I use to use Debian exclusively but in the past year I have switched to Arch Linux. The rolling upgrades do not break the entire system whereas Debian has a very long time between release upgrades. Upgrading to a new release has caused me problems in the past. Now Arch Linux is constantly upgrading and sometimes something gets out of whack but you can always downgrade one package without having to install the entire system.

By the way I still have my Hamm floppies :-)

I read the NY Times Article about calling for government regulation and suing the creators of software. Will this mean that the fine developers that work on the Linux and BSD systems will be sued for bugs in their software that they have donated to the community? Also there is a danger that having the government control computer security will stiffle the openess of the Internet.

Do we want the government looking over our sholder all of the time saying that they are protecting us? We all have locks on our homes and a certain level of personal security. It is not the governmnet's responsibility to make sure we lock our own doors. The same goes for computer security. As a Linux user I have a dedicated firewall utilizing IPtables. Sure it took some time to write the firewall script, compile a custom kernel with patches from the iptables source, but it is worth the effort.

I do not think that depending upon government regulation where the creators of free software might find themselves in a pickle and have a lawsuite slapped on them for damages if someone cracks into someones system.

As much as I despise a certain company in Redmond, I do not think that they should have to face legal law suites from a bug in their code.

It is your responsibility to protect your system and not some beaurcratic faceless agency. Adding more laws on the books is a dangerous idea.