Beta 4 was released on 28 June, so you'll need to wait a bit.

No it doesn't - it avoids most of the rare cases where you need it, though

I read the LKML for years.

So do I, and I won't ask you to search proofs of what you say because it's just lies. Try to find just one single phrase where Linus tells Ingo to wrote a new scheduler. You won't find it because it was Ingo who decided to write it, as he explained in the initial announcement.

You just need to change in your article the name "linus" by "ingo" and then your post may have some sense. Which shows how much you "know" about the topic.

Linus didn't even bothered with the scheduler, Ingo was the maintainer and it was him who was in charge of deciding what should replace it. It was him who argued, not linus. It was him who ended up admitting that the ideas from Con were good and he wrote the scheduler which is now into the kernel. One that, according to Con, was better than his own scheduler.

As an alternative, Debian could fix their release process (they still consider critical bugs of almost unknow and barely used packages as release-critical bugs that can stop the release of widely used and know packages with no critical bugs?).

Microsoft just wants that people can use virtualized Linux while paying at the same time their windows server licenses. I doubt they will break compatibility...

Alan Cox hasn't really been an important figure in Linux for like 10 years.

10 years? I disagree, it hasn't been that long, it'd say 5 or 6 years, since 2.5 started and akpm became the Linus' right hand. And while he has not been as active as he used to be, he still contributes quite frequently (50 changes in 2.6.30, 1032 in the last 10 versions), and he is quite active in the mailing lists. And the kind of work he does is not exactly easy, in the last year he has been fixing the tty locking, a long overdue task that not many hackers (if any) dared to do. He has also been a quite active libata/ide contributor (including new drivers), maintains the 8250 serial driver and edac related things, an sends patches that touch many other places of the tree. He has not the reponsibility he used to have, but i wouldn't say he is not an important figure

It wouldn't get rejected because of the internal volumen-raid implementation. Btrfs has that aswell, and has already been merged. ZFS would be rejected the first time due to other reasons, ZFS is not just a filesystem, it is a complete IO stack. Linux could merge the filesystem, but not the rest of IO stack, because Linux developers would not tollerate two separate IO stacks. ZFS would need to be ported first to the Linux layers.

In other words, is very Linux-unfriendly. So I won't buy such crap. It's sad that we have lost a company that supports linux, fortunately there are others.

The problem with that is that ZFS is not just a filesystem, it's a complete "IO stack". It's everything that does from the VFS to the device drivers. Sun didn't improve their old stack, they wrote a new brand system and they left the old system there.

Such thing would not be tollerated on the Linux main tree, it would be considered a very ugly design mistake. For them, the IO stack would need to work for ZFS and for FAT, and they would never buy the logic of "ZFS is special and needs special treatment to be better than the rest". If ZFS was released, Linus & co wouldn't accept it until ZFS is modified to fit the Linux IO stack, and/or they modify the Linux I/O layer to fit what ZFS needs.

Without the Sun-paid developers, would OpenSolaris keep its development momentum?

Another similar question is: Even with the Sun-paid developers, can OpenSolaris keep its development momentum? I very much doubt it, in fact if you look at the trends, you could say that solaris lost that momentum years ago. The only thing that keeps the interest in opensolaris today is ZFS (which is great, but it doesn't make the traditional filesystems irrelevant - LVM and traditional raid suck, but it works and it can do almost everything that ZFS does, even if its a bit slower and crappier), and it's impossible to release big innovative features like ZFS every few years, things like zfs only happen one time every n-decades.

My take: Ellison is not going to follow the anti-Linux competitive attitude that the old Sun had. Its clear that Linux is here to stay, and Oracle couldn't win a fight against Linux, because pretty much everyone except Microsoft and Apple back it. I can't guess what they will do with opensolaris, but it's clear that they aren't going to start a war against Linux, because that would mean starting a war against the huge and increasing share of their Oracle Linux customers.

Yes, we do. We also pay to SGAE (the spanish RIAA) when you buy a DVD recorder mp3 player, a mobile phone or a hard disk. 6 months ago I bought a 500 GB hard disk, and 13.92 of it went to SGAE.

Obviously, after paying that I demand the right to pirate all what I want.

These things are a great way to make a beautiful landscape hideous.

So do highways and railways. And cities. Anyway, we are lucky that now we make decisions based on aestetics.

And the amount of power generated considering the acreage needed is ridiculous.

Indeed, 4.000 MW (more than pretty much any nuclear power station, there're power stations more powerful but they use multiple reactors) are ridiculous