Many of them being family guys, they cannot turn these offers down due to finances. Kids are expensive, wives are expensive, SUVs are pricy, gas is pricy, taxes, computer hardware, and on and on.
Well, then, why not child prostitution, or organ bootlegging, or dealing crack? Or working for Al Quaida? A man's just *gotta* keep his huge azz-guzzling Sherman tank of an SUV going and meet his monthly cell-phone charges! Do we really have to hash this out again? Danny-boy's conscience *told* him that it wasn't the right thing to do, and he *did* *not* *care*. Be a cold day in hell before any amount of money would get me into Redmond, unless it was to set it on fire. There's a difference between being hog-rich for yourself, and making the world rich for everybody. Both kinds of wealth benefit the individual. And I'll point it out tirelessly every time somebody trots out this apologise-for-Dan sermon. Not to troll or flame, but because it makes me sick to see people who've been lied to so much, that they begin to lie to themselves.
He now works for the company currently slandering his previous life's work. Doesn't look like he did much to "help them better understand Open Source", now, did it?
And can you Debian people see now what you're doing to Linux? Only a week or two ago, I said that Debian/Ubuntu gives Linux a bad name.
Folks, if you let somebody tell you "You're too stupid, gimme that, I'll do it for you!!!" and snatch your work out of your hands, it is a guarantee that they will screw it up. Stick to distros where you have some control over your own system, and that are at least tolerant towards builing your own apps from scratch and configuring things the way you like, or resign yourself to a life of using only what you're given, locked in by somebody else's idea of what should run on your computer. This applies to anything not Debian-based. Even RPMs and.tgz's can be disassembled and hand-rolled. But how many people resign themselves to a lifetime of Windows, based on their one trial of Linux being a Debian experience that one of the zealots pushed them into?
Slashdot is a bunch geeks who are good with technology, but that doesn't make any of us legal experts in any way shape or form.
I notice that legal-knowledge and computer-knowledge are seldom found in the same brain. It seems like to develop one, you must neglect the other. It could be because they're mutually exclusive skill-sets: Computer language is designed to make the most obtuse and abstract concepts as clear and simple as possible (in order to be able to explain it's meaning to the computer), whereas legalese is designed to obfuscate the clear and simple into chaos (in order to hide it's meaning from humans).
I can't believe the stories I'm hearing. People, you DO have a right to read something before you sign it. I have never put pen to paper on anything so much as a credit-card reciept without at least giving it a cursory glance.
On being hired, I read through every piece of paper as quickly as I can, and stop and ask questions if anything seems fuzzy. I always make it a point to ask at least one question, even if it's bogus, just to show that I'm not a lump. I explain that I want to know the rules so that I can follow them. If I'm pressured to sign without reading after that, I get up and walk. I've never had to, because employers CAN be taken to court about that.
Coming from one of the hardest-core Linux zealots: MacIntosh. MacIntosh is about ten-heptillion evil-points behind Microsoft. They would have to resort to mass genocide just to keep up.
Widdle Microsoft doesn't wike it when their Borg wecover and wejoin the outside world.
Color them blue for boo-hoo-hoo. Gentoo users should indeed file a suit on Microsoft, as well as every company that has ever had an employee devoured by the giant on the Red Hill.
You say "proprietary software" and I say "Linux". You say "software patents" and I say "GPL". You say "DRM! We'll control you from your hardware since we can't do it in software! Ha! We gotcha!" and I say "soldering iron". And after they outlaw soldering irons, I guess only outlaws will be able to get you a deal on one.
Could ever a more noble law-breaker be, than he or she who steals power from the despots and turns it into freedom to give to the people? I wish Linux were illegal right now, because I'd enjoy using it that much more!!!
Configuring Unix: 10 times as much time as Windows
Count the binaries. Unix/Linux comes with ten times the programs that Windows does. Especially the free stuff out of the box. Windows comes on one disk. The mean Linux distro release size is three disks - and with DVD technology, the size is quickly growing. Not to mention that if Windows opened it's code and half of Windows came as configurable shell scripts, so that it was possible to tweak it, you'd spend the same proportionate amount of time tweaking Windows - and in the end, because you had fixed it, you wouldn't have the Windows system being a pain in the butt.
I don't know what everybody else downloaded, but I downloaded an operating system. For my computer. It works just fine for that purpose. OK, it works terrifically!
It's spelled "operating" system, not "topple Bill Gates and rule the world" system.
People hate Linux because it's too hard? Good, let them.
The rest of the world is Bill Gates' slave? No skin off my nose!
Linux isn't attracting a huge market share, we're not paradigming the ramifications of the impacted advanced, integrated metaphor, or whatever kind of noise you make at one of those business meeting things? Cool beans!
So we already (a) RUIN Linux by making it so retarded that we can barely find a decent distro, just so we could get Joe Sixpack to use it, and even that wasn't pandering to enough ignorance, we have to (b) now ditch all our choices, effectively eradicating everything but the stupidest possible implementation of Linux, which we then get to have as our "Linisoft".
Somebady has to say it: *climbing onto chair* "Are these people OUT of their FUCKING MINDS?????"
Windows applications, such as a calculator and a sorting program, primarily in the C# programming language.....Thats C#, not VB! I'm not an MS expert, but I say thats pretty damn good for a nine year old!
You're, uh, welcome to be impressed if you want. My daughter's eight, and she programs a little in Python. When I was eight, I was programming a little in Assembler and BASIC. Calc apps and bubble sorts are ten-liners. I've seen C programs do it in one. This is very good performance, but not exceptional.
Over here, we call those "script kiddies". They're the ones attacking your tiny leaf site with a laughably weak attack in the hopes of digitally spray-painting "|{-R4d |-|aQ3r5 5Tr1|{ 4g41N !!!" all over your web page. But as I said, the sad thing is that America is knowledge-deprived enough now that this little girl could easily own most of us, and we'd be glad to hand over the control to her.
A Microsoft product is going to look like poo on toast and make my monitor perform at it's worst. I thought that was their corporate mission statement? Isn't that framed on the wall at Redmond somewhere?
*groan* No, people, you don't need to go out and buy a new $300 monitor to avoid this. This is NEW technology. Go to your local used PC dealer and buy a USED monitor, which won't be capable of letting Big Brother have his little peep-show. For $25 bucks, you can get whatever was top-of-the-line just five years ago.
PS: just learn a little about hardware, and you'll never have to sweat this kind of restriction. See, proprietary systems want another pound of flesh out of you every six months, so they deliberately release new, identical garbage with different colors all the time. This compells you to keep going out and buying new hardware, throwing away hardware that may have another 50-years worth of use . This is about half of what created systems like Linux. We Linux geeks are coming in behind you, scooping up the virtually free hardware, and installing new operating systems on it that make it work so good, it out-performs today's newest, high-end machinery. The hardware almost lasts forever. And what the heck, I buy in quanity, so I always have backups.
So thank you, Joe Sixpack, for burn-testing the $2000 dollar system for me and then letting me get it for $200 just six months later! Now that you've spent all the money on it and thrown it out in frustration when trashy software made it perform like crap, I'll scoop it up and run a real system on it and have a machine that'll give me at least ten years of use.
I now agree, Linux is too hard. You people are unable to cope with it, so don't use it. That's right! Run, *run*, RUN away from the scary, scary, command line prompt! Leave Linux cheap and plentiful for me! Bwah-hah-ha!
We've been trying to dumb it down until this year, we have actually succeeded in producing a few distros which are ten times the bumbling moron that Windows is, and people still scream that it's too hard for them. Good! What a relief! Run away back to your little Freecell toys and AOL!METOOA/S/L???AOL!! and your Pogo.com and your MP3 hoards and your spam 'n' meatloaf w/ side of killer virus... and we'll quit trying to market Linux to the mainstream and just keep it Runic and Arcane for us geeks, which is just how we liked it anyway!
My thanks goes out to the Debian and Ubuntu team, for giving Linux a bad name just in time to stop it from being ruined by becoming too popular! That would have sucked, having to switch to BSD...
Private schools all the way. Even if someone wants to send their kids to an Islamic fundamentalist madrassas.
Elsewhere in this haystack is my needle about how I dropped out of school at a young age and educated myself. I agree with you 100%, except for one small detail: get ready for tearful news! Ready for this? I PRIMARILY WENT TO PRIVATE BAPTIST SCHOOLS!!!
Private religeous schools, answer they not be! The only differences I found from private school: (1) my sucker parents had to pay a bill for it. (2) In addition to how much regular school sucked, private religeous schools just ram a Bible or Torah or Koran up your ass and set it on fire. Hence, you "unlearn" everything you learned in public school in an attempt to have religeous brain-washing replace it. (3) WHO watches the school to ensure that they give your kid his/her tuition's worth? All the government asks of a private school is the same thing it asks of a public one - I have never seen a whit of intellectual difference between alumni of either as adults. (4) There was just as much dope, gangs, sex, and violence on the Church campus. The only difference being, mainly, that un-worldly, not-very-streetwise church folk are easier to lie to when you get caught: "No, that's not coke, that's some laundry detergent for my gym clothes."
Haven't you heard all the news about predetory Army recruiters lately? "No Child Left Behind", it turns out, is actually their slogan for how to get enough soldiers to fight their perpetual wars.
The nonsense that they need to read what interests them is ruining kids.
Not that one freak occurance disproves your years of observation, but I would just like to offer that I am an adult who polishes off an average of 3 to 4 books per week...*book* books, like Michener novels and physics textbooks (for *pleasure!*), yet when I was a kid, I also read my ample share of Spiderman comics, Little-Golden books, Mad magazine, and yes, Playboy, too! More likely it's the fact that, given five-minutes-per-week attention to reading, (during a longish TV commercial?), that five minutes isn't likely to be particularly enriched from the pages of Playboy (or Maxim, these days).
Mu...Chinese for "You just asked a question that shows you do not understand the problem."
I dropped out of school at a young age and laughed my ass off at anybody who told me I had done wrong by myself. I set out to pursue my own studies, and have reached middle age without stopping. Funny, I always ended up working elbow to elbow with the college graduates, getting paid in the same scale as they, and more likely than not I was training them. The only difference was, my paycheck went into the savings account while theirs went to pay off student loan debt.
At least in the US, the damage is done and set in concrete. The trend will only get worse. A nation bent on being a totalitarian global empire can only spare the money from the bombs-and-missile fund to "waste" on "education" that which is only sufficient to produce a semi-civilized human being. Sixteen years of school, even with straight A's, gets you to the point where you can work a cash register or fire an AK-47...that's *all* the government needs (it believes!) 95% of the people to do, so that's all it provides.
Change it? Who you gonna convince? We have people dying of old age who grew up in this system, now, and if you've been locked in a prison cell your whole life, then, baby, that's the whole world to you!
My advice: Steal what's valuable. No, not money! Money is just trading stamps for gasoline, groceries, housing, and the rest buys you pride; It's primary purpose is to keep you focused on the wrong thing. Steal time. Steal knowledge. Steal information. Not to say take it away from other people - I can give you all my information and still have as much as when I started. But if I'm a professor, I have to shut up and only give it to the people who pay for the piece of paper - otherwise, who would pay for what they could get for free? Steal your own mind back from the people who want to deprive you of it!
Been there, done that. It was stupid and broken. It was not hard to use. Linux from Scratch is hard to use, because you have to know what you are doing. That wasn't my problem with Sarge. My problem with Debian Sarge was that it was stupid and broken.
what was popular instead of what works for us, we might be using M$.
You already are. "Windows II" is spelled U-b-u-n-t-u. Don't lecture me about what's popular when your Debian-based Ubuntu is getting more than double the hits of the the second-most-popular (Mandrake!) on Distrowatch's meter. I like Slackware - right down at the bottom of the list, and hence not so dumbed down as to be stupid and broken.
{ Typing "man standards", oops, that didn't come with my distro, I better download it. Oops, this download is in.arj format, I can't open it with tar, gunzip, bunzip, unzip, or FileRoller, better download the program that does that...Eek! It seg-faulted on me when I pressed "?" ! How do I use this thing? Better RTFM...oops, the manual is in pdf format so I can't read it with man, info, less, lynx, emacs, links, nano, pico, or zeppo! I need the pdf reader...hey, the pdf download says "pdf.3.5.7.8-91.2-f3.tar.bz2.zip.rpm.deb.tgz" how did they do that? }
Heh, and you complain because install packages *only* come in about five flavors? In the Linux world, that's a miracle!
will they get off their high horse about Debian Sta(b)le
Yeah, and for that matter, can Debian at last quit pissing about how it's the One, True, Honest-To_God Pure, Holy, Sacramental, Big Kahuna Free Software Linux and everybody else is shit, now that they're going enterprise? Especially since all they ever did was take the same GNU/Linux programs that ALL other distributions use, only the versions that are two years out of date, and wrapped them in their broken package-manager-format and bury them behind it's broken installer?
but it doesn't appear Debian's major user base are businesses.
Yet another excellent question: just who the heck *are* these people who swear by Debian, anyway? Actually, I think Debian is used entirely by it's own developer base. If anybody asks for business support, they say, "We're free software only." If anybody tries to install it on a home machine for personal use, they say, "It's not for home use." If you try to use it for a desktop, you hear, "It's mainly aimed at the server market." If you try to use it for a server, somebody asks, "Who ever heard of a 14-disk server distribution?" Are the disks still good for frisbees and coasters?
Extra credit: This news coming on the heels of the story of just two days ago, that Ubuntu announced *it's* corporate backing, does this tell us anything?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then, why not child prostitution, or organ bootlegging, or dealing crack? Or working for Al Quaida? A man's just *gotta* keep his huge azz-guzzling Sherman tank of an SUV going and meet his monthly cell-phone charges! Do we really have to hash this out again? Danny-boy's conscience *told* him that it wasn't the right thing to do, and he *did* *not* *care*. Be a cold day in hell before any amount of money would get me into Redmond, unless it was to set it on fire. There's a difference between being hog-rich for yourself, and making the world rich for everybody. Both kinds of wealth benefit the individual. And I'll point it out tirelessly every time somebody trots out this apologise-for-Dan sermon. Not to troll or flame, but because it makes me sick to see people who've been lied to so much, that they begin to lie to themselves.
He now works for the company currently slandering his previous life's work. Doesn't look like he did much to "help them better understand Open Source", now, did it?
Folks, if you let somebody tell you "You're too stupid, gimme that, I'll do it for you!!!" and snatch your work out of your hands, it is a guarantee that they will screw it up. Stick to distros where you have some control over your own system, and that are at least tolerant towards builing your own apps from scratch and configuring things the way you like, or resign yourself to a life of using only what you're given, locked in by somebody else's idea of what should run on your computer. This applies to anything not Debian-based. Even RPMs and .tgz's can be disassembled and hand-rolled. But how many people resign themselves to a lifetime of Windows, based on their one trial of Linux being a Debian experience that one of the zealots pushed them into?
Quick! Somebody push another Linux distro to number one! I can't take the cult rattling their tambourines and chanting "Ubuntu" anymore!!!
I notice that legal-knowledge and computer-knowledge are seldom found in the same brain. It seems like to develop one, you must neglect the other. It could be because they're mutually exclusive skill-sets: Computer language is designed to make the most obtuse and abstract concepts as clear and simple as possible (in order to be able to explain it's meaning to the computer), whereas legalese is designed to obfuscate the clear and simple into chaos (in order to hide it's meaning from humans).
On being hired, I read through every piece of paper as quickly as I can, and stop and ask questions if anything seems fuzzy. I always make it a point to ask at least one question, even if it's bogus, just to show that I'm not a lump. I explain that I want to know the rules so that I can follow them. If I'm pressured to sign without reading after that, I get up and walk. I've never had to, because employers CAN be taken to court about that.
Coming from one of the hardest-core Linux zealots: MacIntosh. MacIntosh is about ten-heptillion evil-points behind Microsoft. They would have to resort to mass genocide just to keep up.
Nevertheless, the whole legal system needs a French-revolution-style remodeling. What happened to the Emancipation Proclamation?
http://www.nps.gov/ncro/anti/emancipation.html
Color them blue for boo-hoo-hoo. Gentoo users should indeed file a suit on Microsoft, as well as every company that has ever had an employee devoured by the giant on the Red Hill.
*sigh* OK, so it's O.T., but where *could* I post this?
Could ever a more noble law-breaker be, than he or she who steals power from the despots and turns it into freedom to give to the people? I wish Linux were illegal right now, because I'd enjoy using it that much more!!!
Count the binaries. Unix/Linux comes with ten times the programs that Windows does. Especially the free stuff out of the box. Windows comes on one disk. The mean Linux distro release size is three disks - and with DVD technology, the size is quickly growing. Not to mention that if Windows opened it's code and half of Windows came as configurable shell scripts, so that it was possible to tweak it, you'd spend the same proportionate amount of time tweaking Windows - and in the end, because you had fixed it, you wouldn't have the Windows system being a pain in the butt.
sweetheart, we have standards. They're called ANSI, and we follow them religeously.
It's spelled "operating" system, not "topple Bill Gates and rule the world" system.
People hate Linux because it's too hard? Good, let them.
The rest of the world is Bill Gates' slave? No skin off my nose!
Linux isn't attracting a huge market share, we're not paradigming the ramifications of the impacted advanced, integrated metaphor, or whatever kind of noise you make at one of those business meeting things? Cool beans!
So we already (a) RUIN Linux by making it so retarded that we can barely find a decent distro, just so we could get Joe Sixpack to use it, and even that wasn't pandering to enough ignorance, we have to (b) now ditch all our choices, effectively eradicating everything but the stupidest possible implementation of Linux, which we then get to have as our "Linisoft".
Somebady has to say it: *climbing onto chair* "Are these people OUT of their FUCKING MINDS?????"
You're, uh, welcome to be impressed if you want. My daughter's eight, and she programs a little in Python. When I was eight, I was programming a little in Assembler and BASIC. Calc apps and bubble sorts are ten-liners. I've seen C programs do it in one. This is very good performance, but not exceptional.
Over here, we call those "script kiddies". They're the ones attacking your tiny leaf site with a laughably weak attack in the hopes of digitally spray-painting "|{-R4d |-|aQ3r5 5Tr1|{ 4g41N !!!" all over your web page. But as I said, the sad thing is that America is knowledge-deprived enough now that this little girl could easily own most of us, and we'd be glad to hand over the control to her.
What's surprising to me, is that MS has engineers who are *older* than ten.
*groan* No, people, you don't need to go out and buy a new $300 monitor to avoid this. This is NEW technology. Go to your local used PC dealer and buy a USED monitor, which won't be capable of letting Big Brother have his little peep-show. For $25 bucks, you can get whatever was top-of-the-line just five years ago.
PS: just learn a little about hardware, and you'll never have to sweat this kind of restriction. See, proprietary systems want another pound of flesh out of you every six months, so they deliberately release new, identical garbage with different colors all the time. This compells you to keep going out and buying new hardware, throwing away hardware that may have another 50-years worth of use . This is about half of what created systems like Linux. We Linux geeks are coming in behind you, scooping up the virtually free hardware, and installing new operating systems on it that make it work so good, it out-performs today's newest, high-end machinery. The hardware almost lasts forever. And what the heck, I buy in quanity, so I always have backups.
So thank you, Joe Sixpack, for burn-testing the $2000 dollar system for me and then letting me get it for $200 just six months later! Now that you've spent all the money on it and thrown it out in frustration when trashy software made it perform like crap, I'll scoop it up and run a real system on it and have a machine that'll give me at least ten years of use.
#include
and...
{
and...
}
as for all the other lines that *don't* match - aha! That's the obfuscated part!
We've been trying to dumb it down until this year, we have actually succeeded in producing a few distros which are ten times the bumbling moron that Windows is, and people still scream that it's too hard for them. Good! What a relief! Run away back to your little Freecell toys and AOL!METOOA/S/L???AOL!! and your Pogo.com and your MP3 hoards and your spam 'n' meatloaf w/ side of killer virus... and we'll quit trying to market Linux to the mainstream and just keep it Runic and Arcane for us geeks, which is just how we liked it anyway!
My thanks goes out to the Debian and Ubuntu team, for giving Linux a bad name just in time to stop it from being ruined by becoming too popular! That would have sucked, having to switch to BSD...
Elsewhere in this haystack is my needle about how I dropped out of school at a young age and educated myself. I agree with you 100%, except for one small detail: get ready for tearful news! Ready for this? I PRIMARILY WENT TO PRIVATE BAPTIST SCHOOLS!!!
Private religeous schools, answer they not be! The only differences I found from private school: (1) my sucker parents had to pay a bill for it. (2) In addition to how much regular school sucked, private religeous schools just ram a Bible or Torah or Koran up your ass and set it on fire. Hence, you "unlearn" everything you learned in public school in an attempt to have religeous brain-washing replace it. (3) WHO watches the school to ensure that they give your kid his/her tuition's worth? All the government asks of a private school is the same thing it asks of a public one - I have never seen a whit of intellectual difference between alumni of either as adults. (4) There was just as much dope, gangs, sex, and violence on the Church campus. The only difference being, mainly, that un-worldly, not-very-streetwise church folk are easier to lie to when you get caught: "No, that's not coke, that's some laundry detergent for my gym clothes."
Haven't you heard all the news about predetory Army recruiters lately? "No Child Left Behind", it turns out, is actually their slogan for how to get enough soldiers to fight their perpetual wars.
Not that one freak occurance disproves your years of observation, but I would just like to offer that I am an adult who polishes off an average of 3 to 4 books per week...*book* books, like Michener novels and physics textbooks (for *pleasure!*), yet when I was a kid, I also read my ample share of Spiderman comics, Little-Golden books, Mad magazine, and yes, Playboy, too! More likely it's the fact that, given five-minutes-per-week attention to reading, (during a longish TV commercial?), that five minutes isn't likely to be particularly enriched from the pages of Playboy (or Maxim, these days).
I dropped out of school at a young age and laughed my ass off at anybody who told me I had done wrong by myself. I set out to pursue my own studies, and have reached middle age without stopping. Funny, I always ended up working elbow to elbow with the college graduates, getting paid in the same scale as they, and more likely than not I was training them. The only difference was, my paycheck went into the savings account while theirs went to pay off student loan debt.
At least in the US, the damage is done and set in concrete. The trend will only get worse. A nation bent on being a totalitarian global empire can only spare the money from the bombs-and-missile fund to "waste" on "education" that which is only sufficient to produce a semi-civilized human being. Sixteen years of school, even with straight A's, gets you to the point where you can work a cash register or fire an AK-47...that's *all* the government needs (it believes!) 95% of the people to do, so that's all it provides.
Change it? Who you gonna convince? We have people dying of old age who grew up in this system, now, and if you've been locked in a prison cell your whole life, then, baby, that's the whole world to you!
My advice: Steal what's valuable. No, not money! Money is just trading stamps for gasoline, groceries, housing, and the rest buys you pride; It's primary purpose is to keep you focused on the wrong thing. Steal time. Steal knowledge. Steal information. Not to say take it away from other people - I can give you all my information and still have as much as when I started. But if I'm a professor, I have to shut up and only give it to the people who pay for the piece of paper - otherwise, who would pay for what they could get for free? Steal your own mind back from the people who want to deprive you of it!
Been there, done that. It was stupid and broken. It was not hard to use. Linux from Scratch is hard to use, because you have to know what you are doing. That wasn't my problem with Sarge. My problem with Debian Sarge was that it was stupid and broken.
what was popular instead of what works for us, we might be using M$.
You already are. "Windows II" is spelled U-b-u-n-t-u. Don't lecture me about what's popular when your Debian-based Ubuntu is getting more than double the hits of the the second-most-popular (Mandrake!) on Distrowatch's meter. I like Slackware - right down at the bottom of the list, and hence not so dumbed down as to be stupid and broken.
Linux? Standards? What's that?
{ Typing "man standards", oops, that didn't come with my distro, I better download it. Oops, this download is in .arj format, I can't open it with tar, gunzip, bunzip, unzip, or FileRoller, better download the program that does that...Eek! It seg-faulted on me when I pressed "?" ! How do I use this thing? Better RTFM...oops, the manual is in pdf format so I can't read it with man, info, less, lynx, emacs, links, nano, pico, or zeppo! I need the pdf reader...hey, the pdf download says "pdf.3.5.7.8-91.2-f3.tar.bz2.zip.rpm.deb.tgz" how did they do that? }
Heh, and you complain because install packages *only* come in about five flavors? In the Linux world, that's a miracle!
Yeah, and for that matter, can Debian at last quit pissing about how it's the One, True, Honest-To_God Pure, Holy, Sacramental, Big Kahuna Free Software Linux and everybody else is shit, now that they're going enterprise? Especially since all they ever did was take the same GNU/Linux programs that ALL other distributions use, only the versions that are two years out of date, and wrapped them in their broken package-manager-format and bury them behind it's broken installer?
but it doesn't appear Debian's major user base are businesses.
Yet another excellent question: just who the heck *are* these people who swear by Debian, anyway? Actually, I think Debian is used entirely by it's own developer base. If anybody asks for business support, they say, "We're free software only." If anybody tries to install it on a home machine for personal use, they say, "It's not for home use." If you try to use it for a desktop, you hear, "It's mainly aimed at the server market." If you try to use it for a server, somebody asks, "Who ever heard of a 14-disk server distribution?" Are the disks still good for frisbees and coasters?
Extra credit: This news coming on the heels of the story of just two days ago, that Ubuntu announced *it's* corporate backing, does this tell us anything?
You could pretty much say the same for every MS product.
*grin, duck, run*