linux everywhere", though quite unavoidable, is a bit worrying. I guess competing against Windows does that to you (hint: humor).

Create a new account on your favorite free email server, like Yahoo! or Hotmail! or whoever just for the vacation and give that to people in advance. Tell people not to send sensitive stuff, but if something important comes up to have messages like "Please call Elsa. It's important." You can even leave a .vacation.msg that gives proper instructions on the use of te throw-away account.

This doesn't work for every use, but I could definitely understand the need to have some means of communication when one is on the go. This is especially true when going from country to country, say, in Europe, where I live.

In fact it was important for a friend who was bouncing between Germany and Switzerland who was having trouble connecting with a host. If you're going to be away so long that you need to do more extensive (and sensitive) stuff then I agree with the other posters that you should either bring a laptop or use smart technology. In fact, see my article about a proposed solution here.

> how do you think "everything is a file" works, exactly?

it works by having user level file systems, I use them all day, every day

blame who ? why, it doesn't necessarily need kernel modification

you can even try this LiveCD

or read the pdf

OK, the paper is "Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory" by Peter Gutmann of the Dept. of Comp. Sci. at the University of Auckland.

I found it on www.usenix.org: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/sec96/full_papers/gutmann/

Hope this helps/is interesting.

One of the better worm analysis papers I've read was "Reflections on Witty" by Nicholas Weaver and Dan Ellis (of MITRE), published in the June 2004 issue of ;login, the Usenix magazine.

Rather than a dissection of the worm itself, the authors give a detailed analysis of the author/attacker of Witty.

Some insights about the worm author that Weaver and Ellis proposed:

• he was a fairly proficient programmer - there were no significant bugs in the code of the worm, he knew how to program x86 assembly and access the Windows API, he implemented a stack-overflow attack, and most importantly, he constructed a payload that was malicious to the host, but didn't significantly slow the worm's spread.
• he was quite clever at what he did - randomly padded packet sizes, randomized the destinations and port numbers, and he seeded the worm (rather than start at a single location, the worm started out from 110 different victims) -- prior to this no one had significantly seeded their worms
• he wrote compact code, Witty consists of 177 x86 instructions in 474 bytes (the rest is the buffer overflow and padding); with 177 instructions, he was able to construct routines to cleanup from the overflow attack, seed the RNG, propagate the worm, and execute the malicious payload (Witty slowly overwrites disks on the infected hosts until the machine crashes)
• he worked quite fast; the stack overflow in the ISS BlackIce products was published on March 18, 2004. Witty was released on March 19, 2004, less than 48 hours after the security advisory was published by eEye; it is possible that he knew of the vulnerability when eEye notified ISS on March 8, 2004, but the paper goes into why this is unlikely
• he probably tested the worm before he released it (cf. the lack of major bugs); this combined with the fact that he seeded on 110 hosts, means that he had access to a wide array of compromised machines -- it probably means he has access to the "hacker underground", to gain access to these machines in such a short time frame

The authors' conclusion is somewhat alarming, they reason that Witty represents a new generation of virus/worm authors: motivated, skilled and malicious individuals who are experts at what they do.

One of the better worm analysis papers I've read was "Reflections on Witty" by Nicholas Weaver and Dan Ellis (of MITRE), published in the June 2004 issue of ;login, the Usenix magazine.

Rather than a dissection of the worm itself, the authors give a detailed analysis of the author/attacker of Witty.

Some insights about the worm author that Weaver and Ellis proposed:

• he was a fairly proficient programmer - there were no significant bugs in the code of the worm, he knew how to program x86 assembly and access the Windows API, he implemented a stack-overflow attack, and most importantly, he constructed a payload that was malicious to the host, but didn't significantly slow the worm's spread.
• he was quite clever at what he did - randomly padded packet sizes, randomized the destinations and port numbers, and he seeded the worm (rather than start at a single location, the worm started out from 110 different victims) -- prior to this no one had significantly seeded their worms
• he wrote compact code, Witty consists of 177 x86 instructions in 474 bytes (the rest is the buffer overflow and padding); with 177 instructions, he was able to construct routines to cleanup from the overflow attack, seed the RNG, propagate the worm, and execute the malicious payload (Witty slowly overwrites disks on the infected hosts until the machine crashes)
• he worked quite fast; the stack overflow in the ISS BlackIce products was published on March 18, 2004. Witty was released on March 19, 2004, less than 48 hours after the security advisory was published by eEye; it is possible that he knew of the vulnerability when eEye notified ISS on March 8, 2004, but the paper goes into why this is unlikely
• he probably tested the worm before he released it (cf. the lack of major bugs); this combined with the fact that he seeded on 110 hosts, means that he had access to a wide array of compromised machines -- it probably means he has access to the "hacker underground", to gain access to these machines in such a short time frame

The authors' conclusion is somewhat alarming, they reason that Witty represents a new generation of virus/worm authors: motivated, skilled and malicious individuals who are experts at what they do.

"Mach was the greatest intellectual fraud in the last ten years."
"What about X?"
"I said `intellectual'."
;login, 9/1990

right, if you actually know the tech you know that a handful of instructions CANT be virtualized. Don't take my word for it, read the paper :
Analysis of the Intel Pentium's Ability to Support a Secure Virtual Machine Monitor

PS I dont blame you, but cant believe you got modded Insightful. It reflects on the sad state of slashdot today

NetBSD is hampered by poor scalability and its limited rudimentary SMP.

SMP, yes at the moment. But Uni proc scalability? I don't think so. This looks interesting too.

NetBSD also lacks a production ready journaling file system.

With Soft Updates, it doesn't need it.

You might enjoy an article written by Heison Chak for the February edition of ;login:

The article is only available in .pdf form; the link is halfway down the page. Heison describes how he uses his home implemenation of Asterisk.

Beforegoing to bed, I dial ext. 100 from any phone in the house to request a wake-up call, and the voice of Allison Smith (Allison is the voice of Asterisk) prompts me for the desired time. At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Asterisk called the auto-answer extension of my IP phone in the bedroom. Besides telling me that it was a wake-up call and announcing the current weather in Toronto, Allison also challenged me to repeat a four-digit number after her. If I failed to respond or if I hung up after three tries, Asterisk would call for help, playing back my own recorded voice begging her to wake me up on that same autoanswer extension. The last resort would usually get me the unpleasant voice of my mother.

I work for, but don't speak for, USENIX.

Blatent commercial plug: Heison is the instructor for a training on Asterisk and VoIP at our Annual Technical Conference in Anaheim CA.

You might enjoy an article written by Heison Chak for the February edition of ;login:

The article is only available in .pdf form; the link is halfway down the page. Heison describes how he uses his home implemenation of Asterisk.

Beforegoing to bed, I dial ext. 100 from any phone in the house to request a wake-up call, and the voice of Allison Smith (Allison is the voice of Asterisk) prompts me for the desired time. At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Asterisk called the auto-answer extension of my IP phone in the bedroom. Besides telling me that it was a wake-up call and announcing the current weather in Toronto, Allison also challenged me to repeat a four-digit number after her. If I failed to respond or if I hung up after three tries, Asterisk would call for help, playing back my own recorded voice begging her to wake me up on that same autoanswer extension. The last resort would usually get me the unpleasant voice of my mother.

I work for, but don't speak for, USENIX.

Blatent commercial plug: Heison is the instructor for a training on Asterisk and VoIP at our Annual Technical Conference in Anaheim CA.

You might enjoy an article written by Heison Chak for the February edition of ;login:

The article is only available in .pdf form; the link is halfway down the page. Heison describes how he uses his home implemenation of Asterisk.

Beforegoing to bed, I dial ext. 100 from any phone in the house to request a wake-up call, and the voice of Allison Smith (Allison is the voice of Asterisk) prompts me for the desired time. At 6:30 a.m. that morning, Asterisk called the auto-answer extension of my IP phone in the bedroom. Besides telling me that it was a wake-up call and announcing the current weather in Toronto, Allison also challenged me to repeat a four-digit number after her. If I failed to respond or if I hung up after three tries, Asterisk would call for help, playing back my own recorded voice begging her to wake me up on that same autoanswer extension. The last resort would usually get me the unpleasant voice of my mother.

I work for, but don't speak for, USENIX.

Blatent commercial plug: Heison is the instructor for a training on Asterisk and VoIP at our Annual Technical Conference in Anaheim CA.

Also, from a technical perspective, aren't there concerns over how secure virtualized machines can be on 2004-era x86 machines?

• "We conclude that current VMM products for the Intel architecture should not be used as a secure virtual machine monitor.

• ... Slight modifications to the processor would significantly facilitate development of a highly secure Type I VMM."

One of the most interesting and complete descriptions of the history of the Windows NT family of OSes I've seen was this PowerPoint presentation by Lucovsky.

This was found with a 10 minute search on the 'net. I remembered having something similar on RedHat 5.2. Interesting thing is that it was added to freshmeat.net about 10 days after McAfee patent application was filed.

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2000-7/fe atures/resume.html

.rpm is file-oriented: a package lists its dependencies as files it requires. It's not necessarily important where the file came from - rpm supposes the file does what it is supposed to and is installed correctly.

This assumption is exactly where RPM runs into trouble. See An Analysis of RPM Validation Drift.

:w

See our Freenix 2002 paper for one example of applying formal methods to open source development. Worked great for us!

There really is a SFU; it is a subsystem, and these people are using it. But you can't use a subsystem by itself; a subsystem is useful only as part of a whole operating system. SFU now inludes Interix which is normally used in a combination with the GNU development toolchain and libraries : the system is basically GNU, with SFU functioning as the compatibility DDL Library layer.

Many users are not fully aware of the distinction between the compiler toolset, which is SFU, and the whole system, which they also call `SFU''. The ambiguous use of the name doesn't promote understanding.

Programmers generally know that is a Subsystem. But since they have generally heard the whole system called `Interix' as well, they often envisage a history which fits that name. For example, many believe that once Softway Systems finished writing the posix compatibility DDL Libraries, they looked around for other free software, and for no particular reason most everything necessary to port a Unix-like system was already available.

What they found was no accident--it was the GNU system. The available free software added up to a complete system because the GNU Project had been working since 1984 to make one. The GNU Manifesto had set forth the goal of developing a free Unix-like system, called GNU. The Initial Announcement of the GNU Project also outlines some of the original plans for the GNU system. By the time Interix was written, the system was almost finished.

Most software projects have the goal of developing a particular program for a particular job. For example, Softway Systems set out to build an environment to allow UNIX apps to be ported directly to NT. Donald Knuth set out to write a text formatter (TeX); Bob Scheifler set out to develop a window system (X Windows). It's natural to measure the contribution of this kind of project by specific programs that came from the project.

If we tried to measure the GNU Project's contribution in this way, what would we conclude? If you had access to the full source code of SFU with Interix, you might find found that, GNU software was the largest single contingent, around 60% of the total source code, and this included some of the essential major components without which there could be no compatable subsystem. SFU by without Interix itself could be about 20%. So if you were going to pick a name for the system based on who wrote the programs in the system, the most appropriate single choice would be `GNU''.

But we don't think that is the right way to consider the question. The GNU Project was not, is not, a project to develop specific software packages. It was not a project to develop a C compiler, although we did. It was not a project to develop a text editor, although we developed one. The GNU Project's aim was to develop a complete free Unix-like system: GNU.

Many people have made major contributions to the free software in the system, and they all deserve credit. But the reason it is a system--and not just a collection of useful programs--is because the GNU Project set out to make it one. We made a list of the programs needed to make a complete free system, and we systematically found, wrote, or found people to write everything on the list. We wrote essential but unexciting major components, such as the assembler and linker, because you can't have a system without them. A complete system needs

Dr. Peter Gutmann of the University of Aukland knows a thing or two about data recovery.

Way back in '96 he wrote a paper on recoving information from both disk and solid-state memory.

He did a followup paper in 2001.

L33t haxx0rs beware: If your victims has an ice chest and an FBI forensics team standing by, he just might be able to get at the RAM after pulling the plug.

Dr. Peter Gutmann of the University of Aukland knows a thing or two about data recovery.

Way back in '96 he wrote a paper on recoving information from both disk and solid-state memory.

He did a followup paper in 2001.

L33t haxx0rs beware: If your victims has an ice chest and an FBI forensics team standing by, he just might be able to get at the RAM after pulling the plug.

It's nice to see the GNU fans spreading FUD about BSD (this, and the whole "BSD is dying" campaign). One might wonder what's the difference between GNU and the big and evil corporations they hate so much, since they're using the same dishonest marketing techniques - and spreading FUD is really the most disgusting.

Luckily, the OS world hasn't been monopolized yet by FUD-spreading corporations and FUD-spreading communists. There still is BSD - and it's here to stay. :)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

This effort assumes that "dependency hell" is the problem. Here's an article that says otherwise:

An Analysis of RPM Validation Drift

:w