> CentOS is not just "like" RedHat - it literally *IS* RedHat Linux! Same sources, same compile tree.
Soooo? Have you heard of GPL?
> Can you imagine the SHITFIT that Coca-Cola would have if there was a competing product called "Co-sola - Coca-Cola derived soda"???
Last time I checked their recipe was a trade secret (i.e. not even patented); if you managed to steal it and market a "Co-Sola - Coca-Cola-Derived Soda", you'd help them to bust you for theft and jail you. You could also be sued for misusing their registered trademark to sell a competing product. To sum it up: a) Coca Cola's recipe is a proprietary recipe not published under GPL b) You stole it c) You misused their Reg. TM to advertise a competing product And CentOS: a) Is based on Red Hat's OS (GPL) which anyone can redistribute b) They did not steal the source code, SRPMs are publicly available on the Web/FTP and RH is obliged to make them available c) CentOS has not mislead any customers - they only pointed to RH's Web site as the source (base) of their product. And prior to receiving the letter they had a disclaimer about them not being associated with RH in any way.
> RedHat is being very, very good about this.
They're wrong and dicks about the whole thing. Take a look at this post: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1 39384&t hreshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=110&mode=nested&cid=1 1670859
>RHAT (who was terribly inflexible in their support arrangements, and didn't have a good pricing model for compute clusters).
I think they do have one now, but it's still not a good deal. I think it's a better deal to buy software and support from a good HPC vendor (Scali.com, LinuxNetworks.com, etc.) and use CentOS, than pay anything to the OS vendor. If you really run into a problem, you can duplicate it on a RH system and the HPC vendor should solve the bug (if it's their bug) or submit it to RH (which then will be fixed on CentOS too). And maybe the HPC vendor would accept to support CentOS if you paid just a bit more.
> I'd rather go to CentOS but SuSE is more likely to get validation
Sounds reasonable, but you could try CentOS for uniform installs or very small deployments at first, though.
>I mean, if Apple came up with an agreement with Verizon to be their exclusive provider of music
Why would Verizon want to sign such an agreement with **Apple**? Cut out the middleman, I says.
>wouldn't it force the cell phone makers to engineer apple's DRM and iTunes into their future phones?
That seems to be likely and that is why Verizon wouldn't want to have Apple as an exclusive provider - that would automatically make all of their (multimedia-capable) phones more expensive (for the amount of royalties given to Apple and Apple's cut on each and every song sold/rented/streamed).
> if I were a cell phone carrier, wouldn't I want a piece of the action and the opportunity to control media standards?
It's of course very attractive but at the same time it's expensive to play such games.... If you screw up, say goodbye to hundreds of millions of dollars. Carriers are already in deep shite with all those billions sunk on stupid 3G licenses that will have been rendered almost useless by Wi-Max, WLAN, Skype and such...
> Red Hat is spending millions of dollars to make sure that all of this spiffy software plays nice together etc...
Whatever. Microsoft does the same (without leveraging free work of the Fedora and other communities) and noone feels pity for them - people (especially here on/.) still complain how expensive Microsoft software is. So, the same rule applies to RH - who cares. They don't have to do any of that if they don't want to.
>CentOS is taking all of that work -- all of the value that Red Hat *legitimately* adds,
Oops - sorry, pal, the value (compatibility testing, tweaking, etc.) MUST be relased to the public based on the license (GPL) not only agreed (but also vigorously promoted) by Red Hat. CentOS shares all of that work the same way as Red Hat shares all of work done by other distros and volunteers. They (Red Hat) could decide to decline GPL and stop making the OS, that's the choice they have. If this seems too bad a choice, well, send your suggestions to the makers of the next version of GPL which will be worked on this year.
> The "CentOS testing and QA" is hardly even necessary; it's a rubber stamp; the testing is already done upstream.
Pray tell how is RH's effort on 90% of packages that go into RH EL any different from that? And should SuSe Enterprise Linux, because it ships more RPMs than RH EL, be more expensive?
> and makes it available for nothing.
Haha, that's why it's good. That's what proprietary software vendors feel about open source vendors (".. and make it available for *next to* nothing"). Again, RH is in this by their own choice.
>Which is, according to the strict letter of the various licenses, all perfectly legal --but is it fair?
Of course it's fair, any way you look at it (fairness and freedom were the ideas for GPL). For example, consider this - what is the value (in respect to the OS and related services) created by the lawyers who sent that letter to CentOS? Nothing. Yet, they're making money off the whole thing while many members of the CentOS community get nothing although they actively participate in testing/debugging/etc. of many software packages which in turn benefits future relases of Red Hat's non-free (RPM updates are not freely available) software.
Such is GPL - it makes it damn hard to make money.
Legal: sure - we're not there yet, but this is only the beginning. Red Hat did issue cease and desist before (http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2 001/12/11/224122/14)? This isn't anything like that (those guys were indeed violating RH's TM), but it never hurts to be alert.
Google: o "enterprise linux 4" beta - 8,000 results (redhat "enterprise linux 4" - 5,000 results) o redhat "enterprise linux 4" -beta - 7,000 results o "centos 4" - 16,000 results o centos-4.0 - 2,800 results
>I am going to do everything in my power to get CentOS validated now as a computing platform for my employer,
You should contact Caosity's Greg Kurtzer: http://www.caosity.org/contributing/spon soring I often think about that myself - it'd be cheaper for a big user of enterprise Linux to pay for CentOS certification than for RH EL maintenance and licenses.
Migration of RH to CentOS is really easy (I'm sure you already know that). Here's a link to an authoritative source: https://www.redhat.com/archives/redhat-li st/2005-J anuary/msg00286.html
>How Many people knew about CentOS before this story? How many do now?
I did a search on Google: centos - about 920K mentions redhat "enterprise linux" - about 1,200K pages
a) centos is quite generic a name so let's discount their result by 20% b) Red Hat Enterprise Linux probably also appears on as many pages as "rh el" and whatnot
I'd say until last week about million people knew about CentOS, now it's about 10 million. Within a week their FTP servers will become slow as hell:-)
Watch CentOS become enterprise distro #1 in 2005 (CentOS 4 is in beta now).
I haven't tried to do an actual diff on/, but I've used CentOS since "RH AS 2.1" clone times. It is very good.
Here are some reasons: 1) Free 2) Free updates - no fscking around with non-functioning up2date (as opposed to a "pirated" RH EL version). I'm not sure about the delta, but you need quite immediate updates, get Lineox's version which releases updated RPMs as soon as they appear on Red Hat Network. 3) yum - integrated for automated updates and installs 4) Works with 3rd party software that requires RedHat Enterprise Linux - of course noone can guarantee this 100% but I've tried several packages and they worked just fine... 5) Up-to-date ISO relases - for example the current CentOS release is 3.4 which is similar (well, maybe you could say the same) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 4 (hence 3.4). So you don't have to fsck around and download all the updates as you would have to if you started with the original RH EL 3.0 ISOs. 6) As the marketing folks say, it's a great "upgrade path" to RH EL 3.0 users who got stuck with expired support contracts and don't want to shell out $1,500 for another year of RH updates. "Migrating" from RH EL 3.0 to an up-to-date CentOS 3.x takes couple of minutes (upgrade redhat-release to centos-release, install yum and yum cache RPMs, run yum update)
CentOS is the leading free RHEL 3.0 clone distro so try it if you want a free clone, or Lineox if you want a cheap clone with quick updates.
>You must buy per-seat licensing, whether you want support or not.
This has been subject to debate for a while now. I don't think their EULA understood that way is enforceable at all.
How about this: o Buy a copy of RH EL 3.0 o Connect automatically to RHN and download source RPMs; export the directory with SRPM files via NFS o On 20 other RH EL 3.0 servers, mount the exported NFS disk, automatically build and install updated RPMs.
I don't see how this procedure can be in violation of the RH EL 3.0 EULA.
Of course, to be on the safe side, the best is to simply use CentOS.
> Why would it be a problem that Redhat don't want them to do that?
It is a problem because CentOS users should have the right to enjoy continued access to GPL software released by the CentOS distribution. Red Hat has no right to interfere with that.
>Why should Centos's developers care about the feelings of the Redhat, Inc. Why is this news worthy?
It's not about the feelings but about Red Hat's legal threat to very existence of CentOS. Therefore it cannot be ignored.
It is newsworthy because Red Hat is using closed source-like approach to intimidate competing distributions based on same principles as their own Enterprise Linux - namely, freedom, GPL all other crap that Red Hat wants their customers to believe in.
I'm sorry but you can't if they don' want you to. If they redirect all visitors to their home page, unless the visitor has a recent session cookie of Orbitz.com, you won't be able to access anything without first visiting Orbitz.com.
Firefox should have a mechanism to assign different levels of trust to CAs - http://www.openca.org/openca/ would have a higher level and VeriSign a lower level. This could be changed by the end user, though.
When the user gets presented with a dialog box, Firefox would suggest the user to not trust VeriSign-signed sites.
The "VeriSign penalty" could be adjusted in each new release based on their willingness to ge their shit together. Fuckos.
>Anyone know of such a program or the theory behind it?
My wild guess is it's something like Jungian archetypes embedded deep in ever human's mind.
There's a trick where you ask a person to imagine a two digit number and then guess it correctly. I think it's 87 or something like that - everyone thinks of the same number.. Quite freaky. Perhaps you can search the Web for the exact way it works.
> Stupid courts for applying the laws to a criminal. What were they thinking?
That's my point - they applied laws instead of justice.
It's easy to tell by comparing "before" vs. "after" - there's no difference to the so-called victim. If anything, it's worse as the ocassional user could use the default player and now he has to download it.
>The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE.
A tipical/. comment appropriately modded insightful. At the same time it's completely wrong.
Because all the music industry has rights to their content, there is nothing to "give you*", so it's stupid to claim they want to give you LESS. * For example, they can simply allow you (i.e. make it legal) that you can keep downloading shit via P2P networks. They even don't need to provide download service as the content is mostly out there on the Network. Do they want to charge more? As profit-making enterprises, they should be trying to charge more, which is no problem if they offer disproportionately more in return. If you're currently a net-thief (i.e. you steal more than you buy), you'll pay "more" if you buy everything. Folks who pay for all their content will probably pay (relatively) less than they do now.
>They're not going to give us more.
They don't care - they can give you use-rights to everything they own as long as you pay more. For example, if you approach a studio and offer them $10K in cash for "all you can see" I believe they'd accept it as they know they now squeeze (say) $3K per lifetime per customer of your traits. The fact that the average $3K customer sees 1,935 movies for those $3K and you'd see 24,292 titles for your $10K is of no importance whatsoever.
The article is correct in saying that the format of the future is no format at all but not because you buy data (and convert it any way you want) but because you buy use-rights to a song and you don't even need to own the data. Music can be played someplace else and delivered to your earphone's via GPRS phone or DSL.
> The cause of racism is honesty, not overpopulation.
Of course it is. You feel it, and you are honest about it. What you do not know, though, is that not everything's right in your head.
If you seek help, maybe you can become a healthy, happy and free individual.
I'd say you lack self-esteem which you then project unto others. You hate others for what you are.
Read some books about Jung's concept of shadow and its connection to racism and seek professional help.
> You just want to pretend to go along with the current tolerance in the zeitgeist. But, seriously, how long can that last?
You better hope it can last long enough as you may live long enough to become a member of a minority (race). To paraphrase that line from American History X, "in the future, you will be black".
> the laws in Europe. They're actually trying to regulate people's thoughts. It's quite sickenning.
IIRC, in Europe (I think you mean Germany here) they're still free to think whatever they want, but Nazi parties and propaganda are illlegal. What's wrong with that? Like the society needs their contributions!
What is sickening is that people have the ability to hate so much so that they have to be legally restrained from creating a new Nazi state.
P.S. Modding the parent interesting is the triumph of the Slashdot moderation system. Moron after moron...
>So how does the end user benefit from this decision? In my opinion, they don't.
Exactly.
The whole thing was a stupid PR show by the stupid Euro bureaucrats.
When the whole thing was about to unfold, it seemed like some sort of politically-correct push against US-based Microsoft and a welcome boost for the home-grown SuSE and Mandrake.
Well it's 2005 now; Mandrake has been marginalized, SuSE was lucky to be acquired by IBM (their proxy Novell, that is) and enterprises are back to buying U.S. software (Red Hat, SuSE, Microsoft, Solaris, OS X) and services.
On the multi-media side, Windows Media Player has been replaced by another proprietary hardware-software combo (iPod). And Windows customers are extra bothered by the crippled Windows version for which they have to download a multi-MB media player software (as most of them are 10MB or more).
Slashdot Mirror
Right now it's free for us and not free for the advertisers.
Google is a monster "Hit the Monkey" banner add - all it takes for us is to browse its news, search the web and read blogs while ads are popping up.
So far so good! We'll see how long that's gonna last.
>Obviously they're just angling for a discount from Microsoft ;)
;-)
No, from Sun - for the new Star Office 8!
I think this one is the right one:
http://whiteboxlinux.org/
> CentOS is not just "like" RedHat - it literally *IS* RedHat Linux! Same sources, same compile tree.
1 39384&t hreshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=110&mode=nested&cid=1 1670859
Soooo? Have you heard of GPL?
> Can you imagine the SHITFIT that Coca-Cola would have if there was a competing product called "Co-sola - Coca-Cola derived soda"???
Last time I checked their recipe was a trade secret (i.e. not even patented); if you managed to steal it and market a "Co-Sola - Coca-Cola-Derived Soda", you'd help them to bust you for theft and jail you. You could also be sued for misusing their registered trademark to sell a competing product.
To sum it up:
a) Coca Cola's recipe is a proprietary recipe not published under GPL
b) You stole it
c) You misused their Reg. TM to advertise a competing product
And CentOS:
a) Is based on Red Hat's OS (GPL) which anyone can redistribute
b) They did not steal the source code, SRPMs are publicly available on the Web/FTP and RH is obliged to make them available
c) CentOS has not mislead any customers - they only pointed to RH's Web site as the source (base) of their product. And prior to receiving the letter they had a disclaimer about them not being associated with RH in any way.
> RedHat is being very, very good about this.
They're wrong and dicks about the whole thing.
Take a look at this post:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=
Very clear and informative, thanks!
You should instead take a look at these two HPC-focused clones:
1) Rocks
http://www.rocksclusters.org/
2) Fermi Linux
www-oss.fnal.gov/projects/fermilinux
>RHAT (who was terribly inflexible in their support arrangements, and didn't have a good pricing model for compute clusters).
I think they do have one now, but it's still not a good deal.
I think it's a better deal to buy software and support from a good HPC vendor (Scali.com, LinuxNetworks.com, etc.) and use CentOS, than pay anything to the OS vendor.
If you really run into a problem, you can duplicate it on a RH system and the HPC vendor should solve the bug (if it's their bug) or submit it to RH (which then will be fixed on CentOS too).
And maybe the HPC vendor would accept to support CentOS if you paid just a bit more.
> I'd rather go to CentOS but SuSE is more likely to get validation
Sounds reasonable, but you could try CentOS for uniform installs or very small deployments at first, though.
>I mean, if Apple came up with an agreement with Verizon to be their exclusive provider of music
Why would Verizon want to sign such an agreement with **Apple**? Cut out the middleman, I says.
>wouldn't it force the cell phone makers to engineer apple's DRM and iTunes into their future phones?
That seems to be likely and that is why Verizon wouldn't want to have Apple as an exclusive provider - that would automatically make all of their (multimedia-capable) phones more expensive (for the amount of royalties given to Apple and Apple's cut on each and every song sold/rented/streamed).
> if I were a cell phone carrier, wouldn't I want a piece of the action and the opportunity to control media standards?
It's of course very attractive but at the same time it's expensive to play such games.... If you screw up, say goodbye to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Carriers are already in deep shite with all those billions sunk on stupid 3G licenses that will have been rendered almost useless by Wi-Max, WLAN, Skype and such...
> Red Hat is spending millions of dollars to make sure that all of this spiffy software plays nice together etc...
/.) still complain how expensive Microsoft software is. So, the same rule applies to RH - who cares. They don't have to do any of that if they don't want to.
Whatever. Microsoft does the same (without leveraging free work of the Fedora and other communities) and noone feels pity for them - people (especially here on
>CentOS is taking all of that work -- all of the value that Red Hat *legitimately* adds,
Oops - sorry, pal, the value (compatibility testing, tweaking, etc.) MUST be relased to the public based on the license (GPL) not only agreed (but also vigorously promoted) by Red Hat.
CentOS shares all of that work the same way as Red Hat shares all of work done by other distros and volunteers.
They (Red Hat) could decide to decline GPL and stop making the OS, that's the choice they have.
If this seems too bad a choice, well, send your suggestions to the makers of the next version of GPL which will be worked on this year.
> The "CentOS testing and QA" is hardly even necessary; it's a rubber stamp; the testing is already done upstream.
Pray tell how is RH's effort on 90% of packages that go into RH EL any different from that?
And should SuSe Enterprise Linux, because it ships more RPMs than RH EL, be more expensive?
> and makes it available for nothing.
Haha, that's why it's good.
That's what proprietary software vendors feel about open source vendors (".. and make it available for *next to* nothing").
Again, RH is in this by their own choice.
>Which is, according to the strict letter of the various licenses, all perfectly legal --but is it fair?
Of course it's fair, any way you look at it (fairness and freedom were the ideas for GPL).
For example, consider this - what is the value (in respect to the OS and related services) created by the lawyers who sent that letter to CentOS? Nothing. Yet, they're making money off the whole thing while many members of the CentOS community get nothing although they actively participate in testing/debugging/etc. of many software packages which in turn benefits future relases of Red Hat's non-free (RPM updates are not freely available) software.
Such is GPL - it makes it damn hard to make money.
Okay, I missed the irony in your comments....
2 001/12/11/224122/14)?
Legal: sure - we're not there yet, but this is only the beginning.
Red Hat did issue cease and desist before (http://www.infoanarchy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=
This isn't anything like that (those guys were indeed violating RH's TM), but it never hurts to be alert.
Google:
o "enterprise linux 4" beta - 8,000 results
(redhat "enterprise linux 4" - 5,000 results)
o redhat "enterprise linux 4" -beta - 7,000 results
o "centos 4" - 16,000 results
o centos-4.0 - 2,800 results
>I am going to do everything in my power to get CentOS validated now as a computing platform for my employer,
n soring
i st/2005-J anuary/msg00286.html
You should contact Caosity's Greg Kurtzer:
http://www.caosity.org/contributing/spo
I often think about that myself - it'd be cheaper for a big user of enterprise Linux to pay for CentOS certification than for RH EL maintenance and licenses.
Migration of RH to CentOS is really easy (I'm sure you already know that).
Here's a link to an authoritative source:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/redhat-l
Good luck~!
>How Many people knew about CentOS before this story? How many do now?
:-)
I did a search on Google:
centos - about 920K mentions
redhat "enterprise linux" - about 1,200K pages
a) centos is quite generic a name so let's discount their result by 20%
b) Red Hat Enterprise Linux probably also appears on as many pages as "rh el" and whatnot
I'd say until last week about million people knew about CentOS, now it's about 10 million. Within a week their FTP servers will become slow as hell
Watch CentOS become enterprise distro #1 in 2005 (CentOS 4 is in beta now).
>How accurate a clone is it?
/, but I've used CentOS since "RH AS 2.1" clone times. It is very good.
I haven't tried to do an actual diff on
Here are some reasons:
1) Free
2) Free updates - no fscking around with non-functioning up2date (as opposed to a "pirated" RH EL version). I'm not sure about the delta, but you need quite immediate updates, get Lineox's version which releases updated RPMs as soon as they appear on Red Hat Network.
3) yum - integrated for automated updates and installs
4) Works with 3rd party software that requires RedHat Enterprise Linux - of course noone can guarantee this 100% but I've tried several packages and they worked just fine...
5) Up-to-date ISO relases - for example the current CentOS release is 3.4 which is similar (well, maybe you could say the same) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 4 (hence 3.4). So you don't have to fsck around and download all the updates as you would have to if you started with the original RH EL 3.0 ISOs.
6) As the marketing folks say, it's a great "upgrade path" to RH EL 3.0 users who got stuck with expired support contracts and don't want to shell out $1,500 for another year of RH updates. "Migrating" from RH EL 3.0 to an up-to-date CentOS 3.x takes couple of minutes (upgrade redhat-release to centos-release, install yum and yum cache RPMs, run yum update)
CentOS is the leading free RHEL 3.0 clone distro so try it if you want a free clone, or Lineox if you want a cheap clone with quick updates.
>RH will lose their TM rights if they don't try to protect them!!! (it's the law)
To protect them! That's so clever.
And can you now give examples of trademark rights violated by CentOS (presumably this protection is needed because of someone's violation)
>You must buy per-seat licensing, whether you want support or not.
This has been subject to debate for a while now.
I don't think their EULA understood that way is enforceable at all.
How about this:
o Buy a copy of RH EL 3.0
o Connect automatically to RHN and download source RPMs; export the directory with SRPM files via NFS
o On 20 other RH EL 3.0 servers, mount the exported NFS disk, automatically build and install updated RPMs.
I don't see how this procedure can be in violation of the RH EL 3.0 EULA.
Of course, to be on the safe side, the best is to simply use CentOS.
> Why would it be a problem that Redhat don't want them to do that?
It is a problem because CentOS users should have the right to enjoy continued access to GPL software released by the CentOS distribution. Red Hat has no right to interfere with that.
>Why should Centos's developers care about the feelings of the Redhat, Inc. Why is this news worthy?
It's not about the feelings but about Red Hat's legal threat to very existence of CentOS.
Therefore it cannot be ignored.
It is newsworthy because Red Hat is using closed source-like approach to intimidate competing distributions based on same principles as their own Enterprise Linux - namely, freedom, GPL all other crap that Red Hat wants their customers to believe in.
I thought Hed Rat was the agreed upon alternative...
> I can look at it any damn way I'd like
I'm sorry but you can't if they don' want you to.
If they redirect all visitors to their home page, unless the visitor has a recent session cookie of Orbitz.com, you won't be able to access anything without first visiting Orbitz.com.
Firefox should have a mechanism to assign different levels of trust to CAs - http://www.openca.org/openca/ would have a higher level and VeriSign a lower level.
This could be changed by the end user, though.
When the user gets presented with a dialog box, Firefox would suggest the user to not trust VeriSign-signed sites.
The "VeriSign penalty" could be adjusted in each new release based on their willingness to ge their shit together. Fuckos.
>Anyone know of such a program or the theory behind it?
My wild guess is it's something like Jungian archetypes embedded deep in ever human's mind.
There's a trick where you ask a person to imagine a two digit number and then guess it correctly. I think it's 87 or something like that - everyone thinks of the same number.. Quite freaky. Perhaps you can search the Web for the exact way it works.
> Stupid courts for applying the laws to a criminal. What were they thinking?
That's my point - they applied laws instead of justice.
It's easy to tell by comparing "before" vs. "after" - there's no difference to the so-called victim.
If anything, it's worse as the ocassional user could use the default player and now he has to download it.
>The music industry wants to give us LESS and charge us MORE.
/. comment appropriately modded insightful. At the same time it's completely wrong.
A tipical
Because all the music industry has rights to their content, there is nothing to "give you*", so it's stupid to claim they want to give you LESS.
* For example, they can simply allow you (i.e. make it legal) that you can keep downloading shit via P2P networks. They even don't need to provide download service as the content is mostly out there on the Network.
Do they want to charge more?
As profit-making enterprises, they should be trying to charge more, which is no problem if they offer disproportionately more in return. If you're currently a net-thief (i.e. you steal more than you buy), you'll pay "more" if you buy everything. Folks who pay for all their content will probably pay (relatively) less than they do now.
>They're not going to give us more.
They don't care - they can give you use-rights to everything they own as long as you pay more. For example, if you approach a studio and offer them $10K in cash for "all you can see" I believe they'd accept it as they know they now squeeze (say) $3K per lifetime per customer of your traits. The fact that the average $3K customer sees 1,935 movies for those $3K and you'd see 24,292 titles for your $10K is of no importance whatsoever.
The article is correct in saying that the format of the future is no format at all but not because you buy data (and convert it any way you want) but because you buy use-rights to a song and you don't even need to own the data.
Music can be played someplace else and delivered to your earphone's via GPRS phone or DSL.
I feel sorry for you.
> The cause of racism is honesty, not
overpopulation.
Of course it is. You feel it, and you
are honest about it. What you do not
know, though, is that not everything's
right in your head.
If you seek help, maybe you can become a
healthy, happy and free individual.
I'd say you lack self-esteem which you
then project unto others. You hate others
for what you are.
Read some books about Jung's concept of
shadow and its connection to racism and
seek professional help.
> You just want to pretend to go along
with the current tolerance in the zeitgeist.
But, seriously, how long can that last?
You better hope it can last long enough as
you may live long enough to become a member
of a minority (race).
To paraphrase that line from American
History X, "in the future, you will be
black".
> the laws in Europe. They're actually
trying to regulate people's thoughts. It's
quite sickenning.
IIRC, in Europe (I think you mean Germany
here) they're still free to think whatever
they want, but Nazi parties and propaganda
are illlegal. What's wrong with that? Like
the society needs their contributions!
What is sickening is that people have the
ability to hate so much so that they have to
be legally restrained from creating a new
Nazi state.
P.S.
Modding the parent interesting is the
triumph of the Slashdot moderation system.
Moron after moron...
>So how does the end user benefit from this decision? In my opinion, they don't.
Exactly.
The whole thing was a stupid PR show by the stupid Euro bureaucrats.
When the whole thing was about to unfold, it seemed like some sort of politically-correct push against US-based Microsoft and a welcome boost for the home-grown SuSE and Mandrake.
Well it's 2005 now; Mandrake has been marginalized, SuSE was lucky to be acquired by IBM (their proxy Novell, that is) and enterprises are back to buying U.S. software (Red Hat, SuSE, Microsoft, Solaris, OS X) and services.
On the multi-media side, Windows Media Player has been replaced by another proprietary hardware-software combo (iPod).
And Windows customers are extra bothered by the crippled Windows version for which they have to download a multi-MB media player software (as most of them are 10MB or more).
Congratulations to the stupid Euro government!
>Google is one of the companies that keep using "beta" term for years for its products
You can't claim the other way around doesn't work either.
Microsoft has been shipping beta-quality products as "Final Release" for years and they've done sooo well for themselves!
P.S. I don't really think so, it's just a joke.