Don't be mad at the oportunist, be mad at those that gave this oportunist leeway.

Patents and Copyrights have always been political power instruments and are used to censor, stiffle progress and to provide landgrab in the broadest sense to accomplices.
Stiffle progress is a special one, politicians are people with contol freak mindsets, they hate any sense of not being in control.
Science in perticular is constantly providing legal fronteer situations which enable others than the political class and their accomplices to be oportune.

Besides that, it is also strategic, when Google hurts Nokia it will kill Microsoft its (only?) platform and chances to enter that market.

PCLinux is an old fork, probably it is too far from the codebase of Mandriva.

Texstar (PCLinux' maintainer) used to be a packager for Mandriva years ago, he rpm'd a lot of applications in those days, and the packages were of exceptional quality.

But depending on if PC's can be built with electronics from pads and mobiles, prices may rise again to XT and AT prices from the mid 80's.
These machines did not come cheap.

I hope that more projects like rapsberry pi will enable us serious PC users to continue while keeping cost at acceptable levels.

Mageia is a fork of the rock solid Mandriva 2010 codebase, Mandriva crashed with their experimental 2011 codebase and threw out the main builders of the product, these builders united in september 2010 to start Mageia.

They used the Mandriva 2010 to build the servers that make the distribution (puppet based) and made the Mageia 1 distro with the servers in june 2011.
At this moment Mageia 2 is out there but it is not as stable, the product is in the middle of changing from startup scripts to systemd and has dbus and policy kit problems, half of my system does not startup in systemd mode so I am using startup scripts as I always have done.

The Mandriva they want to use for the desktop is less stable than the Mageia 2 they want to use for servers.
I use Mandrake since ancient times and stayed with Mandriva and now with Mageia, I am used to it and it mostly works out of the box.

Only that French company, it has always been and probably stay a disaster.

It's the cold water that contains the food, not the warm water, so from that perspective this is not odd at all

You think stopping the tectonic renewal is a brilliant idea?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer

b.t.w. I can hear that and also mosquito buzz like the ones in shopping malls.
Oh yes, I am heading towards 50 years of age, not all old people have hearing problems.
Nowadays more young than old people have hearing problems...

Uhm, A Tasmanian Devil would do...

Aahh, that's why you are so slow recently...

Thanks for that.

The problem is that a lot of developers making things on Linux started using Macs and instead of developing things for their Macs they try to change things on Linux to what they are used to.

I think that the majority of problems that were in the native environment are solved.
Most of the desktop applications are mature and complete and a big part of the commandline never had problems that werent solvable to begin with.
The last 10 years just caused a lot of problems to be solved on the web platform, now that HTML et al. are getting in mature state as well we will see coming 5 years that most problems on that platform are getting solved too.
Even scalability problems are getting solved with virtual computing.
This means attention is shifting to new platforms like mobile and pad until something new comes round the corner.

Most people will not have the luxury of deploying their own cloud but are stuck in some IT company it's cloud.