I would be very interesting in knowing what essential elements of the GNU System were added AFTER linux appeared on the scene. And how many of those were developed on LinuxOS systems.
I sure hope that RMS isn't counting any of that orignally-written-for-LinuxOS-but-now-owned-by-GNU software in his calculations as to the proper name for LiGNuX (or GNUlix, or whatever else it's called this week).
Actually, I want a browser that's boring. I want a lot of functionality, ease of use, fast and correct rendering, etc. I don't want it to be ugly.
But the purpose of a browser is to display an html document. I want to see that document in all of it's glory, with no exciting browser stuff getting in the way. Konqueror (and Galeon) fit this bill just fine.
As it seems Linus did not build it himself, so don't let him be the name and get all the credit.
No, Linus didn't build it all by himself. Neither did RMS or his GNU Project. In fact, no one person or project built the entire LinuxOS. So the situation boils down to the system integrators. Those that actually put all the pieces together and got them working get to name it. And Slackware has decided to call theirs "Linux", Redhat calls theirs "Linux, Debian calls theirs "GNU/Linux" and SuSE calls theirs "Linux". All them them are right, at the same time.
You have to give up the GUI (sorta), but it is doable.
I was talking about operating systems. The GUI isn't the OS, so I wasn't thinking of it.
But I still don't think you can go from GRUB to Bash using ONLY GNU software and the Linux kernel. What would I use as a file system? What would I use for a root process besides init? Will I have printing capabilities? Etc., etc. I've got lots of choices from the world at large, but I can't find any solutions that come from GNU.
I won't fall apart (theoretically). However, the VLAA is competing against the EFF/FSF Legal Society in a free market. It may very well be true that the EFLS beats out the VLAA for access to the consumers' pocketbooks.
It is a free nation, after all. If no one wants copyright-like systems, they will not happen. But I would suspect that you will have a mixture of both. Some real and virtual communities may go with a copyright-less system, and co-exist with those advocating a copyright system.
if they can copy it easily (without the threat of jail) they will.
To quote from the Hammer article: "The cheater faces free enterprise. A cheater can get away with a 50 cent theft only until an entrepreneur invents a 40 cent way to catch him."
Also interesting is this quote: "Even though contract and technology will work at their best in a free nation, some efforts to restrict the copying of intellectual products will not pay for themselves. This economic reality, I suggest, will determine the extent of intellectual property rights."
In a free nation a copyright-like system can exist. But it most certainly will NOT be like the present system of statist copyrights.
Postscript: I see that the LNF site at least is now up and running. I would suggest the looking at the following articles (which are both pro and con copyright):
...the GNU environment doesn't necessarily mean software written by Stallman/FSF--just that he considered it Free and fit to include in a definition of a Free environment.
What a bizarre definition! Absolutely meaningless of course. Just because RMS says that something is GNU does not make it so. GNU has chosen to consider XFree86 to be a part of GNU System. But that does not make XFree86 GNU software.
Since stallman observed that the environment he likes to call GNU has been wrapped around the Linux kernal, he chooses to call it GNU/Linux.
Well I just observed that the environment I like to call FRED is being used by the GNU Project, so I will choose to call it FRED/GNU.
But Linus Torvalds did not take an existing unfinished GNU operating system and merely add the missing piece. Yes, GNU could have taken the Linux kernel and completed its OS, but they did not. And it's not what Linus did.
The real, unrevised, history is very different. Linus started with the goal of creating a complete operating system. Once he got the kernel and a few bits of infrastructure done, he and his collaborators chose to use off-the-shelf parts already available to complete it. Some of those parts were from GNU, but many others from elsewhere. And many of the crucial components were written *specifically* for Linux.
To use an analogy, imagine that RMS set out to create an automobile. He was all finished except for the engine. Now Linus comes along and builds an engine. He goes and grabs a drive train and chassis from GNU Autoparts Store, and an electrical system from BSD. He and many friends contribute to the miscellaneous components. Voila! It's an ugly car, but it works.
GNU does not get to name this automobile. They did not build it. They only supplied some critical parts.
Go into any computer store, walk over to the software section, find a random person, hold up a box of Redhat, show the price sticker, and say "Is this free?"
The answer you will get will have a high probability of being "no".
The point I was making in my post was that the average person on the street assumes that "free" means "gratis" when applied to software.
Can property have "rights"?
I own myself, I have rights, therefore property can have rights. If you would learn a bit more about libertarianism, you would find that without ownership of the self, no other rights are possible. Thus humanity is valued above everything else. Or as Ron Paul once put it, "all rights are human rights".
...but you gloss over what right allows you to own any property at all.
In a libertarian anarchist nation such as Hammer's Free Nation Foundation proposes, your point would be rather moot. There would be no rights protected by the state since there would be no state at all.
But it wouldn't matter if my property were not *really* property, so long as everyone behaved as if it were. Assuming a recognized system of contracts, then I would sell my creative works to you under an agreement stipulating that you would behave as if they were indeed my property. If you did not agree, I would not sell the software to you.
Additionally assuming contractual associations, all the ingredients of copyright are in place. I can easily envision a "Hammer Standard Copyholder Contract", which I agreed to when I joined the "Vinge Legal Advocacy Association". The VLAA has arbitration agreements with other contractual associations, including an agreement to enforce the "GNU Copyleft Contract". In this mythical world, imagine a "FSF/EFF Legal Society" that does *not* recognize the Hammer Contract. They can violate my copyright at any time, since they don't recognize software ownership. If one of their members decided to "infringe" my copyright, I could pursue no legal actions against them. But I could lodge a complaint with the VLAA, and it would then become extremely difficult for the "violator" to conduct further business with other VLAA membe
Netscrape 3.0 ran just fine on a 486. No, it couldn't render all of the complex stuff that Konqueror or Mozilla can, but running several orders of magnitude slower than NS-3.0 is ridiculous.
I've spent twenty years chasing after enough speed, ram and storage just to get last week's software to run. It's a losing battle. I'm desperately waiting for Moore's Law to smack all the world's developers upside the head so they can stop writing last week's software for next week's systems.
Can you show me anywhere on the Slackware box or in the Slackware documentation where it is officially named "GNU/Linux". Even unofficially named that?
"Open source," as a term, is *far* more vague than "free software."
It is only more vague because you have had the FSF definition of "free software" drummed into you. To the average person not graduated from the RMS school of GNUspeak, the opposite is true.
"Open Source" means software whose source code is open. Yes it's vague. Is the source code open for inspection? Does it follow open standards? Who knows? But the lay assumption to its meaning is much more accurate than the lay assumption as the the meaning of "Free Software". Of course software can't have liberty, it's not a person! So it MUST mean the software is free of monetary cost.
I've got a friend that has a hobby of "pirating" software. He keeps asking me if I want a copy of Windows 2000 or Microsoft Office or Baldur's Gate. When I tell him no, I don't want them, he says "Why not, they are free! Don't you want free software?"
Yes, other languages may have two words for the one English "free". But those two words still have to cover two dozen definitions. And "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" are both *English* terms.
The purpose of the word "flerbage" was to create a word with zero emotional connotations, so that the rights, privileges and permissions that pertain to software can be discusses rationally.
"Liberty" has just as much emotional connotation as "freedom". Perhaps more so.
When RMS says that Free Software gives people Freedom and Liberty, I get all choked up about it. Very emotional. My great great great grandfather died so that I could be free. My great great grandfather died so that I could have liberty. By God if they would wield muskets and flintlocks against King George, then I am justified in nuking Redmond, shooting Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison, and tar and feathering all the small shareware authors!
By using the word "flerbage", everything comes into perspective. My great great great grandfather fought and died because my great great great aunts, uncles and cousins were being hung, arrested, having their homes confiscated, their livelihoods taxed and their neighbors impressed into the British Navy. But when I decide to play the latest proprietary first-person shoot-em-up game, my Liberty and Freedom is intact. My life and well-being is secure. My property is undamaged. My freedom of action with regards to my person and my property is completely unhindered. And I am not forced to provide labor, services or skills to the games's author.
Using proprietary software is like walking into a closet and closing the door behind you. According to the dictionary definition, I would indeed be less "free". I don't have the freedom to flail my arms about. I don't have enough room to have the freedom to lie down. But I am not a slave. I am not subjugated or dominated by the closet. At any time I can simply open the door and leave. And should I decide that the use of a proprietary program becomes too onerous, I can simply and easily stop using it.
I may indeed be less "free" when I walk into a closet or use proprietary software. But my flerbage is intact.
my system would be completely unusable without glibc, bash, and gcc.
What a strange system you must have!
Bash is a shell that can be trivially replaced by csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh or even good old sh.
gcc is merely a compiler. It is not necessary for the execution of any program. It may be useful for you, but the average user of LiGnuXOS can forego the use of gcc indefinitely. As for myself, I have spent three productive days on my system without once using gcc. Oh, and all of the BSD systems also use gcc. Are you advocating that they change their names to "GNU/FreeBSD", "GNU/OpenBSD", "GNU/NetBSD" and "GNU/Mac OSX"?
glibc is pretty much essential without going through a ton of work putting libc back into Linux. But I have never yet heard a valid argument that operating systems must be named after their standard C library. That's ridiculous. "Slackware requires glibc, so it must be called 'GNU/Slackware'". Bullshit.
As for unusable systems, mine would be unusable without ext2fs or reiserfs, neither of which are from GNU. It would be unusable without init, and would not boot without lilo or any of those dozens of scripts under/etc/rc.d.
If the government does not coerce people *not* to copy your stuff, then copyright doesn't exist.
There is an excellent article by Richard O, Hammer entitled "Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts". It is a rebuttal to Roderick Long's "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights", which the FSF links to.
Both were published by in Formulations, but their links online are no longer working (as the Free Nation Foundation has split into two organizations and their web sites are still in flux).
In this article, Richard argues that a statist system of copyrights is not necessary for a creator to legally protect his works. Everyone should try to find this article, along with related articles by both Hammer and Long.
A government recognition of a class of property is most certainly not the sole basis for that property. When the government recognizes real estate as property, I gain the benefit of access to the government police and courts to defend my land property with. Should the government cease recognizing real estate, my task of protecting my property will be considerably harder, but it will still be my property. Ditto for intellectual property.
Of course, the current system of copyrights are flawed. But seeing flaws in copyright laws does not infer that software should not be owned.
Section three of the GPL contains three options with regards to distributing the source code. Every single option starts with the words "Accompany it..." referring to the distribution program. So the source code (or directions to get it) must accompany the program, but their is no requirement that the source code must be made available separately from the program.
Thus, if Caldera did not distribute the program to you then you have no legal right to demand the source code from them.
I said "as I understand it". Caldera took OpenLinux, the completed Linux distro, and used that as the basis for Open UNIX. No, it most certainly is NOT a Linux distro. I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I thought it was.
Yes, Debian is properly called "GNU/Linux", because that's what its creators named it.
RMS has said that the FSF does not intend to ever release a GNU distribution. But I think it would be very interesting if someone could create a Linux-From-Scratch distro using *only* the Linux kernel and packages belonging to the GNU Project. I'm not sure if it can be done, but it would be an interesting exercise.
Actually, Microsoft developers have an excellent reputation as talented programmers. Microsoft's shoddy products aren't because of talentless programmers, but because the corporate structure jams as much stuff as they can into the products in as short of a development cycle that they can.
Re:Don't Like It That Way? Don't Buy It That Way?
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Explain to me why I should care about THEIR freedom.
Because freedom isn't something that just you should have. It something that everyone should have. So long as people's actions to not diminish the exising freedoms of other people, those actions should be allowable.
They're not trying to fracture anything. They're trying to be compatible with Linux. Big difference.
The old Unix fracturing came about because all the companies deliberately made things non-compatible in a failed attempt to lock in their customer base. In this situation Caldera is bending over backwards for interoperability.
I have to second your opinion. I bought a new computer a mere three weeks ago. Since that time there have been TWO new releases of the kernel! This is ridiculous. You know for damn sure that two kernels did not get proper testing in a three week time span.
Release early and often is good. Release early and often and call it stable is bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good insight there!
U software in his calculations as to the proper name for LiGNuX (or GNUlix, or whatever else it's called this week).
I would be very interesting in knowing what essential elements of the GNU System were added AFTER linux appeared on the scene. And how many of those were developed on LinuxOS systems.
I sure hope that RMS isn't counting any of that orignally-written-for-LinuxOS-but-now-owned-by-GN
Actually, I want a browser that's boring. I want a lot of functionality, ease of use, fast and correct rendering, etc. I don't want it to be ugly.
But the purpose of a browser is to display an html document. I want to see that document in all of it's glory, with no exciting browser stuff getting in the way. Konqueror (and Galeon) fit this bill just fine.
A browser isn't a toy, it's a tool.
As it seems Linus did not build it himself, so don't let him be the name and get all the credit.
No, Linus didn't build it all by himself. Neither did RMS or his GNU Project. In fact, no one person or project built the entire LinuxOS. So the situation boils down to the system integrators. Those that actually put all the pieces together and got them working get to name it. And Slackware has decided to call theirs "Linux", Redhat calls theirs "Linux, Debian calls theirs "GNU/Linux" and SuSE calls theirs "Linux". All them them are right, at the same time.
You have to give up the GUI (sorta), but it is doable.
I was talking about operating systems. The GUI isn't the OS, so I wasn't thinking of it.
But I still don't think you can go from GRUB to Bash using ONLY GNU software and the Linux kernel. What would I use as a file system? What would I use for a root process besides init? Will I have printing capabilities? Etc., etc. I've got lots of choices from the world at large, but I can't find any solutions that come from GNU.
I won't fall apart (theoretically). However, the VLAA is competing against the EFF/FSF Legal Society in a free market. It may very well be true that the EFLS beats out the VLAA for access to the consumers' pocketbooks.
It is a free nation, after all. If no one wants copyright-like systems, they will not happen. But I would suspect that you will have a mixture of both. Some real and virtual communities may go with a copyright-less system, and co-exist with those advocating a copyright system.
if they can copy it easily (without the threat of jail) they will.
To quote from the Hammer article: "The cheater faces free enterprise. A cheater can get away with a 50 cent theft only until an entrepreneur invents a 40 cent way to catch him."
Also interesting is this quote: "Even though contract and technology will work at their best in a free nation, some efforts to restrict the copying of intellectual products will not pay for themselves. This economic reality, I suggest, will determine the extent of intellectual property rights."
In a free nation a copyright-like system can exist. But it most certainly will NOT be like the present system of statist copyrights.
Postscript: I see that the LNF site at least is now up and running. I would suggest the looking at the following articles (which are both pro and con copyright):
The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights
Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts
The Intellectual Property Debate
...and...
Ideas As Property"
...the GNU environment doesn't necessarily mean software written by Stallman/FSF--just that he considered it Free and fit to include in a definition of a Free environment.
What a bizarre definition! Absolutely meaningless of course. Just because RMS says that something is GNU does not make it so. GNU has chosen to consider XFree86 to be a part of GNU System. But that does not make XFree86 GNU software.
Since stallman observed that the environment he likes to call GNU has been wrapped around the Linux kernal, he chooses to call it GNU/Linux.
Well I just observed that the environment I like to call FRED is being used by the GNU Project, so I will choose to call it FRED/GNU.
The problem is that the new glibc got released under the LGPL-2.1. That means you CANNOT use the old LGPL-2.0 if you prefer.
But Linus Torvalds did not take an existing unfinished GNU operating system and merely add the missing piece. Yes, GNU could have taken the Linux kernel and completed its OS, but they did not. And it's not what Linus did.
The real, unrevised, history is very different. Linus started with the goal of creating a complete operating system. Once he got the kernel and a few bits of infrastructure done, he and his collaborators chose to use off-the-shelf parts already available to complete it. Some of those parts were from GNU, but many others from elsewhere. And many of the crucial components were written *specifically* for Linux.
To use an analogy, imagine that RMS set out to create an automobile. He was all finished except for the engine. Now Linus comes along and builds an engine. He goes and grabs a drive train and chassis from GNU Autoparts Store, and an electrical system from BSD. He and many friends contribute to the miscellaneous components. Voila! It's an ugly car, but it works.
GNU does not get to name this automobile. They did not build it. They only supplied some critical parts.
I wasn't talking about feral cats :-)
Go into any computer store, walk over to the software section, find a random person, hold up a box of Redhat, show the price sticker, and say "Is this free?"
The answer you will get will have a high probability of being "no".
The point I was making in my post was that the average person on the street assumes that "free" means "gratis" when applied to software.
Can property have "rights"?
I own myself, I have rights, therefore property can have rights. If you would learn a bit more about libertarianism, you would find that without ownership of the self, no other rights are possible. Thus humanity is valued above everything else. Or as Ron Paul once put it, "all rights are human rights".
...but you gloss over what right allows you to own any property at all.
In a libertarian anarchist nation such as Hammer's Free Nation Foundation proposes, your point would be rather moot. There would be no rights protected by the state since there would be no state at all.
But it wouldn't matter if my property were not *really* property, so long as everyone behaved as if it were. Assuming a recognized system of contracts, then I would sell my creative works to you under an agreement stipulating that you would behave as if they were indeed my property. If you did not agree, I would not sell the software to you.
Additionally assuming contractual associations, all the ingredients of copyright are in place. I can easily envision a "Hammer Standard Copyholder Contract", which I agreed to when I joined the "Vinge Legal Advocacy Association". The VLAA has arbitration agreements with other contractual associations, including an agreement to enforce the "GNU Copyleft Contract". In this mythical world, imagine a "FSF/EFF Legal Society" that does *not* recognize the Hammer Contract. They can violate my copyright at any time, since they don't recognize software ownership. If one of their members decided to "infringe" my copyright, I could pursue no legal actions against them. But I could lodge a complaint with the VLAA, and it would then become extremely difficult for the "violator" to conduct further business with other VLAA membe
Would you expect a web browser to work on a 486?
Ummm, yes...
Netscrape 3.0 ran just fine on a 486. No, it couldn't render all of the complex stuff that Konqueror or Mozilla can, but running several orders of magnitude slower than NS-3.0 is ridiculous.
I've spent twenty years chasing after enough speed, ram and storage just to get last week's software to run. It's a losing battle. I'm desperately waiting for Moore's Law to smack all the world's developers upside the head so they can stop writing last week's software for next week's systems.
Can you show me anywhere on the Slackware box or in the Slackware documentation where it is officially named "GNU/Linux". Even unofficially named that?
"Open source," as a term, is *far* more vague than "free software."
It is only more vague because you have had the FSF definition of "free software" drummed into you. To the average person not graduated from the RMS school of GNUspeak, the opposite is true.
"Open Source" means software whose source code is open. Yes it's vague. Is the source code open for inspection? Does it follow open standards? Who knows? But the lay assumption to its meaning is much more accurate than the lay assumption as the the meaning of "Free Software". Of course software can't have liberty, it's not a person! So it MUST mean the software is free of monetary cost.
I've got a friend that has a hobby of "pirating" software. He keeps asking me if I want a copy of Windows 2000 or Microsoft Office or Baldur's Gate. When I tell him no, I don't want them, he says "Why not, they are free! Don't you want free software?"
Yes, other languages may have two words for the one English "free". But those two words still have to cover two dozen definitions. And "Free Software" and "Open Source Software" are both *English* terms.
The purpose of the word "flerbage" was to create a word with zero emotional connotations, so that the rights, privileges and permissions that pertain to software can be discusses rationally.
"Liberty" has just as much emotional connotation as "freedom". Perhaps more so.
When RMS says that Free Software gives people Freedom and Liberty, I get all choked up about it. Very emotional. My great great great grandfather died so that I could be free. My great great grandfather died so that I could have liberty. By God if they would wield muskets and flintlocks against King George, then I am justified in nuking Redmond, shooting Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison, and tar and feathering all the small shareware authors!
By using the word "flerbage", everything comes into perspective. My great great great grandfather fought and died because my great great great aunts, uncles and cousins were being hung, arrested, having their homes confiscated, their livelihoods taxed and their neighbors impressed into the British Navy. But when I decide to play the latest proprietary first-person shoot-em-up game, my Liberty and Freedom is intact. My life and well-being is secure. My property is undamaged. My freedom of action with regards to my person and my property is completely unhindered. And I am not forced to provide labor, services or skills to the games's author.
Using proprietary software is like walking into a closet and closing the door behind you. According to the dictionary definition, I would indeed be less "free". I don't have the freedom to flail my arms about. I don't have enough room to have the freedom to lie down. But I am not a slave. I am not subjugated or dominated by the closet. At any time I can simply open the door and leave. And should I decide that the use of a proprietary program becomes too onerous, I can simply and easily stop using it.
I may indeed be less "free" when I walk into a closet or use proprietary software. But my flerbage is intact.
Try running your favorite distro after remove all of the non-GNU software (I'll let you keep the non-GNU kernel). It can't be done.
In fact, I don't think it's possible to create a working system using ONLY the Linux kernel and software written by or donated to the FSF.
my system would be completely unusable without glibc, bash, and gcc.
/etc/rc.d.
What a strange system you must have!
Bash is a shell that can be trivially replaced by csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh or even good old sh.
gcc is merely a compiler. It is not necessary for the execution of any program. It may be useful for you, but the average user of LiGnuXOS can forego the use of gcc indefinitely. As for myself, I have spent three productive days on my system without once using gcc. Oh, and all of the BSD systems also use gcc. Are you advocating that they change their names to "GNU/FreeBSD", "GNU/OpenBSD", "GNU/NetBSD" and "GNU/Mac OSX"?
glibc is pretty much essential without going through a ton of work putting libc back into Linux. But I have never yet heard a valid argument that operating systems must be named after their standard C library. That's ridiculous. "Slackware requires glibc, so it must be called 'GNU/Slackware'". Bullshit.
As for unusable systems, mine would be unusable without ext2fs or reiserfs, neither of which are from GNU. It would be unusable without init, and would not boot without lilo or any of those dozens of scripts under
If the government does not coerce people *not* to copy your stuff, then copyright doesn't exist.
There is an excellent article by Richard O, Hammer entitled "Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts". It is a rebuttal to Roderick Long's "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights", which the FSF links to.
Both were published by in Formulations, but their links online are no longer working (as the Free Nation Foundation has split into two organizations and their web sites are still in flux).
In this article, Richard argues that a statist system of copyrights is not necessary for a creator to legally protect his works. Everyone should try to find this article, along with related articles by both Hammer and Long.
A government recognition of a class of property is most certainly not the sole basis for that property. When the government recognizes real estate as property, I gain the benefit of access to the government police and courts to defend my land property with. Should the government cease recognizing real estate, my task of protecting my property will be considerably harder, but it will still be my property. Ditto for intellectual property.
Of course, the current system of copyrights are flawed. But seeing flaws in copyright laws does not infer that software should not be owned.
Section three of the GPL contains three options with regards to distributing the source code. Every single option starts with the words "Accompany it..." referring to the distribution program. So the source code (or directions to get it) must accompany the program, but their is no requirement that the source code must be made available separately from the program.
Thus, if Caldera did not distribute the program to you then you have no legal right to demand the source code from them.
I said "as I understand it". Caldera took OpenLinux, the completed Linux distro, and used that as the basis for Open UNIX. No, it most certainly is NOT a Linux distro. I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I thought it was.
Yes, Debian is properly called "GNU/Linux", because that's what its creators named it.
RMS has said that the FSF does not intend to ever release a GNU distribution. But I think it would be very interesting if someone could create a Linux-From-Scratch distro using *only* the Linux kernel and packages belonging to the GNU Project. I'm not sure if it can be done, but it would be an interesting exercise.
Actually, Microsoft developers have an excellent reputation as talented programmers. Microsoft's shoddy products aren't because of talentless programmers, but because the corporate structure jams as much stuff as they can into the products in as short of a development cycle that they can.
Explain to me why I should care about THEIR freedom.
Because freedom isn't something that just you should have. It something that everyone should have. So long as people's actions to not diminish the exising freedoms of other people, those actions should be allowable.
They're not trying to fracture anything. They're trying to be compatible with Linux. Big difference.
The old Unix fracturing came about because all the companies deliberately made things non-compatible in a failed attempt to lock in their customer base. In this situation Caldera is bending over backwards for interoperability.
No GNU license requires that sources must be in ISO9660 format.
No GNU license requires that sources be distributed to the public at large.
Unless you're a Caldera customer who received GNU software with Open UNIX 8, they have no legal, moral or ethical obligation to give you anything.
I have to second your opinion. I bought a new computer a mere three weeks ago. Since that time there have been TWO new releases of the kernel! This is ridiculous. You know for damn sure that two kernels did not get proper testing in a three week time span.
Release early and often is good. Release early and often and call it stable is bad.