I've had the same thoughts as well. If it was incorporated into something like Folding@home, you could get "paid" for completing so many work units.

Must be an oracle database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Red Hat doesn't include anything that could potentially infringe upon patents. The reason why fonts in Windows and OS X look good is because a lot of man-hours went into developing them, so companies like Microsoft got a patent for things like ClearType. That said, if you need better Linux fonts, look into Infinality.

I agree. I'm not sure why the top 50 comments are all complaining about it since it's already a requirement for most states that retailers have to collect sales tax. It seems the groups that are complaining about it are the companies who are out of compliance with the law and the internet libertarians who think that paying taxes is literally communism.

Larry Ellison?

gNewSense depends on outdated Ubuntu repositores and as far as I know, isn't being developed anymore. If you want a "libre" distro, either run Debian with only the main repository enabled (the Debian kernel doesn't have the nonfree firmware files unless you add them) or run Trisquel.

Actually, there's a customized spin of CentOS called Stella Linux which is more desktop-focused. It has some external repos enabled for things like flash. I haven't tried it, but it looks interesting. http://li.nux.ro/stella/

Also, if you're a Linux user, you can use the OpenJDK packages as well if you don't want to use anything Oracle related. Minecraft runs fine with OpenJDK on my Slackware 14 setup.

See, everything works out fine.

You don't go to college to learn a trade. You go to college to learn the fundamentals and become a well-rounded individual. There's certainly an argument that college is overpriced, but it will certainly help you in the long run. As someone once said, an employer may not care that you have a degree, but they will care if you don't have one.

Plus, the web development field is rather saturated as everyone else thinks they can make web pages. If you want to be a freelancer, you'd better be a good salesman (or woman) too.

Personally, I think 6 months is way too short of a time to iron out bugs plus insert new features (and then fix those bugs). As we've seen with Ubuntu, the bugs don't get fixed until at least 1-3 months after release. Slackware, for instance, does yearly releases and that seems to work well for them. The openSuSE guys are also considering (although not officially) yearly releases after the QA problems they had with getting 12.2 ready.

Exactly. Until vacation time is put into law as a mandatory requirement, then people will come in when they're sick in order to ration the few days that they have off. Employers will only give the bare minimum that doesn't make them too unattractive to employees and most employers lump vacation time with sick time.

I can see what you're saying, but the problem with that comparison is that Red Hat does contribute back in other ways to the community. They're one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel and they've also paid developers to create their own projects, such as with the nouveau driver. Meanwhile, Oracle seems to go in the opposite direction, such as the recent moves with MySQL. So, from an ethical perspective, Red Hat is a hell of a lot higher compared to Oracle or other companies.

Red Hat wouldn't need to start obfuscating their patches in the first place. You'd think with all the billions of dollars Oracle and its consultants mooches off of companies that they would at least be able to develop their own Linux distribution instead of relying on something else.