Well, I do find it extremely useful. Especially in Debian & Ubuntu, we have multi-arch support. For some specific workload using interpreted languages, it just reduces the memory footprint by a half. For example, PHP and Perl. If you once ran Amavis and spamassassin, you certainly know what I mean: it takes double the amount of RAM on 64 bits. Since most of our servers are running PHP, Amavis and Spamassassin, this would be a huge benefits (from 800 MB to 400 MB as the minimum server footprint), while still being able to run the rest of the workloads using 64 bits: for example, Apache itself and MySQL, which aren't taking much RAM anyway compared to these anti-spam dogs.

Is there still a lot of people like you believing in this stupid left-right paradigm? We're well passed that, aren't we?

Are you one of these scumbags paid by the European Parliament to troll on forums? Of course one can try though with the current system, it's doomed to failure.

This is not the united states of Europe. Nobody wants that in Europe (I mean, as in, the people doesn't want this, at least anymore). There's more and more sovereign movements raising, and they will get even stronger as time passes. So, it has never been, and never will be fair to replace the flags of individual countries (did you notice I didn't use the word state?) by the European flag.

This is why users should use open source software and run their own web sites.

Yeah, right... You are only the 32497234th person to do that joke because of not reading previous comments...

It's funding the advertising campaign on slashdot.

Certainly not the first. China, Iran, North Korea, Singapore, Turkey, Vietnam comes to mind. Though in these countries, there's no opt-out option. And I'm sure I forgot many other countries though.

I do agree with all of your points, and the fact that Beijing would have been a much better place, but I don't agree that plane ticket price is the blocker. There's also the high speed train from Beijing to Guanzhou as an option btw.

Ah, finally, a good post. Mod this up!!!

There, you got it very wrong. The cheapest flight I can find on english.ctrip.com is about 2700 RMB (including air port taxes, one way). If you decide to go through Shengzhen (which is next to HongKong, connected with a very cheap train), it drops to 1300 RMB. A decent salary in the IT, and especially if you are able to work on Openstack, would be about 10 times this amount. So, that's probably half a week of work that we are talking about. That's affordable. Plus a lot of the Chinese OpenStack community is in Guanzhou. I agree it should have been in mainland for other reasons which you stated below (and facilities for such an event, in both Beijing and Shanghai, are much better as well)

As if the Chinese gov. was able to fork such a project as OpenStack. Lots of laughs reading this over here reading this.

I wonder how you heard about this WiFi story. Everyone uses pretty standard WPA2 over there. This might have been yet another thing that the government failed to impose.

As for the fragmentation, well, I don't believe this will happen. People in China just need to get their hands on OpenStack, and that's far from done. Yet, being able to fork is beyond what I think is possible.

What both HP and Rackspace have experienced shows the exact opposite thing: getting out of the safe path of the trunk can be a very costly choice that you are going to regret later on. They both reported on this fact.

You forgot about Debian. As the maintainer of the packages (working full time on them), I would really appreciate if you try to remember me! :)

...especially since I consider my packages the most easy ones to install (thanks to debconf things)!

Quite not. French people use the English wording "Self-Service". Libre-service means that it's gratis.

Software freedom has nothing to do with convenience, I believe RMS broadcasts the message enough so that everyone should know.