Don’t misunderstand my point of view, many patents in the U.S. could probably be forced to expired given the proper legislation for interoperability purposes, whether it be multimedia codecs, or whatever. The whole purpose of patents under U.S. law is to provide for the funding for R&D. Expirations are set on patents under U.S. law to prevent monopolies. I don’t think that the U.S. congress would be opposed to forcing expirations on technologies long held by monopolies. The problem I’m speaking of is when governments modify this code for their own advantage and fail to provide their modifications as they are required to by the GNU GPL. One would have to declare war on such a nation (with bombs and ammunition) to force compliance.

These are the real problems we face.

Our expectations are substantially poor – we excuse no or poor application development and testing because of our open industry.

We accept far too readily that bugs in their high hundreds are acceptable.

We become complacent in the number of times we accept a RC1 candidates to be mastered and released on mass without thought of going to an RC8 etc.

We will never be realized as a serious competitor to the other monstrously dismal technical prowess of the other O/S because the market place does not give a dam about technical excellence at the root of Linux.

NO I.T manager is going to look at us if his/her job suffers user backlash by users who just want to click and have an application work – every time.

End users and non-technical CEO’s will never accept an I.T Managers selection of our technically better O/S or application software, Open or Enterprise who is sacked for a tangible increase in cost of any Industries loss of administrative and automation dependent productivity.

I love how much we grow, I love the inclusion of the worlds minds, I love the equity in our technical right to produce or increase workplace standards.

I cry defending the front end/back end/middle end/command line of an out of focus window or debug dump with the comfort of an inoculate “Error” displayed in a small Window on the screen without reason.

I first of all thank you and all the members of the core development team of our beloved Linux Distro openSUSE for the great work you are doing. I switched to the Factory Distribution two weeks after the release of openSUSE 11.1 and I can assure you that dependency problems became rare with the latest upstreams of the Factory builds. This confirms the improvements made in the build system as you pointed out.

Anyway, the reeimplementation of the feature of YaST which automagically detects packages made obsolete by newer ones like we used to see in the past during an update or an upgrade would be very helpful. It offers the possibility of a clean installation and solves by the way all dependency issues. I deactivated recently all the main repos of the stable release and I am working with the foctory trees of the distribution as well as some of the OBS and my system is stable enough. I only missed the latest stable release of the kernel and this is very often the case in the Factory tree. The switch to a newer kernel always takes long or does not happen at all. To the maintainer of the kernel repo of the OBS I would like to say that the release candidates of the development version has a serious imcopatibility issue with the Nvidia graphic driver whereas the stable release has none. So I suggest that she/he gives the latter a try.

Once again thanks of a lot for all the efforts in increasing the quality of the software you deliver to the community, making our distro the best choice for all.

openSUSE is unbreakable.

Have a lot of fun

There is already an “IMPLEMENT ME” comment in the build script for this ;)