"I'm not aware of any fraud done by actual Satoshi" – except for creating an inherently fraudulent "money" system to profit from.

While I clearly am not one to whine about "compliance best practices", I don't really like the direction in which the Linux Foundation is sailing, either. As I already asked a few days earlier, how does Kroah-Hartman even know "nobody" uses those kernels? Does the Linux kernel do telemetry? Of course they're free to (not) do and (not) say what they want, but if they give an explanation like that for such a—in the literal meaning of the word—far-reaching decision, it wouldn't hurt to back it with at least a minimum of substance, either.

As @jmccue already said elsewhere in this forum, the Linux Foundation is a large-enterprise venture practically owned by companies like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and if the kernel people would understand the world's economic operating system only half as well as they understand their computer operating system, they wouldn't have fallen into the delusion that especially Microsoft would really have the best interests of Linux at its greedy heart.

I'd like to repeat some Linux Foundation figures which @jmccue already noted and add some more:

2021: revenue forecast $177M, 3.4% allocated to 'Linux kernel support'.
2022: revenue forecast $244M, 3.2% allocated to 'Linux kernel support'.

Yes, in absolute figures that's more in 2022. But isn't 3.x% dedicated to Linux a bit sad for the 'Linux Foundation'?

How do they know the older kernels are not used anymore? Even Ubuntu 16.04 LTS which runs on the Linux 4.4 Kernel is still in ESM support by Canonical until 2026, I guess it will still be used in some numbers.

That's indeed the correct question here.

If employers suddenly start to think about the wording with which they tell their wage slaves that they need to perform better so that the company owners can get richer and richer from their staff's creation of value, the only reason is that, for once, supply vs. demand of labour works for the employees for a change.

I never used the term "true communism", nor have I, explicitly or implicitly, said anything that would refer to such a concept. You've invented that term yourself – and now ask me for a description. Fun!

It means a spectrum of ideas that is wider than anyone who uses the word derogatorily wants to know about.

Given this, your additional questions are irrelevant.

If I remember correctly, OS/2's resource demands were only unreasonably high in its earlier phase, and then they didn't rise as quickly as hardware became cheaper, either. Myself, I started using OS/2 2.1 way before I had a real income from my first IT job...

... is, of course, anti-communist bull. But even 30+ years after the cold war the anti-communist dogma that primarily feeds on not wanting to know what communism even means is as virulent as ever...

... to get the Workplace Shell back, on an up-to-date operating system with lavish software support (which leaves about three, of which OS/2-eComStation-ArcaOS isn't one). No other OS UI I've seen over the last 40 years comes even close.

Yes. And the Workplace Shell continues to be the very best – by at least one order of magnitude – OS GUI I've seen until today in terms of ergonomics, functionality, configurability and extendability, all those nice Linux Desktop Environments included. Many of which, by the way, already are so much better than Windows up to and including Windows 11, the only advantage of which is that, for a change, it does look quite nice.

Now I would agree that IBM's being unaccustomed to marketing directed to tiny little personal computer end users didn't help, but it wasn't just that. As part of a competition case against Microsoft (that Microsoft lost), testimony came up that Microsoft had blackmailed IBM, effectively forcing IBM's software division to stop marketing OS/2 to end users, lest Microsoft would stop selling Windows to IBM's hardware division. Of course it's hard to know for sure, but as that was before OS/2 became able to really challenge Windows, it might have been the crucial nail in the coffin.

I sure agree with the rest of your post.

There was no figuring out necessary back in the nineties, though, if AU was anything like Europe in that regard. It would have practically come with the internet connection. Quite a few older colleagues of mine still have their ISP's domain name in their home e-mail addresses, too, from back then, if it was one of the biggies which still exist. It was easy and it was free and it was from a (back then) renowned company, so what could go wrong? I always advised against using their ISP's e-mail even if only because someone might be forced to change their ISP at some point, but as soon as they actually were using that e-mail address, obviously nobody wanted to change it again just because they *might* have to at some point in the future.

Some of those biggies around here let people keep their free e-mail address even if they're no ISP customers anymore, but then it will be somewhat restricted regarding storage except they consent to a fee. In one case I've provided help with I've seen that happen to someone just because they moved house and had to switch from landline to LTE at the new address, otherwise staying with the same ISP...

The reason for ISPs to offer e-mail services on their own domains was and is, of course, that customers promote them in every e-mail message they send. Which makes it even more shabby to stop those services now or to put substantial fees on them, after they've been enjoying free advertising through those people for decades.

That's like saying 17" is the favored wheel when someone is talking about new tyre tech for heavy trucks.

Oracle and Red Hat could have a deal we don't know of. And shutting down 'freeloader' downstream distros would then be in the commercial interest of both of them.

"First demonize it, then do it yourself - Red Hat's idiotic mess", under that title Germany's arguably most renowned IT news publisher Heise released a commentary a few days ago that's as clearly worded as it is insightful. Translated with your translator of trust (mine would be deepl) it should be a fairly easy read, although it uses a good amount of hard-to-translate, sometimes untranslatable, figures of speech:

https://www.heise.de/meinung/K...

Specifically, the text finds very clear words on Red Hat's reaction to the goings-on on their blog.

It is, I guess, also similar to Canonical's Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM), now part of what they call Ubuntu Pro. It is available for free for a limited number of personal installations, though, and there are competing services to supply EOL'ed Ubuntu versions with security updates, too (without Canonical too obviously trying to intervene in one way or another, by the way).

The elephant in the room, though, and sometimes my impression is that it must be an invisible elephant in the room as no one likes to talk about it, is the fact that major distro version upgrades are such a PITA, regardless whether it's a FLOSS or commercial distro, Debian- or RHEL-based. Even RH speaks of a 'migration'...