Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of Intellectual Property is inherently evil.
Which "concept of intellectual property" are you talking about?
IP as it is currently implemented in the law? IP in the patent office fantasy land? IP scientifically and rigorously justified to advance the state of the art? IP that protects hard work and not just fishing expeditions? IP that represents true innovation, as recognized by peers and not some bureaucrat? IP that is unambiguous and not handwaving?
The reality is that the entire patent edifice, as currently implemented, is at the bottom based on a very dubious and entirely arbitrary ideas about what it means to say two ideas are the same or different. It's all hand waving.
The patent office can't even separate new words from new ideas. Let alone something as utterly trivial as (compared to the universe of ideas) e.g. deciding whether two shades of orange are the same or different.
Unlike physical property where boundaries between property items are very carefully defined and generally recognized.
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Patents: When all they've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I didn't say it didn't exist. I said parent post was exaggerating. You too despite your anecdote. Most good quality educational material, including language material, is available on the web these days, and the downloadable material is often cross-platform multimedia files and flash also. If you insist on running MSDOS/MSWIN98 era software I'd suggest you investigate virtual machines. There's now a number of free and paid options available and it's often a good idea to run them anyway to isolate and allow clean restores of poorly written software even if your native OS supports the software directly.
- Specialist software demanded by the teachers (and make no mistake, there's masses of it and a lot of it will be demanded) won't run because that tends to be Windows only.
Unless you can solve this problem, you can provide the most fantastic system in the world and it'll be relegated to the sidelines.
You are exaggerating. Most educational "specialist software" these days are web pages.
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Large, slow code is slower to debug. It costs development time. Those who claim there's a development/code performance tradeoff are blowing hot air.
I doubt DRM was a big deal in this. My roommate has a Zune and the two biggest reasons he hates it are the Zune software (the only way to transfer music to your Zune), and the lock-up issue.
You do realize that DRM was probably the main reason why the Zune software was the only alternative don't you?
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lock in = Death of the free market.
"We" will be dealing with it so long as ignorant end users can execute arbitrary code.
"We" will still be dealing with it, and have been dealing with it for decades, until certain companies start designing their software for their intended audience, rather than some fictional perfect being that never makes a mistakes.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Presumably the reason you are still living in your mother's basement is that your adblock has stopped you seeing all those job ads for posts that pay geeky fat kids to sit on their ass for $200k.
Wrong.
Also, reading your posts, I really think you should see a shrink. You have a lot of anger.
Not particularly, that's just your warped perception.
Steve Ballmer is NOT stalking you.
To a degree, via his marketing drivel, he is. And on a daily basis. I'd be quite happy to mind my own business if he did the same. Marketing parasites in general just reap what they sow. They want to pollute online forums with their meaningless drivel? They are going to get kick-back.
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Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
It's all about mindshare. They can't make it too blatant or people would ignore it. So they create and propagate content-free stories about non-existent* software that plausibly sounds like useful technical information but is in fact just noise to drown out alternative points of view. Astroturfers are contributing to that noise.
* Non-existent because it's not released yet and anybody who makes any assessment/decision at all based on pre-release software is being foolish.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Not to mention the fact that if companies *did* start selling machines with their own flavors of Linux I'm sure they'd quickly spiral into garbage. Think of the crapware on budget PCs. Now imagine an entire OS bastardized, branded and sold to the highest bidder. I could see custom manufacturer Linux distros quickly becoming a total nightmare.
No, different situation. Vendors don't control their Linux customer base nearly as much as with MSWindows. A bastardized Linux can be relatively easily replaced with an alternative linux distribution developed by third parties e.g. Like Acer netbooks where some people didn't like the custom Linux install and replaced it with Ubuntu. MSWindows, not so much.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Fancy that, a content free post that accuses slashdotters of groupthink is modded up to +5, whereas a post that exposes some of the dirty tricks being done gets mysteriously modded down. And associated with twitter. Guilt by association you know. Just for the record I have nothing to do with twitter.
To those reading: they're trying to marginalize any viewpoint which doesn't happen to toe the M$ party line. When similar viewpoints become established in the general population, viewpoints that treat M$ as just one option amongst many that they will lose much of their $40,000,000,000+ per year gravy train.
Perception is everything, particularly in software. People buy based on perception, not reality, and M$ will go to considerable lengths to retain that "M$ is the only option" tax.
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Anonymous company communication can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
M$ has a multi-billion dollar incentive to astroturf all the major computer discussion sites. Unlike some companies they have the alley cat ethics and they've been caught astroturfing several times in the past. Only a small percentage change of opinions in places like slashdot can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales and it's no accident that every time they spam some propaganda like this story that lots of people pop out of the woodwork to support the propaganda. Follow the money. They are currently spamming slashdot with content-free drivel on a daily basis about their Windows7 vapourware, something that doesn't even exist as a product yet, and they are doing everything they can, ethical and unethical, to get mindshare at the expense of anything else. They also appear to be using sock puppets to mod up content free posts that they particularly want to support the M$ propaganda.
If you want to see the true meaning of groupthink head over to microsoft.com or any number of microsoft astroturf web sites. Even if slashdot had bias it only adds a tiny bit of balance to the many millions of dollars of incredibly one-sided propaganda flowing out of Redmond.
Here are some fraudulent ideas that M$ marketing and their astroturfers and sock puppets like to push:
Anybody who disagrees with the M$ party line is a zealot. No, actually no more than any business that chooses to be an exclusively M$ shop. M$ is not the center of the universe and reasonable people don't have to use any of their products at all. Calling somebody a zealot is just M$ marketing's scummy way of trying to marginalize opinions that don't toe the M$ party line.
Choosing non-M$ products is religious. No, actually only people who can't think for themselves might think that. Again another way M$ marketing tries to marginalize alternative points of view.
M$ is treated unfairly in discussion forums. Gee, I'd like to be treated that unfairly. They reap what they sow. If they were truly honest and open and didn't try to manipulate and gouge everybody in sight then they might have a point.
Open source licensing has mysterious dangerous properties making them somehow different from commercial licensing.FUD. No, they don't, all licenses need to be checked for the intended purpose. Whether closed or open is irrelevant.
People helping each other is communist. Yeah, and breathing shared air is communist also.
M$ has the interests of their customers at heart. No they don't, particularly because they are a virtual monopoly and because they have alley cat ethics, they only care about perceptions.
etc. I'm sure others could add more.
Oh, and concerning "M$". It's to add some balance to M$ continuing to put their marketing drivel on general purpose PC keyboards. Personally, I'll be happy to stop when they stop.
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Astroturfers use very creative definitions of what an astroturfer is so they can say with a straight face "I'm not an astroturfer".
Software errors are only one aspect which can fail in such a device anyway.
True but unlike most failure modes software errors are not statistical (e.g. failures follow a normal curve). No amount of blackbox testing is going to be able to tell you that the software won't give the wrong result next Tuesday. See my previous post.
Unfortunately a fairly common misunderstanding of software even amongst programmers, to treat it like a physical process with similar statistical properties, which leads to a lot of bad software and bad software testing. But this is simply wrong in general. See comp.risks for many examples of software failure modes where obscure conditions cause consistent failure.
If the methods are correctly verified, I don't care whats in the "black box" just that it was verified, and unchanging in it's processing.
Software is not statistical. That is, it's quite possible for a piece of software to run a 1000 times giving one result and on the 1001 time give a completely different result (e.g. the millenium bug or a rare race condition). Because of this no amount of black box testing can prove closed source software is correct. Even statistically correct because they have no way of reproducing the exact conditions at the time of the breathalyze (e.g. air temperature, unusual chemicals in air, unusual subject, unusual breathing, different humidity, different usage history, different key press timing, low battery, physical shock, manipulative policeman etc. etc.).
Due to bad coding practices race conditions are extremely common in software. You've seen one every time a program acted even the tiniest bit different on two different runs with the same conditions. Closed source covers a multitude of such sins.
Particularly in legal cases there needs to be accountability, and closed source software means there is no accountability. Source code doesn't solve all problems (bugs and race conditions can be obscure) but it is a helluva a lot better than closed source and black box testing.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Having it hosted on YouTube doesn't cost the taxpayer anything for hosting and distribution, whereas hosting it on a.gov server would have a cost to the taxpayer.
Nonsense, this meme needs to die. Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do. You pay twice, once in time and attention to avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Granted, youtube currently only has non-self advertising on it's search page but like it did with google.com that's going to change. Google is not a charity.
Very little is free and people who keep pushing advertising supported as "free" need to stop listening to the marketing parasites, who have a rather large vested interest in maintaining this fiction.
People like you need to get it through their heads that the because of the ill-defined nature and boundaries of ideas, not to mention the patent office's wild incompetence in differentiating words and the ideas they represent, it means that to say something is, or is not, prior art is a very ill defined idea indeed. They, and you, are just hand waving when you say something is [not] prior art.
As to your example about text files; utterly trivial to implement using Unix group permissions and setgid.
Pretty much all software patents are bogus because the ill defined nature of software blobs and of software terminology means that patent office bureaucrats are endlessly confusing new words with new ideas.
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The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality.
<sarcasm>Yeah, it's quite reasonable that one person should be able to stop potentially billions of people from copying something</sarcasm>.
Get a grip, it's a far more complex question than that. Despite the laughable distribution cartel propaganda.
The law, including copyright and like software, is a creation of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. There are virtually an infinite number of possibilities and to claim that copyright as it is currently implemented is somehow a reasonable representation of "reality" is silly at best and disingenuous at worse.
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Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
But since users' standard practice, as trained by M$ security theatre over many years, is to click on everything that has an OK on it, I think it doesn't matter.
There, fixed that for ya.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Well, for really complete certainty, you could write your own compiler. I think for now it can be assumed that it's not possible to automatically install a backdoor in any arbitrary compiler, without having prior knowledge of how it works.
Na, easy - just have something watching files being created. If it's an executable, patch a backdoor into it via the entry point e.g. something that intercepts file creations. No need to patch all those compilers separately.
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Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
But, of course, if your machine is behind a firewall, they'll just outlaw having firewall because it impedes their ability to investigate you for crimes.
Pointless. Windows/Mac/Linux Update is the back door. As long as you're patching and network connected what firewalls and encryption you're using are almost irrelevant.
This is governments we're talking about, not some criminal. Governments the world over, particularly the US, spend billions on spying. You think they're not going to spend a few thousand organizing a spy package to be downloaded by Windows/Mac/Linux Update at will? It's almost trivial.
While I have no direct evidence I feel you're hopelessly naive if you think they haven't already done it. The cost-benefit ratio is too huge to ignore.
Wouldn't surprise me that the reason governments all over the world have fallen over themselves to cooperate with the US with "anti-terrorism" security theater is partly because they've been given access to those back doors by M$+CIA etc. Wouldn't even be illegal.
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Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
but if you go beyond the star players, you'll quickly find this argument doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny.
Nonsense. My linux installation has more than 1500 packages installed and more than 26,000 packages available, most of them a 2 click install, covering stable, user recommended releases of the vast majority of decent open and free source available. I have never been short of documentation either, though sometimes it is not as well organized as I would like.
Sourceforge and freshmeat have a lot dead, unfinished and bleeding edge projects. So what? That's what open source is, the development process is out in the open. If you want to download a development build then go right ahead but don't pretend you're not a developer.
Closed source vendors love to pretend that their software and their development process is all sweetness and light. They're lying; they have every bit as much crap but because it's closed source it's often hidden.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but not everybody thinks that the concept of Intellectual Property is inherently evil.
Which "concept of intellectual property" are you talking about?
IP as it is currently implemented in the law? IP in the patent office fantasy land? IP scientifically and rigorously justified to advance the state of the art? IP that protects hard work and not just fishing expeditions? IP that represents true innovation, as recognized by peers and not some bureaucrat? IP that is unambiguous and not handwaving?
The reality is that the entire patent edifice, as currently implemented, is at the bottom based on a very dubious and entirely arbitrary ideas about what it means to say two ideas are the same or different. It's all hand waving.
The patent office can't even separate new words from new ideas. Let alone something as utterly trivial as (compared to the universe of ideas) e.g. deciding whether two shades of orange are the same or different.
Unlike physical property where boundaries between property items are very carefully defined and generally recognized.
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Patents: When all they've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I guess you could say it's a form of DRM, but the problem is device support. The Zune software is the only program that can figure out what a Zune is.
Just part of the [DRM] design. Even the cheapest MP3 players support the USB mass storage device class these days.
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Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
I didn't say it didn't exist. I said parent post was exaggerating. You too despite your anecdote. Most good quality educational material, including language material, is available on the web these days, and the downloadable material is often cross-platform multimedia files and flash also. If you insist on running MSDOS/MSWIN98 era software I'd suggest you investigate virtual machines. There's now a number of free and paid options available and it's often a good idea to run them anyway to isolate and allow clean restores of poorly written software even if your native OS supports the software directly.
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Living the American DRM.
It's more a training course in how to use Microsoft Office.
Quite apart from the educational loss that's your tax money subsidizing a non-UK company at the expense of competitors.
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How many proprietary dependencies do your archival backups have?
- Specialist software demanded by the teachers (and make no mistake, there's masses of it and a lot of it will be demanded) won't run because that tends to be Windows only.
Unless you can solve this problem, you can provide the most fantastic system in the world and it'll be relegated to the sidelines.
You are exaggerating. Most educational "specialist software" these days are web pages.
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Large, slow code is slower to debug. It costs development time. Those who claim there's a development/code performance tradeoff are blowing hot air.
I doubt DRM was a big deal in this. My roommate has a Zune and the two biggest reasons he hates it are the Zune software (the only way to transfer music to your Zune), and the lock-up issue.
You do realize that DRM was probably the main reason why the Zune software was the only alternative don't you?
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Unregulated DRM = Total Customer Control = Ultimate Customer Lock in = Death of the free market.
"We" will be dealing with it so long as ignorant end users can execute arbitrary code.
"We" will still be dealing with it, and have been dealing with it for decades, until certain companies start designing their software for their intended audience, rather than some fictional perfect being that never makes a mistakes.
---
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Presumably the reason you are still living in your mother's basement is that your adblock has stopped you seeing all those job ads for posts that pay geeky fat kids to sit on their ass for $200k.
Wrong.
Also, reading your posts, I really think you should see a shrink. You have a lot of anger.
Not particularly, that's just your warped perception.
Steve Ballmer is NOT stalking you.
To a degree, via his marketing drivel, he is. And on a daily basis. I'd be quite happy to mind my own business if he did the same. Marketing parasites in general just reap what they sow. They want to pollute online forums with their meaningless drivel? They are going to get kick-back.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
It's all about mindshare. They can't make it too blatant or people would ignore it. So they create and propagate content-free stories about non-existent* software that plausibly sounds like useful technical information but is in fact just noise to drown out alternative points of view. Astroturfers are contributing to that noise.
* Non-existent because it's not released yet and anybody who makes any assessment/decision at all based on pre-release software is being foolish.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Lots of insecure marketing 'droids here trying to justify their useless "jobs". Ah gee, where's my miniature violin.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Not to mention the fact that if companies *did* start selling machines with their own flavors of Linux I'm sure they'd quickly spiral into garbage. Think of the crapware on budget PCs. Now imagine an entire OS bastardized, branded and sold to the highest bidder. I could see custom manufacturer Linux distros quickly becoming a total nightmare.
No, different situation. Vendors don't control their Linux customer base nearly as much as with MSWindows. A bastardized Linux can be relatively easily replaced with an alternative linux distribution developed by third parties e.g. Like Acer netbooks where some people didn't like the custom Linux install and replaced it with Ubuntu. MSWindows, not so much.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Well, I struck a nerve there! :-)
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Anonymous company communication can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Fancy that, a content free post that accuses slashdotters of groupthink is modded up to +5, whereas a post that exposes some of the dirty tricks being done gets mysteriously modded down. And associated with twitter. Guilt by association you know. Just for the record I have nothing to do with twitter.
To those reading: they're trying to marginalize any viewpoint which doesn't happen to toe the M$ party line. When similar viewpoints become established in the general population, viewpoints that treat M$ as just one option amongst many that they will lose much of their $40,000,000,000+ per year gravy train.
Perception is everything, particularly in software. People buy based on perception, not reality, and M$ will go to considerable lengths to retain that "M$ is the only option" tax.
---
Anonymous company communication can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
By 'astroturfing', do you mean 'having a differing opinion to the groupthink'?
No, he means astroturfing.
M$ has a multi-billion dollar incentive to astroturf all the major computer discussion sites. Unlike some companies they have the alley cat ethics and they've been caught astroturfing several times in the past. Only a small percentage change of opinions in places like slashdot can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales and it's no accident that every time they spam some propaganda like this story that lots of people pop out of the woodwork to support the propaganda. Follow the money. They are currently spamming slashdot with content-free drivel on a daily basis about their Windows7 vapourware, something that doesn't even exist as a product yet, and they are doing everything they can, ethical and unethical, to get mindshare at the expense of anything else. They also appear to be using sock puppets to mod up content free posts that they particularly want to support the M$ propaganda.
If you want to see the true meaning of groupthink head over to microsoft.com or any number of microsoft astroturf web sites. Even if slashdot had bias it only adds a tiny bit of balance to the many millions of dollars of incredibly one-sided propaganda flowing out of Redmond.
Here are some fraudulent ideas that M$ marketing and their astroturfers and sock puppets like to push:
Oh, and concerning "M$". It's to add some balance to M$ continuing to put their marketing drivel on general purpose PC keyboards. Personally, I'll be happy to stop when they stop.
---
Astroturfers use very creative definitions of what an astroturfer is so they can say with a straight face "I'm not an astroturfer".
Software errors are only one aspect which can fail in such a device anyway.
True but unlike most failure modes software errors are not statistical (e.g. failures follow a normal curve). No amount of blackbox testing is going to be able to tell you that the software won't give the wrong result next Tuesday. See my previous post.
Unfortunately a fairly common misunderstanding of software even amongst programmers, to treat it like a physical process with similar statistical properties, which leads to a lot of bad software and bad software testing. But this is simply wrong in general. See comp.risks for many examples of software failure modes where obscure conditions cause consistent failure.
---
Commercial software bigots - a dying breed.
If the methods are correctly verified, I don't care whats in the "black box" just that it was verified, and unchanging in it's processing.
Software is not statistical. That is, it's quite possible for a piece of software to run a 1000 times giving one result and on the 1001 time give a completely different result (e.g. the millenium bug or a rare race condition). Because of this no amount of black box testing can prove closed source software is correct. Even statistically correct because they have no way of reproducing the exact conditions at the time of the breathalyze (e.g. air temperature, unusual chemicals in air, unusual subject, unusual breathing, different humidity, different usage history, different key press timing, low battery, physical shock, manipulative policeman etc. etc.).
Due to bad coding practices race conditions are extremely common in software. You've seen one every time a program acted even the tiniest bit different on two different runs with the same conditions. Closed source covers a multitude of such sins.
Particularly in legal cases there needs to be accountability, and closed source software means there is no accountability. Source code doesn't solve all problems (bugs and race conditions can be obscure) but it is a helluva a lot better than closed source and black box testing.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Having it hosted on YouTube doesn't cost the taxpayer anything for hosting and distribution, whereas hosting it on a .gov server would have a cost to the taxpayer.
Nonsense, this meme needs to die. Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays marketer's salaries? You do. You pay twice, once in time and attention to avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Granted, youtube currently only has non-self advertising on it's search page but like it did with google.com that's going to change. Google is not a charity.
Very little is free and people who keep pushing advertising supported as "free" need to stop listening to the marketing parasites, who have a rather large vested interest in maintaining this fiction.
---
Living the American DRM.
People like you need to get it through their heads that the because of the ill-defined nature and boundaries of ideas, not to mention the patent office's wild incompetence in differentiating words and the ideas they represent, it means that to say something is, or is not, prior art is a very ill defined idea indeed. They, and you, are just hand waving when you say something is [not] prior art.
As to your example about text files; utterly trivial to implement using Unix group permissions and setgid.
Pretty much all software patents are bogus because the ill defined nature of software blobs and of software terminology means that patent office bureaucrats are endlessly confusing new words with new ideas.
---
The name "Copy Right" is incorrect. It's really "Copy Control Privilege". "Patent" is incorrect. It's really "Idea Control Privilege".
The thing of it is that copyright law IS a reasonable reflection of reality.
<sarcasm>Yeah, it's quite reasonable that one person should be able to stop potentially billions of people from copying something</sarcasm>.
Get a grip, it's a far more complex question than that. Despite the laughable distribution cartel propaganda.
The law, including copyright and like software, is a creation of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. There are virtually an infinite number of possibilities and to claim that copyright as it is currently implemented is somehow a reasonable representation of "reality" is silly at best and disingenuous at worse.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
But since users' standard practice, as trained by M$ security theatre over many years, is to click on everything that has an OK on it, I think it doesn't matter.
There, fixed that for ya.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Where the hell are they supposed to get money to fund education?!?
Advertising pays for nothing. Who do you think pays for marketer's salaries?
"Advertising supported" is nothing more than a shell game to hide the cost from the user.
With advertising user just ends up paying double, once in time and attention and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Well, for really complete certainty, you could write your own compiler. I think for now it can be assumed that it's not possible to automatically install a backdoor in any arbitrary compiler, without having prior knowledge of how it works.
Na, easy - just have something watching files being created. If it's an executable, patch a backdoor into it via the entry point e.g. something that intercepts file creations. No need to patch all those compilers separately.
---
Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
But, of course, if your machine is behind a firewall, they'll just outlaw having firewall because it impedes their ability to investigate you for crimes.
Pointless. Windows/Mac/Linux Update is the back door. As long as you're patching and network connected what firewalls and encryption you're using are almost irrelevant.
This is governments we're talking about, not some criminal. Governments the world over, particularly the US, spend billions on spying. You think they're not going to spend a few thousand organizing a spy package to be downloaded by Windows/Mac/Linux Update at will? It's almost trivial.
While I have no direct evidence I feel you're hopelessly naive if you think they haven't already done it. The cost-benefit ratio is too huge to ignore.
Wouldn't surprise me that the reason governments all over the world have fallen over themselves to cooperate with the US with "anti-terrorism" security theater is partly because they've been given access to those back doors by M$+CIA etc. Wouldn't even be illegal.
---
Virus scanners don't detect M$ and US government trojans.
but if you go beyond the star players, you'll quickly find this argument doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny.
Nonsense. My linux installation has more than 1500 packages installed and more than 26,000 packages available, most of them a 2 click install, covering stable, user recommended releases of the vast majority of decent open and free source available. I have never been short of documentation either, though sometimes it is not as well organized as I would like.
Sourceforge and freshmeat have a lot dead, unfinished and bleeding edge projects. So what? That's what open source is, the development process is out in the open. If you want to download a development build then go right ahead but don't pretend you're not a developer.
Closed source vendors love to pretend that their software and their development process is all sweetness and light. They're lying; they have every bit as much crap but because it's closed source it's often hidden.
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.
then my choices are to either quit or stage some sort of elaborate civil disobedience likely to get me fired.
False dichotomy. You're either naive (grow up please), a marketing parasite (kill yourself) or a troll (get a life).
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Beware deceptive astroturfers.