I swear I was thinking the same thing!

It's not commercialism that's the problem with Ubuntu. Commercialism is useful and valuable to hackers and programmers, and the people that help them put food on the table. Redhat is a commercial distro, and very few people complain about it. The problem is that Mark Shuttleworth thinks he's Steve Jobs. He's not. I don't even think Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs, honestly.

I think in general, we need to stop looking at them as bugs. We need to start looking at them as performance art.

I may have written this one. Or maybe one of it's ancestors. Back in 2005, a marketing company in Minneapolis asked me to figure this out. So I did. Haven't thought about it since. If I did write this one, don't feel bad. I got paid a premium for it. So at least they're treating their programmers well. That should make you feel at least a little better about permanently losing your privacy, don't you think?

Yes, but do you see what you're doing there? You're throwing money at a problem, to get away from inherently poor architecture and bad design. Dude, you can make anything work if you throw enough hardware at the problem. You shouldn't have to scale your hardware to use basic features (Perl had this figured out in 1996) like parallelism. It's asinine.

I strongly disagree. There's nothing wrong with avoiding taxes in places where the taxes are too high. If tax rates were a little more reasonable in the US and Europe, companies wouldn't have to get creative to be profitable. It's all this anti-business, and anti-entrepreneurism that we see in the US and Europe that is the issue. Harsher policies are what caused this crap to begin with. Do you people honestly mean to tell me that the solution is policies that are even harsher than the ones that are already too harsh? Christ! Everybody needs to stop drinking the Kool-aide on this one. Taxes are too high. The IRS has too much power as it is. Corporate taxes need to be lowered, and productivity needs to be incentivized. Not punished.

I disagree. Anyone who uses the product is a customer. You are paying for the product, even if it's not with cash. The whole thing is a giant ad for Amazon. That means that it should be important to him what you think of it, because he's selling your attention. If by some quirk, you're dumb enough to use Ubuntu in the first place, you are Shuttleworth's customer. And Ubuntu is certainly a product. RMS is a crazy old man.

Dude, if Javascript is your only skill, you're in serious trouble.

Yeah, but you're suicidal if you put it on anything with traffic.

Or how about, how to make your http requests stand in line for a half hour while they're parsed individually?

Ubuntu's repositories are more complete. But yes, I see your point.

As expected, Mark Shuttleworth is again demonstrating his obtuse ceaselessness. People get upset when their voices are ignored. In this case, like it or not, these are his customers that he's ignoring. But, thankfully, he doesn't see it that way. They're just empty vessels with assholes, and if you don't like the way Ubuntu does things, you can GTFO. Intentionally alienating your users/customers is the worst possible thing he could do for the adoption of his product. I've said it before. I'll say it again. Only a an absolute moron would run his business this way.

Right. I think it's fair to turn government logic back on them in this case. If they are telling the truth about their intentions, and they are not doing anything the public would object to, then why the secret meetings and media silence on the whole thing? Since they're being secretive and quiet, one can only reasonably assume that they're up to no good, and that they need to be monitored.

It may be a glass of frosty piss, but it's a delicious and tantalizing glass of frosty piss. Hats off to the hucksters.

I don't know what RMS would say on this, but it's my opinion that protectionism of any kind runs contrary to capitalism and the free market. All goods should be able to be sold and resold freely, without restriction. Intellectual property is a kind of a protectionism, that distorts markets by creating artificial scarcities. Like tariffs and other forms of protectionism, they do not help capitalism or the markets. Instead, they create new forms of censorship and tyranny.

RMS is big on protecting the freedom of software. But let's be realistic here. The only time a work is ever truly free, is when it's part of the public domain.