[geeks] SSD for MacBook Pro

[Phil Stracchino]

On 06/27/15 16:21, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> I have no problem with a vendor charging to SUPPORT free software...

Well, nor do I really.  That was Cygnus Solutions' business model.
Fully supported custom ports of gcc.


But that's not really what I'm talking about.  Red Hat ships outdated,
crufty versions of major software packages (MySQL for one), yet leaps at
the bleeding edge with crap like systemd that locks down Linux.  Their
default MySQL configuration file for years has contained only one
directive that actually DOES anything - and that one directive is
*actively harmful*.  Red Hat is the reason why vast numbers of
commercial servers out there running enterprise business sites and web
storefronts are still using insecure MySQL 3 authentication.  Good gods,
it was replaced, what, fifteen years ago?  Because it was realized *back
then* that it was dangerously insecure.  It hasn't gotten any more
secure since, but for fifteen years Red Hat continued (and still
continues, I think) to make it the default.  Red Hat continued to ship
MySQL 5.0 for two years after Oracle declared it end-of-life.  Then they
did the same thing with 5.1.  MySQL 5.5 will be EOL this coming
December; I think Red Hat is just now starting to ship it in RHEL7.

Were you around for the Red Hat IPO and the subsequent frenzy of company
acquisitions?  Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions because Red Hat wanted
the prestige of being the official maintainer of GCC (which Cygnus was),
then mismanaged it so badly that within a year, the GCC steering
committee took the maintainership away and awarded it to Wind River
Systems.  The very first thing they did after acquiring Cygnus was
impose an eight-month hiring freeze.  A year after the freeze ended,
they laid off essentially the entire release engineering department.
They bought up ccvs, the *only* open-source e-commerce credit card
verification package then in existence ...  then killed it.  At least
one other - I don't remember which - of the companies acquired in the
immediate post-IPO period, they bought "to fill out Red Hat's product
line", and within 30 days of acquiring the company, had killed every
single product it made and laid off every employee.  They basically
bought a company that did not even compete with them, solely to destroy it.

So, yeah.  Not really a fan.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: 603.293.8485