As a Debian user, I'm glad whenever there are new releases of it. Debian launched version 3.0r2 this weekend and since there are many Debian users on Slashdot, I've submitted the news.

Here's the resulting article and comments. Less fun then the first one, but still good stuff in there ; hey, I've asked for it...

Ever wondered why going from source to binary is so easy while the other way around usually involves much more work ? Read this. To summarize, compilators get rid of important info to build leaner binaries ( when they don't directly have source-protection schemes ), and getting to fill in the gaps if you want to go from such a binary to the source is like doing an integral transform in maths and then trying to go back to the original function.

So that's why closed source programming still exists today I guess, but I digress...

As a relatively new Linux user, I really like DistroWatch. These guys have info about tons of stuff, and their wide coverage on distros helped me a lot picking my favorite ( Debian... I plan to try Gentoo soon though ). So Monday, I stumbled on this news item from the DW newsletter : looks like SuSE's CEO got pretty prolific on corporatespeak lately. Basically, he said ( amongst other stuff ) that the market belongs to two companies right now, Red Hat and SuSE. Such claims are of course ridiculous the minute you get to look at major corporation-backed distros like Mandrake, Lindows and Xandros, moreover when it's obvious that bunches of companies uses other distros than Red Hat or SuSE.

And so I submitted this story. At first I thought it had been trashed, since it was on a "pending" status for a couple of days. I looked at article submission policies in the FAQ a bit later though, and since it's written that most submissions are quickly rejected, I then thought that it may have simply been shelved and waiting its glorious hour. And I was right.

I was out tonight when my article went public, so I've been able to actually take all my time to enjoy the pile of comments about it ( 334 right now ) without the reloading frenzy. Those were quite interesting in fact : some people saw my people as a disguised troll since I supposedly "took quotes out of their context", while others went pedantic about the CEO's comments and yada-yada-yada, but most people stuck with my views on this one anyway. I knew from the start that this topic was going to be somehow explosive, since it deals with corporatism, distro wars, and parallels could be made with the SCO situation since SuSE were involved with them in UnitedLinux.

Anyway, I'm quite satisfied by the results : the news item went noticed and many balanced discussions followed. That's all good.