Just troll people with the question mark.

That should be "SCO and MS arguments".

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

It's a different grade of fighting, tho. Males fight until everyone settles out where they are in the social hierarchy, then it stops; this stable endpoint is disrupted when the goal is always promotion. Kinda like always adding a new male to the mix.

But the root difference is that males fight to secure their own status, while females fight to kill anyone they see as competition. Males beat each other up, then go have a beer. But when females see another female as a rival, it never ends til one is dead. Can't quite get away with murder in the office, but the virtual hairpulling just goes on and on.

Depends if the job requires physical strength.

My concern would be more along the lines of what I've observed in all-female offices. The social environment is a lot more likely to get ugly for those of lower status than when there's even one male present.

Incidentally this is nothing unique to humans; in most animals, an all-female group fights a lot, but add even one male and things calm down. All-male groups may fight at first but soon find equilibrium. All-female groups never give it up until all the "targets" are dead.

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.

Meh, it's easy to find people with skill. With values, OTOH...

You have a point.

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg issue. Debian doesn't get the help because Debian doesn't make itself worthy of getting the help. There have previously been paid developers working on Debian, they simply weren't paid by Debian.

Copyrights don't apply in this case. Patents might. The Supreme Court has recently been struggling with drawing a line between "abstract ideas" (which are not patent-eligible) and concrete methods (which are patent eligible). In general, you can't patent the math per se, but you can patent (for example) a space craft programmed to perform that particular maneuver. As applied to ship building, if it's sufficiently novel, you may be able to patent a ship having certain hull parameters, but you won't generally get a patent just for "make it BIGGAR!" The patentability will usually lie in your solution to the problems you encountered in the process of making it bigger, which means that if somebody finds a different way to make it bigger, you may not be able to stop them. (This isn't legal advice, of course.)

I call BS. I can buy a brand-spanking-new replacement for literally any part of my Garand except the receiver. In fact, when I bought it, the receiver was probably the only part that was still original. I know for sure that the spiffy walnut stock and Criterion barrel were new off-the-shelf. I can also buy clips, bayonets, ammo pouches, and other accessories on the cheap. I don't personally own a Lee-Enfield, but it's a fairly popular hunting rifle. You can get parts for it. This reeks of a contract for the contract's sake.

I am beginning to be wary of systemd, but no. I am talking about anal-retentive policy wonks who believe they only make the distribution for themselves and have (perhaps without intending to) systematically marginalized Debiian and made the project a whore to Ubuntu.

There is a certain contingent in Debian that is not good for the project, IMO. I would like to see which side of a fork they are on, and pick tthe other.

Burning Man has created an artificial monopoly for ice. By the description it sounds much like bread lines in Russia. If you try to bottleneck and manage essential goods at a single source, it invariably gets unmanageable as it scales up. They're dealing with a pretty large population these days for a bunch of festival organizers.

Based on the commenter who described the actual process via way of being a volunteer, a short term solution without getting into the political questions is to massively increase parallelism during peak times. Despite the pretty simple process, the peak demand is straining the system.

If they kept statistics about load vs. time they could figure out easily when to have a whole bunch more labor present to get the job done more quickly for the throngs of thousands.

I don't know if Boeing patented that method or not, but if they did patent it for the 1969 moon shot, the patent has long since expired. (Yes, I am a patent attorney.)

It depends on how you use it. You could wear-out a SSD in six months if you're continuously writing and re-writing to it; but for 99.9% of people the SSD will probably last longer.