It strikes me as odd that they single out Limewire, since Gnutella (which Limewire runs) really isn't that prevalent in the first place and other User Agents are way, way more prevalent than Limewire. Depending on where in the world you happen to be situated, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Ares or Winny/Winmx/Perfect Dark would be the preferred poison, both in terms of hosts and bandwidth consumed.
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of gnutella out there, but 1/3 of all (consumer) hosts is sheer hogwash. No way I'll be paying for that report, but it sounds like they could be making some very odd assumptions about Gnutella based on network traffic (i.e identify *all* non-port 443 SSL as Gnutella or something equally silly), or just got an extremely skewed host pool they're looking at.
While it doesn't fit everyones taste, backup up to an online service is a fairly cheap way of getting it done. Depending on your needs, amount of data and bandwidth it might be more or less reliable/useful for you than using local disks, but I'd suggest at least looking into it.
Mozy does the job for me. There's oodles of others, but Mozy was the only one I found with a decent Mac client.
..while the US happily tries to strongarm its policy / trade interests pretty much wherever it can (The Pirate Bay is one example), stir up a nationwide fuzz about a braindead woman and her rights to live, consider morality to be superior to choce in many states (gay marriage, right to abortion) and got "in god we trust" printed on every dollar bill.
Sorry guv, but if you - as a nation - were serious about nerfing China over human rights, stop trading. Won't happen, since the US economy would plummet faster than you could say Cheap Plastic Toy, but nonetheless.
Point of all this? The internet is global and as such, control over the (software & allocation) infrastructure should be as well. Yes, global means that other nations does have a say, that's the beauty of it. It doesn't mean that China, Iran or whoever gets any more or less encouraged when it comes to blocking access, despite what some people here might think.
"Ah, but Net Neutrality is fine with traffic shaping and prioritization." see grand-grantparent for someone who thinks otherwise. If this were the case and universally accepted, yes, I'd agree with you somewhat (see below). And I agree with your sentiment that net neutrality in the sense of not doing extortion is a good thing. I'm somewhat tired of the 'my packets are holy' sentiment, though.
The problem with the 'good' net neutrality, still, is that it kind of runs into a grey area once you start talking about peering. What if Google goes to BigISP or BackboneProvider and say 'Hey, we'll peer with you directly'.. they just 'bought' an advantage versus OtherOnlineVideoService. If that's OK, why isn't it OK to do it virtually?. And, if you start limiting peering in the name of fairness, you're probably doing the net in the US a huge disservice..
In short: How do you stop people from being greedy evil fucks without doing a lot of collateral damage?
"Well, if I have troubles getting my acks through, I should probably start pondering whether my pipe should be bigger."
Not really - you have a limited pipe upstream, no? If it's DSL it's probably asymmetric as well, which doesn't exactly help - let's say you use one of those for this particular scenario. Bear with me. And you obviously want to squeeze some more oomph out of it.
Sure, you can ponder if your pipe should be bigger, but the increase in costs from your DSL to something bigger is, assuming there's no operator offering ethernet or fiber locally, prohibitive. You can either take that cost, or get a decent bit more oomph out of your current wire by shaping traffic.
Thing is, you're saying 'all traffic shaping is evil' and say you'd be prepared to use QoS yourself - a prime example of traffic shaping if any.
As for the 'I can use all I pay for'.. try going to a 24/7 gym and get a membership. Start hogging one of the big, expensive machines 24/7. No sweat, you're one user. Ten people start doing it? Problem.40 people? Major problem. Sure, you pay for access whenever you want, but no matter how much you feel entitled to it, it's still a shared resource. The options are to increase price or limit your hogging of the exercise machine. In my experience, most ISP's get the best pipes they can, but bandwidth isn't cheap and it's not always possible to just crank up the bandwidth either.
That's not to say that I think you're not entitled to use whatever you want on the pipe - but by all means, think a bit further and check out what a few Mbps of global transit costs. Either you buy them yourself, or you buy them shared and.. well.. have to accept that they are, in fact, shared.
* Service level control (give the customer the service level they pay for) * Prioritizing empty acks for improved transfer speed * Congestion avoidance - if you're approaching the wirespeed, you'd rather want to drop a packet from something non-interactive than say, a DNS query. Well, given a normal ISP consumer scenario anyhow.
The problem isn't in the contents, it's in the amount. If you've got a limited resource - bandwidth - there's two ways of going about sharing it: Either you got access to your own little slice of the fat pipe (not a whole lot), or a collective/shared pool (much more), but it is just that - shared.
You can, of course, refer to your 'right' to use the pipe however you deem fit - but let's face it - if it's your torrent or 400 average web users that should be prioritized right now, your torrent wouldn't win either the sound business sense vote, nor the democratic one.
Sure, one can say that the provider should upgrade the bandwidth and equipment - to some extent this is possible, of course, but it's not exactly cheap equipment we're talking here and there has to be some sort of ROI, or there won't be a provider.
So if you buy these basic ideas - you're paying for a shared resource and it can't be magically made into an un-shared resource - what would you say is a fair way of doling out the bandwith in?
Well, you could make an analogy about a 24/7 mid-city gym. The gym has a number of exercise machines and a whole lot more customers. There's some fixed costs - square footage and exercise machine leases, and staff. In order to cover these costs, you need more customers than there's available machines.
The model would be shot if a number of people started hogging machines 24/7. It's not humanly possible - or preferable to do so (hell, who'd want to live at the gym?), and this is what's different about bandwidth and ISP's - you let the computer hog the resources - and it don't mind living at the gym.
One option for the ISP would be to give each customer his/her share of the total - comparable to say, getting a whole lot of skip ropes (cheap) and provide the customer with one each, the fee covering the square footage required for a lot of skipping, nothing else.
The other option is to get all these sexy machines and hope that cooperative usage of the resources and best effort - waiting for the machine for a few minutes if all the machines of your preferred type are in use - but again, the model is shot as soon as people start hogging them 24/7.
I suppose the analogy works for any number of other scenarios. Try sitting at a restaurant for six hours every day, buying one coffee. You will get thrown out before long. You can claim your 'right' to sit there since you pay them money, but from their perspective, you're a freeloader.
That's not to say some ISP's aren't cheapskates or have to cover up bad hardware investments by being so, but if anyone thinks that it's their money-given right to use up the last bit of pipe given to them and do so 24/7, well, the option of your own 32kB of (quasi-)guaranteed bandwidth to use in any way you deem fit sucks more and that's what you're ultimately asking for.
One, relatively strong Monopoly (Microsoft) gets screwed in a small town by another absolute monopoly.
Ah, no, sorry, welcome to Sweden. I know things work a bit differently in the states, but we actually got competition.
Lunds energi drop fiber along with their heating pipes and sell net access over that. Other than that, you'd have at least four different DSL providers plus net over CATV. Chances are that you'd actually have another 100Mbit ethernet provider over in Lund on top of that.
Lunds energi is definitely not the only shop in town:-)
It's most likely related to the DHCP issue reported in another post in this thread (it's modded up quite a lot, can't miss it). It's not like noone else has ever seen the issue - I'd even venture that anyone with ISC DHCP (and quite a few other implementations) has - but the normal reaction is just to fix the problem locally. Hell, a one-line code fix, recompile, test, beats supporting a number of anoyed customers. Support costs money. One server fix less so than n helpdesk issues.
Lunds way of handling it is.. well, interesting. I find it rather funny that the local branch of Microsoft claims they never heard of this issue though - 'specially as there's a KB article on it. Plus, it makes you wonder just how much compatibility testing they did with Vista in the first place. It's not like this particular DHCP implementation is the most obscure piece of software ever.
Actually, it sounds like they're blocking rather than shaping and missing some of the traffic. But agreed, it's an ISP problem, not a protocol problem.
It does, however, not really have much to do with the political (and revenue related) aspects of network neutrality that has been discussed in droves. And as for 'real'.. well, that ain't it, guv.
What I would consider fair is that bandwidth be more fairly apportioned. If there is 100Mbs available, and 20 heavy users, you get up to 1/20th of the bandwidth to use as you see fit. You might want to use your piece to make a trouble free VoIP call, play WoW, or download from BT -- BUT IT'S YOUR CHOICE.
And what about the 80 non-heavy users? Wouldn't 'fair' in your scheme be to give each user one Mbps to use as they deem fit then, no matter how heavy they are? That's the point of DPI - to let you use the bandwith that they don't out of their 'fair share', without affecting their user experience by letting you do just that.
Under the non-Net Neutrality proposed by this article, that isn't the case. If you're neighbor is doing something deemed more "worthy" of bandwidth, he may get more of it than you do, despite you both paying exactly the same price to transport bits to and from your house. That, to me, is most decidedly unfair.
Actually 'net neutrality' is a rather weird label to use here. The political discussion about it has been about tiered services where service providers pay premium for prioritized transit. What you're describing is plain and simple traffic shaping and really doesn't have much to do with net neutrality (even if the political version of net neutrality also would be implemented using shaping, of course)
Well, yes. If your bittorrent (encrypted or no) drops a packet when there's congestion, you likely wouldn't give a rats ass. If the same packet is a DNS lookup for you, your neighbour or the guy in the next city, that means someone will have to wait for the website to load for quite a while longer (well, relatively speaking). Hence, if you need to drop SOMETHING (that's congestion for you), the 'fair' bit would be to drop it from your BT.
If you do government work that's truly sensitive and you're worried about privacy concerns, you're doing something wrong by not encrypting it in transit in the first place.
A. Depends on what you're after really - do you want to ID traffic as HTTPS and perhaps prioritize it? Then it works wonders. B. I'm not sure what you're after here, but again, I'd say that particular task is a bit outside of the scope of these machines. As with anything sitting inline, it'd be trivial to capture an email and re-assemble it, but that goes for say, routers, unix firewalls and whatnot as well - and they'd likely be better at that particular task. C. 'Very expensive' is a rather relative term. Does the gear from various vendors come at a substantial dollar value? Yes. But I think you're overestimating the tag. D. As far as you know, yes;-) E. Oh, there's plenty, but I think you'd have to look at it from the ISP or carriers point of view. Just knowing what the hell flows through your network in order to plan upgrades is next to invaluable. Or, adding a few notches of perceived speed by dropping a few packets in BT connections rather than your HTTPS, DNS requests or porn browsing when there's congestion. Or ensuring that your HTTP doesn't get a speed hit for no reason 'cause an ACK got dropped at random, et cetera.
And that's not even going into the scenarios where there *is* a certain bandwidth to utilize, period, and you have to be fair to your customers in some fashion. Think longrange wireless to rural communities or pipes in countries where bandwidth comes at a premium. There's plenty of ISP's in the world that operate on a 4Mbps upstream. In these cases, the argument that your bittorrent is holy and your ISP is evil if they downplay it kind of falls flat. F. You'd be surprised at the amounts of torrent I see at ports 80, 443, 25 & friends. G. Actually, given any modern switching hardware, you could just bypass the devices if they go titsup assuming that's what you want. Cost? A few extra interfaces. Granted, redundancy is a good thing and some will pay extra for it.
It's important to keep in mind that 'Europe' is a number of hugely disparate markets. If you say that 50% of the (commercial home) internet traffic in Scandinavia is BitTorrent, 50% of the traffic in parts of southern europe would be eDonkey. You'd need to sample a LOT of different countries and types of sites to get a fair picture, extrapolating just about anything from just one and saying 'this is Europe' is doomed to be irrelevant.
There was a choice of about two dozen distributed revision control systems around at the time that Linus decided to go with his mate's proprietary product, Bitkeeper, and there was about twice as many as that after that fiasco came to the head that everyone said it would but Linus was incapable of seeing.
It seems that this is my phrase of the day here, but it depends on if you're looking at it from a software activist point of view or a slightly more pragmatic one. Bitkeeper is good, especially if you understand its strengths. In fact, Bitkeeper is very good. Does this mean that Darcs or Monotone sucks? Naturally not. But I'd definitely say that you can't imply that BK was chosen merely because of personal ties.
(..a footnote, but since when is 'personal ties' a bad thing in the free software movement? Even with those evil, bad, nasty proprietary vendor people..)
Who cares what Linus has to say? It's readily apparent that the inevitable consequence will be a shift away from Linux kernel under GPL2 towards Solaris under GPL3.
Well, that depends on if you see it from a software activist point of view or from a make-a-living point of view. Either how, I think it's neither 'inevitable' nor 'readily apparent' that there'd be a lemming run away from Linux and sorry, that kind of rhetoric really doesn't achieve anything.
Yes, you want to see things your way. This is a given for most, if not all, people - seeing things from their perspective. The trick is to accept that hey, someone else that is not me might also be right, despite a differing view..
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this very scenario a while back. It's a series of books about the colonization of Mars, both from a technical and a social viewpoint. Very good sci-fi.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus.. Source Farce to the rescue. Wonder what they were thinking when they thought this up.
Well, for starters you'd need to actually *find* the IP header in the frame before you start mooking around for the transport headers.
Nothing truly original, nothing really noteworthy. I can see this on freshmeat, but - as others have stated - front page material?
If your software is good, you probably don't need to plug it on slashdot yourself in the first place.
It strikes me as odd that they single out Limewire, since Gnutella (which Limewire runs) really isn't that prevalent in the first place and other User Agents are way, way more prevalent than Limewire. Depending on where in the world you happen to be situated, BitTorrent, eDonkey, Ares or Winny/Winmx/Perfect Dark would be the preferred poison, both in terms of hosts and bandwidth consumed.
Which is not to say that there isn't a lot of gnutella out there, but 1/3 of all (consumer) hosts is sheer hogwash. No way I'll be paying for that report, but it sounds like they could be making some very odd assumptions about Gnutella based on network traffic (i.e identify *all* non-port 443 SSL as Gnutella or something equally silly), or just got an extremely skewed host pool they're looking at.
While it doesn't fit everyones taste, backup up to an online service is a fairly cheap way of getting it done. Depending on your needs, amount of data and bandwidth it might be more or less reliable/useful for you than using local disks, but I'd suggest at least looking into it.
Mozy does the job for me. There's oodles of others, but Mozy was the only one I found with a decent Mac client.
..while the US happily tries to strongarm its policy / trade interests pretty much wherever it can (The Pirate Bay is one example), stir up a nationwide fuzz about a braindead woman and her rights to live, consider morality to be superior to choce in many states (gay marriage, right to abortion) and got "in god we trust" printed on every dollar bill.
Sorry guv, but if you - as a nation - were serious about nerfing China over human rights, stop trading. Won't happen, since the US economy would plummet faster than you could say Cheap Plastic Toy, but nonetheless.
Point of all this? The internet is global and as such, control over the (software & allocation) infrastructure should be as well. Yes, global means that other nations does have a say, that's the beauty of it. It doesn't mean that China, Iran or whoever gets any more or less encouraged when it comes to blocking access, despite what some people here might think.
"Ah, but Net Neutrality is fine with traffic shaping and prioritization." see grand-grantparent for someone who thinks otherwise. If this were the case and universally accepted, yes, I'd agree with you somewhat (see below). And I agree with your sentiment that net neutrality in the sense of not doing extortion is a good thing. I'm somewhat tired of the 'my packets are holy' sentiment, though.
The problem with the 'good' net neutrality, still, is that it kind of runs into a grey area once you start talking about peering. What if Google goes to BigISP or BackboneProvider and say 'Hey, we'll peer with you directly'.. they just 'bought' an advantage versus OtherOnlineVideoService. If that's OK, why isn't it OK to do it virtually?. And, if you start limiting peering in the name of fairness, you're probably doing the net in the US a huge disservice..
In short: How do you stop people from being greedy evil fucks without doing a lot of collateral damage?
"Well, if I have troubles getting my acks through, I should probably start pondering whether my pipe should be bigger."
Not really - you have a limited pipe upstream, no? If it's DSL it's probably asymmetric as well, which doesn't exactly help - let's say you use one of those for this particular scenario. Bear with me. And you obviously want to squeeze some more oomph out of it.
Sure, you can ponder if your pipe should be bigger, but the increase in costs from your DSL to something bigger is, assuming there's no operator offering ethernet or fiber locally, prohibitive. You can either take that cost, or get a decent bit more oomph out of your current wire by shaping traffic.
Thing is, you're saying 'all traffic shaping is evil' and say you'd be prepared to use QoS yourself - a prime example of traffic shaping if any.
As for the 'I can use all I pay for'.. try going to a 24/7 gym and get a membership. Start hogging one of the big, expensive machines 24/7. No sweat, you're one user. Ten people start doing it? Problem.40 people? Major problem. Sure, you pay for access whenever you want, but no matter how much you feel entitled to it, it's still a shared resource. The options are to increase price or limit your hogging of the exercise machine. In my experience, most ISP's get the best pipes they can, but bandwidth isn't cheap and it's not always possible to just crank up the bandwidth either.
That's not to say that I think you're not entitled to use whatever you want on the pipe - but by all means, think a bit further and check out what a few Mbps of global transit costs. Either you buy them yourself, or you buy them shared and.. well.. have to accept that they are, in fact, shared.
* Service level control (give the customer the service level they pay for)
* Prioritizing empty acks for improved transfer speed
* Congestion avoidance - if you're approaching the wirespeed, you'd rather want to drop a packet from something non-interactive than say, a DNS query. Well, given a normal ISP consumer scenario anyhow.
That's three. I'm sure you can Google for more.
The problem isn't in the contents, it's in the amount. If you've got a limited resource - bandwidth - there's two ways of going about sharing it: Either you got access to your own little slice of the fat pipe (not a whole lot), or a collective/shared pool (much more), but it is just that - shared.
You can, of course, refer to your 'right' to use the pipe however you deem fit - but let's face it - if it's your torrent or 400 average web users that should be prioritized right now, your torrent wouldn't win either the sound business sense vote, nor the democratic one.
Sure, one can say that the provider should upgrade the bandwidth and equipment - to some extent this is possible, of course, but it's not exactly cheap equipment we're talking here and there has to be some sort of ROI, or there won't be a provider.
So if you buy these basic ideas - you're paying for a shared resource and it can't be magically made into an un-shared resource - what would you say is a fair way of doling out the bandwith in?
Well, you could make an analogy about a 24/7 mid-city gym. The gym has a number of exercise machines and a whole lot more customers. There's some fixed costs - square footage and exercise machine leases, and staff. In order to cover these costs, you need more customers than there's available machines.
The model would be shot if a number of people started hogging machines 24/7. It's not humanly possible - or preferable to do so (hell, who'd want to live at the gym?), and this is what's different about bandwidth and ISP's - you let the computer hog the resources - and it don't mind living at the gym.
One option for the ISP would be to give each customer his/her share of the total - comparable to say, getting a whole lot of skip ropes (cheap) and provide the customer with one each, the fee covering the square footage required for a lot of skipping, nothing else.
The other option is to get all these sexy machines and hope that cooperative usage of the resources and best effort - waiting for the machine for a few minutes if all the machines of your preferred type are in use - but again, the model is shot as soon as people start hogging them 24/7.
I suppose the analogy works for any number of other scenarios. Try sitting at a restaurant for six hours every day, buying one coffee. You will get thrown out before long. You can claim your 'right' to sit there since you pay them money, but from their perspective, you're a freeloader.
That's not to say some ISP's aren't cheapskates or have to cover up bad hardware investments by being so, but if anyone thinks that it's their money-given right to use up the last bit of pipe given to them and do so 24/7, well, the option of your own 32kB of (quasi-)guaranteed bandwidth to use in any way you deem fit sucks more and that's what you're ultimately asking for.
No, it's standard torrent, but you can recognize it by the UA.
One, relatively strong Monopoly (Microsoft) gets screwed in a small town by another absolute monopoly.
:-)
Ah, no, sorry, welcome to Sweden. I know things work a bit differently in the states, but we actually got competition.
Lunds energi drop fiber along with their heating pipes and sell net access over that. Other than that, you'd have at least four different DSL providers plus net over CATV. Chances are that you'd actually have another 100Mbit ethernet provider over in Lund on top of that.
Lunds energi is definitely not the only shop in town
It's most likely related to the DHCP issue reported in another post in this thread (it's modded up quite a lot, can't miss it). It's not like noone else has ever seen the issue - I'd even venture that anyone with ISC DHCP (and quite a few other implementations) has - but the normal reaction is just to fix the problem locally. Hell, a one-line code fix, recompile, test, beats supporting a number of anoyed customers. Support costs money. One server fix less so than n helpdesk issues.
Lunds way of handling it is.. well, interesting. I find it rather funny that the local branch of Microsoft claims they never heard of this issue though - 'specially as there's a KB article on it. Plus, it makes you wonder just how much compatibility testing they did with Vista in the first place. It's not like this particular DHCP implementation is the most obscure piece of software ever.
Ah, yes. The company that managed to switch CPU archs without a huge amount of breakage. Twice. I'm sorry, I fail to see your point here..
Jackass?
Can I use the phone to annoy people no end? Sure.
Can I use my voice to do the same thing? Oh yes.
Solution? Ban the phone and require a mandatory gag ball..? They make about as much sense to me.
Actually, it sounds like they're blocking rather than shaping and missing some of the traffic. But agreed, it's an ISP problem, not a protocol problem.
It does, however, not really have much to do with the political (and revenue related) aspects of network neutrality that has been discussed in droves. And as for 'real'.. well, that ain't it, guv.
What I would consider fair is that bandwidth be more fairly apportioned. If there is 100Mbs available, and 20 heavy users, you get up to 1/20th of the bandwidth to use as you see fit. You might want to use your piece to make a trouble free VoIP call, play WoW, or download from BT -- BUT IT'S YOUR CHOICE.
And what about the 80 non-heavy users? Wouldn't 'fair' in your scheme be to give each user one Mbps to use as they deem fit then, no matter how heavy they are? That's the point of DPI - to let you use the bandwith that they don't out of their 'fair share', without affecting their user experience by letting you do just that.
Under the non-Net Neutrality proposed by this article, that isn't the case. If you're neighbor is doing something deemed more "worthy" of bandwidth, he may get more of it than you do, despite you both paying exactly the same price to transport bits to and from your house. That, to me, is most decidedly unfair.
Actually 'net neutrality' is a rather weird label to use here. The political discussion about it has been about tiered services where service providers pay premium for prioritized transit. What you're describing is plain and simple traffic shaping and really doesn't have much to do with net neutrality (even if the political version of net neutrality also would be implemented using shaping, of course)
Well, yes. If your bittorrent (encrypted or no) drops a packet when there's congestion, you likely wouldn't give a rats ass. If the same packet is a DNS lookup for you, your neighbour or the guy in the next city, that means someone will have to wait for the website to load for quite a while longer (well, relatively speaking). Hence, if you need to drop SOMETHING (that's congestion for you), the 'fair' bit would be to drop it from your BT.
If you do government work that's truly sensitive and you're worried about privacy concerns, you're doing something wrong by not encrypting it in transit in the first place.
A. Depends on what you're after really - do you want to ID traffic as HTTPS and perhaps prioritize it? Then it works wonders. ;-)
B. I'm not sure what you're after here, but again, I'd say that particular task is a bit outside of the scope of these machines. As with anything sitting inline, it'd be trivial to capture an email and re-assemble it, but that goes for say, routers, unix firewalls and whatnot as well - and they'd likely be better at that particular task.
C. 'Very expensive' is a rather relative term. Does the gear from various vendors come at a substantial dollar value? Yes. But I think you're overestimating the tag.
D. As far as you know, yes
E. Oh, there's plenty, but I think you'd have to look at it from the ISP or carriers point of view. Just knowing what the hell flows through your network in order to plan upgrades is next to invaluable. Or, adding a few notches of perceived speed by dropping a few packets in BT connections rather than your HTTPS, DNS requests or porn browsing when there's congestion. Or ensuring that your HTTP doesn't get a speed hit for no reason 'cause an ACK got dropped at random, et cetera.
And that's not even going into the scenarios where there *is* a certain bandwidth to utilize, period, and you have to be fair to your customers in some fashion. Think longrange wireless to rural communities or pipes in countries where bandwidth comes at a premium. There's plenty of ISP's in the world that operate on a 4Mbps upstream. In these cases, the argument that your bittorrent is holy and your ISP is evil if they downplay it kind of falls flat.
F. You'd be surprised at the amounts of torrent I see at ports 80, 443, 25 & friends.
G. Actually, given any modern switching hardware, you could just bypass the devices if they go titsup assuming that's what you want. Cost? A few extra interfaces. Granted, redundancy is a good thing and some will pay extra for it.
It's important to keep in mind that 'Europe' is a number of hugely disparate markets. If you say that 50% of the (commercial home) internet traffic in Scandinavia is BitTorrent, 50% of the traffic in parts of southern europe would be eDonkey. You'd need to sample a LOT of different countries and types of sites to get a fair picture, extrapolating just about anything from just one and saying 'this is Europe' is doomed to be irrelevant.
That is proven by history.
No argument is possible.
Translated: LALALALALALALALALALALA
There was a choice of about two dozen distributed revision control systems around at the time that Linus decided to go with his mate's proprietary product, Bitkeeper, and there was about twice as many as that after that fiasco came to the head that everyone said it would but Linus was incapable of seeing.
It seems that this is my phrase of the day here, but it depends on if you're looking at it from a software activist point of view or a slightly more pragmatic one. Bitkeeper is good, especially if you understand its strengths. In fact, Bitkeeper is very good. Does this mean that Darcs or Monotone sucks? Naturally not. But I'd definitely say that you can't imply that BK was chosen merely because of personal ties.
(..a footnote, but since when is 'personal ties' a bad thing in the free software movement? Even with those evil, bad, nasty proprietary vendor people..)
Who cares what Linus has to say? It's readily apparent that the inevitable consequence will be a shift away from Linux kernel under GPL2 towards Solaris under GPL3.
Well, that depends on if you see it from a software activist point of view or from a make-a-living point of view. Either how, I think it's neither 'inevitable' nor 'readily apparent' that there'd be a lemming run away from Linux and sorry, that kind of rhetoric really doesn't achieve anything.
Yes, you want to see things your way. This is a given for most, if not all, people - seeing things from their perspective. The trick is to accept that hey, someone else that is not me might also be right, despite a differing view..
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about this very scenario a while back. It's a series of books about the colonization of Mars, both from a technical and a social viewpoint. Very good sci-fi.
(Search for 'Red Mars' on amazon)