lycoris

[dep]

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.