I did subscribe. At one time Stratfor had a "student" price structure and my University paid for it as it was relvant to my study. That is actually how I found these other news agencies. Stratfor offered (and I'm guessing still offers) what they call SITREPS which you could have either emailed batched, or as they came out. I had them delivered as they came out via email, and the vast majority, close to 90%, were credited/attributed to other news agencies like ITAR TASS etc etc etc. You're right, I was wrong in saying Stratfor was like HuffPo. Stratfor is more like an expensive Twitter (if you follow the right people on Twitter that is.)

How awful would it be, to be arrested and go to jail, for attacking a joke of a company, that no one respected in the first place.

The real lulz come from the fact that people take Stratfor seriously, and continue to use their overblown moniker of "private intelligence firm". They were/are a news aggregating group that sold stale news articles from REAL news organizations like ITAR TASS and Xinhua. And since most American corporate executives never heard of ITAR TASS, Xinhua, ABN, etc. etc., they were able to pawn it off as their own work. Not only did they sell old news, but they charged a huge price for it. They were essentially an expensive HuffPo with a wanna-be CIA spook edge for effect. Not surprising at all that they didn't encrypt their data, or provide any real security.

I wonder if De Raadt, Torvalds, Stallman, and to this extent, even Tanenbaum fighting, discourages people from cross-contributing to the various projects. It'd be interesting to know if the fighting alienates any of the users by forcing people to pick "sides"

The simple answer (and probably one of the more correct answers) is GNU/Linux won because it works. I love BSD, especially OpenBSD. I buy OpenBSD's CD's to contribute money to the project because I admire the hell out of it, but rarely do I try to run it. OpenSSH? Amazing. And that it came from such a relatively small group, just shows what a complete powerhouse the OpenBSD group is. However, when I got my OpenBSD CD's in the mail, I figured let's do the twice-a-year dance where I attempt to run OpenBSD. Results? On my primary workstation, OpenBSD's X doesn't agree with my video card. On my primary laptop, though I can get OpenBSD to install via CD, once installed, it doesn't recognize my DVD drive, and on my EEE machine, it doesn't recognize my wireless. Now, let's look at one of my favorite GNU/Linux distros, Trisquel. Which uses the linux-libre "deblobbed" kernel. It works, flawlessly, on my workstation and both laptops. Zero un-free drivers, blobs, or software. People can come up with as many theories on why GNU/Linux overshadowed BSD, but in my case, and in the case of many, GNU/Linux works better. BSD might have more elegant, bug free code, but for the vast majority of users, that doesn't matter, working features matter.

"Note to all: Despite what you might read on Slashdot or other aggregators, this piece is about servers, not desktop FreeBSD use. Not sure how that got misconstrued, but I'm talking exclusively about server use. I haven't run *BSD on the desktop since 1998, hence my comment about Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the servers. "