Redhat *does* sell Redhat Enterprise, and Redhat *does* promote “Open Source” while marginalizing “Free Software.”

That, my good sir, is my issue with Redhat. If you can prove me wrong here, I would be more than happy to publish a retraction.

You can’t get any more Free than that.

But I agree.

All the other money RH make are from services of one form or another.

I just cannot understand what it is you have against RH. You clearly have some weird misconception that RH take and don’t give back.

And the simple fact is this: RH takes money from companies who don’t give a monkeys about the Free Software, and ploughs a substantial amount of it back into Free software. Yes, some of that money goes to shareholders. That is small price to pay for what the Free software world gets back.

But the alternative would be that *all* the money from all those companies would go to deeply closed source companies.

I also have a very strong feeling that RH spend way more money on Free software than Canonical do.

So next time you decide to go off on a rant about some random subject, how about actually getting your facts straight?

Note: I should perhaps disclose that I am an employee of RH, a (inactive) debian developer, and also run Ubuntu on all my laptops. I can’t comment on Novell beyond that I thought Suse was awful when I last tried it out some 7+ years ago, and that their deal with MS stinks.

For example, you’ve stated that you take issue with people like me running opera instead of konquorer. While konq is amazing; the swiss army knife of file managers, I strongly dislike it’s web browsing mode. I like opera’s interface more, and I feel that opera has a better download manager. I am but a clueless user, so take my opinion as you will. It *is* my opinion however, and if I was forced to use konq instead, I would be rather unhappy.

Aren’t you taking away my freedom to use whatever I want if you restrict me to your standards of strict free-as-in-freedom freedom?

Another example would be the discussion on weather or not to include the binary bundles for 3D graphics drivers in Ubuntu. Most windows users don’t know anything about how to set them up, and many would be hard pressed to figure it out. If you don’t include an easy on/off option for them, you’d essentially be limiting their freedom of choice. Does the user want to choose freedom and perform general tasks, or do they want to choose the evil proprietary drivers and play games?

I dunno. To me, the issue looks a lot like “free as in freedom” vs. “free as in choice.”

Questionably sane, indeed. Rolling eyes…

If the Open Source community disagrees so much with the Free Software community, perhaps they should write their own operating system instead of trying to shoehorn their ethics into Free Software.

You seem to be lumping all open source coders into a “Freedom fighters” group. I’ve coded and released a few things over the years but I didn’t do it to promote freedom, I did it because it was something I enjoyed doing, it produced something that was useful to me and it possibly produced something that was useful to others.

Your average non-technical computer user could care less about freedom. They simply want something that “Just works.” Companies have to have something that “Just works.” IMO, this “freedom” discussion (food fight) that seems to be the norm in the Linux community is detrimental to the spread of the operating system.

Everything has its time. Keep up the food fight for long enough and Linux could become a footnote in history books.

So how do you achieve that? Throwing everything in cold, stingy water and let them swim or let them go down, right? How to get free software system _serious_ and _self-sustaining_? Get more developers. Where to get more developers? From _more users. How to get _more_ users? …. !@$!@$@% watermelon, let’s go back to coding like hobby.

You can’t have it both - total freedom and improving free software. Choose either one.

For watermelon sake, just stop act like children - la la la, everyone must love freedom, la la la, companies are bad - and give watermelon reasonable account WHY this is bad. There are more lot practical reasons. Can’t say that they are not fixable, though.

Under no circumstances is it acceptable for you to utilize profanity on my blog. Your opinion is welcome, but that language is not. The profanity has been removed.