[Responding to post at bottom.] It is true that were the Linux community to be less fragmented Linux would long since have overwhelmed the junk proffered by M$. (One of the wealthiest men in history cannot even cause decent code to be written. Pitiful.) Anyhow, while on one hand the open source movement has created an environment well defended against M$ co-opting Linux and BSD the lack of a unified voice and significant user base makes it impossible to pressure hardware manufacturers to provide Linux drivers. Given the decades-long drift toward socialist-spawned anti-Americanism in much of Europe (and post-Iraq some anti-Europe feelings in America) it is merely a matter of time when nationalistic rivalries will impact international Linux cooperation. Open source will limit the impact of nationalistic rivalries but absent one or two very strong multi-national Linux businesses on either side (who would have the money and self-interest to resist the fragmentation) it must be anticipated that there will be additional splits -- eventually fracturing a singular Linux into two or more incompatible versions. Such is the historic reality of the collateral damage of competing nation states (the dream of the UN spawning a single everybody-loves- everybody one-world government will never happen, absent a tyrant; too many egos, tribes, and differing value systems). We make the best of things, wish for closer cooperation and coordination within Linux, and press on! Meanwhile, is the flood of problems I am reading here with RH9 greater, lesser, or equal to that when RH8 was released? I am beginning to wonder if I was wise to rush and purchase RH9 -- though it can hardly be worse than RH8 and anything Linux is better than M$! Waiting for the new hdd ... perhaps I will be blessed and not discover that my motherboard or cpu or modem or video card or usb devices or printer or scanner or network has an irreconcilable conflict with RH9 ... I can pray and dream! IMHO, YMMV ... doc On Sun, 2003-04-13 at 09:04, David Krider wrote: > Keith Packard is quoted as saying that "RH" and Debian were looking for > changes in XFree86 that apparently weren't happening. Will this move > benefit Red Hat? Are you all in favor of having, now, 2 implementations > of X to choose from? (Ala KDE/Gnome, Vim/Emacs, OpenOffice/KOffice/Gnome > Office, Sun/Blackdown, Mozilla/Konqueror et cetera ad nauseum. I know > I'm leaving off a bunch.) I guess open source development does what it > must; sort of a "survival of the fittest," if you will. But it seems to > me that the Linux community -- as a whole -- duplicates an awful lot of > effort. > > dk
