And the most of the rest appear to be either unions (police and labor) and the content owners themselves like MPAA, ABC, CBS, NFL, and Disney (i.e. the usual suspects). GoDaddy seemed to be the only Internet based company on that list. I'm not sure I understand the motivation for all of the major drug and cosmetic companies, except to say that they rely heavily on copyright and patent to maintain their business models (no pun intended for the cosmetic companies).

Honestly, I was expecting that PDF to be a huge download, not 3 1/3 pages of companies I pretty much fully expected to see. If that's a mostly comprehensive list, I'm baffled as to why this sees so much support in Congress. The dollars must really be flowing from the usual suspects mentioned above.

You might be right. I'll be honest and say I've never really given FreeBSD much attention beyond the pretty wrapping paper of things like pfsense and FreeNAS. However, on my local LUG mailing list there used to be a guy who made no attempt to hide his love of FreeBSD and marginal disdain of Linux. I think he participated on the listserv just because our LUG was the closest thing to an open-source form/community in our area. He constantly referred to Linux distributions as 'forks' and when the topic of FreeBSD was discussed, it was made to be superior to Linux. Looking back, I don't think he was really trying to anger anyone, but after a while he did. Eventually he was shunned to the point of leaving the listserv. My conversations about FreeBSD and its user base almost always ended up with people saying "I tried it, but got tired of the condescending tone when I tried to get help."

I really try hard not to stereotype or generalize people, but the tone of your post falls right in line with this. Also, you say FreeBSD is "great for server daemons, clusters, DB, and can run Xorg." I'd like to point out that the first three things are exactly NOT what this article is about. Instead of bashing people, talk about how FreeBSD can run desktop environments just like Linux can, and talk about the virtues of portage. I know you're probably just venting so what I'm saying isn't exactly fair, but sadly perception is reality.

Yes. I use Gentoo and absolutely love it. That is, until an emerge of a package hoses my system and I spend the next six hours troubleshooting it. The Gentoo forums are sometimes helpful, but not always depending on the root cause of the problem. If I didn't read a news item after syncing my portage tree I can usually find the answer along with a proper scolding for not RTFM. If the problem is a Gentoo ebuild issue or an upstream bug, finding an answer is usually more difficult.

Because Gentoo is geared more towards a seasoned, savvy Linux user, I never would recommend it to someone switching from Windows, and hardly would recommend it to someone who's been using Ubuntu for the last year. I've been using Linux since 1998 and Gentoo since about 2003, and I struggle at times (see previous paragraph). I think that disqualifies Gentoo as a general-purpose desktop Linux distribution.

Also, remember that the Gentoo portage system is a direct kin of FreeBSD's ports. I guess you don't *need* FreeBSD around since it's the concept and not the code that makes portage, but what a slap in the face.

I haven't purchased a Linksys product since Cisco bought the company and promptly started pile driving them into the ground. My company has standardized on Cisco, but I am nowhere near involved in networking equipment purchases. I know I'll get blank stares if I bring this up to our Cisco rep the next time he steps in the building. Other than simply being outraged, I'm not sure what else to do.

You must have never played Warcraft. Blizzard will not ban anyone for this. From their website: