hiring that really bright coder 12 timezones away with good English skills ... and grabbing that talent before it fleas to a country

Unlike you then, it's flees not fleas.

Why fancy doing some research do you?

Ddywedwch means "say" not douche!

"yr hyn a ddywedwch" -> What you say

"yn debygol iawn" -> very probably

"wir" -> true

Try Squashfs which creates deduplicated and compressed filesystem archives (http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7357/ for a good journal article).

If you're using Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Squashfs will be already built into your distro kernel, and the squashfs-tools will also already be available in your distro repository.

Oh wow, a little Englander on slashdot, I thought you'd all be at the Tory conference in Manchester.

I describe myself first as British, secondly as a (proud) European, and lastly and hardly ever as English, for all the negative connotations people like you have given it.

Britain is a European country, it has a proud history of involvement (for the better too) with the other countries in Europe, and it is a European culture.

Complete twaddle. Do you really think that these jobs are going to the hundreds of thousands of Indians surviving on less than a dollar a day? They'll be going to the rich English speaking Indian middle class who could afford to go to university. You never know, but, some of those American workers may have pulled themselves out of (American levels of) poverty by getting their IT qualifications and career. It's too easy to say America rich, India poor and therefore this always justifies outsourcing American jobs.

No, I'm not American.
 

Mark Shuttleworth is effectively the user every free software developer wants, because he puts his money where his mouth is. Vision is one thing, being prepared to pay for it is better.

Besides someone's needless continuity breakage/stability disruption is often another's necessary innovation. Often I've been begged by some users to implement something which they badly need, but then got criticised by others for yet another incompatible version. You can't please everyone all of the time.

Innovation doesn't need to be the evil twin of stability, it unfortunately often feels that way in free software IMO due to lack of resources. I, for example, as a free software developer only have the time to support the latest (and 'greatest') version, and so all users are forced to use it whether or not they want the latest features. If I made enough money from the software to pay developers, I could support the last couple of versions or when adding features I could implement a backwards compatibility option. However, I can't do this.

Free software is still driven by developers working on what interests or concerns them.

If it is being developed in the developer's free time then this should be expected, The software is effectively a hobby which the developer enjoys and users benefit from. Innovation is enjoyable, maintenance isn't, and users if they aren't paying should expect this. If they want reliable long term maintenance (or any other "boring" issues) they should consider playing for support, like in any normal business relationship,

If I (as a spare-time software developer) gets asked to do something I'm not interested in, I may not refuse, but it gets placed at the end of a priority sorted list, and it can stay there for a long time. However, If I can see that it is of use to a large amount of users I will usually do it, but it is as a favour and it shouldn't be expected (I get annoyed when I feel this is the case).

Why should a developer be expected to do something users want, if the developer has no interest in it, and the users aren't willing to pay or at least make a donation? It's not expected in other aspects of life, and so I don't understand why it is increasingly being expected in free software.