Ah Libertarianism. Saying only the laws in the Constitution matter, and that all other laws don't matter, instead of just using logic in general when it comes to good and bad laws. Well, unfair treatment of non-white humans was made illegal in the Constitution, fyi. Also, your utopian Libertarian view of "XYZ would be awesome if there were no laws governing XYZ thing" when it comes to this segregation is horribly flawed. What this would mean in America is *segregation*, where you'd end up with a lot of racist cities and states once again, and life would be even more rough than it is for non-white humans.

Clearly bad and harmful things should be illegal. Things that aren't shouldn't be. Most Americans agree with that! But segregation not being illegal? Most Americans would disagree. Yes yes, you want those dirty (group of individuals who have done nothing wrong) out of your store, but, well, they've done nothing wrong, so fuck you.

Yes, like no insurance, so that you're not gambling your money away your whole life. Also, the automobile industry should definitely not be encouraged in their free (for the rich) market price hikes of typical crash-related car parts which are largely in part due to the upward push from the insurance industry.

Which have to perfectly align with the original ones and can totally mess everything up if you're not careful, a fact I had direct experience with when the xorg-edgers repo completely effed up my installation and even after backing things out I ended up having to reinstall.

Meanwhile, Zero Install keeps each app separated and sandboxed and you could argue that it is better than adding a repo.

Right, but Ubuntu and others will never package Zero Install by default unless it started getting wider adoption because of two factors:

1. More apps need to start using it so it gets in higher demand.
2. Ubuntu and others benefit from market fragmentation. By having all the software in their repos which aren't compatible with other distros, that pulls users to their platform just for software access. This is of course contrary to what the free software and ubuntu philosophies are all about.

So for those who actually care about free software and about all users being able to access software, please help out Zero Install since it seems to be leading the rest of the cross-distro packaging solutions in features and momentum.

With Zero Install the packager can make the dependencies be whatever they want includiong the version numbers. If they didn't trust a library to not break things, they could even set the version == (require only that version and no other) if they wanted. The user can also force different versions to be used than the recommended one in case they ever disagreed with the packager.

You're confused and don't understand what Zero Install is. Maybe the feature list needs to be worded better, but it is infinitely better than "an RPM alternative" because it can run ALONG SIDE an existing package manager. Zero Install can be used on ANY DISTRO and can ADD TO that distro, so it will expand the number of packages that are accessible to users. If I release my software for Zero Install it means any user will be able to install it easily, get automatic updates, uninstall it easily, potentially share libraries with other programs, etc. That is better than a bunch of binaries laying around because you don't get all those features and nice cleanup with just releasing an archive of a binary your users run, and then you'd have to implement automatic updates in your binary as well.

So who cares if Zero Install doesn't have every app under the sun yet, the key part is that every app it does have will be available for anyone to use in any distro as long as those files and dependencies are hosted.

No more "you can't run this because you don't have glib.blahblahpoop", as long as it was packaged with the dependencies it will work for all Linux users.

Linux needs to be a proper single platform to unify community software efforts. I don't want my software to go unused and to not be of help to anyone just because 1970's UNIX fragmentation BS gets in the way of things.

Because everyone knows there's no way a government can have the power to protect citizens and ensure corporations don't fuck them over by ensuring interoperability. It's not like they have these things called legislatures that can make laws or anything. Besides, corporations were created to give all the wealth of a nation (and world) to one or a small group of individuals, not for the common good of society!

Aren't standards something the FCC is supposed to protect? Even better though an international organization should champion standards. I would suggest the ISO but after the whole OOXML fiasco they seem to be okay with declaring these same kinds of proprietary standards as standards.

Real standards need to rely on only open pieces throughout, and revisions especially if frequent should be backwards compatible. If you break compatibility, you should be creating a totally new and separate standard.

Oh Slashdot, you're such a good opinion/polling testing site for corporations...

Mozilla, Google, and others make data mining revenue, so Canonical wants in too. Funny, since I've been doing a lot lately while browsing to prevent tracking with user agent strings, cookies, scripts, and am considering Tor to hide my IP even. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is headed in the opposite direction. Time to switch distros after this.

Lol, they "need money" only if they come up with a business model that is moral, otherwise they can find other jobs. If they are going to data mine users, at the very least they need to build in options for easily opting into that instead of forcing that onto users.

lol, says the CEOs of the oil industry. Great excuse, but there are other solutions that don't sacrifice morals.

At least if it gets bad someone can release a bundle without those included, or better yet an easy privacy option to enable/disable them, the way it should have been to begin with. I suggested it in the Ubuntu forums but that didn't go over very well.

I know of some ways, and they don't involve spying on users. How about offering installation and development services for two?

You can make money via paid development/support and other ways. You can have morals and have a business at the same time, it is possible.