begin Kurt Wall's quote: | Still optimistic, dep? I, for one, am glad *that's* over. Nothing | like having my hope clubbed to death like a baby seal to start my | day off right. I should have known better. Once again, Caldera has | snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Fscking amazing.
still optimistic? but of course! there will still be linux, and there will still be a community, and all the geniuses who have thusfar totally screwed up will continue to do so, and linux will in that sphere achieve all the power and prestige of AIX, and the companies will draw the wrong conclusions. i *am* red-faced for having given them too much credit -- they went *out of their way* to say that the companies are *prohibited* from producing a "unitedlinux" desktop distribution. as with the release of caldera 3.0, if they would have just shut the hell up, maybe thrown a bone to the community in the form of isos, it might have been okay. but, if you remember, when 3.0 was released they first said something about business only, no isos, per-seat licensing -- in otherwords, "desktop people: go to hell," and they ended up retracting or weaseling around much of it, but by then the damage was done. today, they gratuitously dissed the linux community, and there lies a world of hurt. but what is so mindbogglingly stupid about it is *they didn't have to! they gained nothing by doing it!* and the damage is done. they could send CDs out by bulk mail, aol-style, and it probably wouldn't fix the stuff they broke today for no reason at all. the whole thing, the conference call, was chillingly reminiscent of the rollout of OS/2, in which a multitude of things that never happened were announced. the companies were all lined up to cheerlead (it should be noted that several mentioned that they were certainly sticking to their associations with red hat, too), at what amounts to no cost to them. so yeah, the linux equivalent of the hindenburg was launched today. oh, the humanity! but just because four makers of not-all-that-good distributions decided to leave the loop for the circle jerk, we needn't despair. the decks have been cleared. debian will still don its hooded cloaks and hold its secret blood rituals; slack is actually doing things that make it bright and modern and very possibly the best desktop distro; lycoris is showing promise, as are a couple of others; and there may now be even more reason to build to the skippy standard, which really *could* turn out being the best desktop distro ever. | That's the last time I cross *my* fingers. hey. we crossed ours. they raised one of theirs. i'd rather be in our position than theirs. -- dep http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
