February 22

ESR

If your any kind of geek you already know who ESR, RMS and Linus are. You might have noticed that ESR has quite publicly stated he will no longer run Red Hat and will favour of Ubuntu instead. ESR's reasoning as best as I can tell, is that Red Hat should in fact first try to obtain a wider user base and then, with a market share that actually has some clout, lobby for Free Software and open formats and all that good stuff.

I am not sure this is the best approach. I do feel like ESR wants Red Hat Linux to become a big player in the desktop market, and I am quite certain Ubuntu has the same goal so I expect ESR will quite enjoy his new OS. However it seems silly to me to sacrifice some freedoms to get to the top and then try to get those freedoms back.

Another thing that struck me was that he had a problem upgrading a specific package and then hand removed some files and then was unable to reinstall said package, he then decided against booting into rescue mode and fiddled some more, finally resulting in an unbootable machine. All this without backing up any data beforehand and using a community driven `testbed' OS and not a stable release.

I have a great respect for someone that wrote fetchmail and the bulk of the code for both Emacs modes for VC and GDB but still, I don't think this was Fedora's fault.

In other news, my niece set a new record (36 times in one day) for text messaging me while I was at work :-) She is in fact quite remarkable at texting, she knows how many times to press each number to get the desired letter without even looking at the phone. Luckily for me and her mom, I let her use a cellphone from work which she can use with no charge just to message me.

Posted by æc♥ | Permanent Link