[OT] Good or best Linux distro?

[Chris]

On Thursday, 30 January 2014 at 12:36:07 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 January 2014 at 14:12:03 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> I think it boils down to fairness. If someone can have a good 
>> life with what you've created, why shouldn't you have a good 
>> life too? You have to change the system completely so that 
>> everyone gets his / her due. You cannot have a system where a 
>> band can make money with a song, but royalties don't exist, 
>> and the author gets nothing.
>
> It is. And fairness is highly subjective. Even value of 
> fairness is subjective - no one actually demands laws of 
> physics to be fair after all, do they? For me it is perfectly 
> expected that act of presentation is more profitable than act 
> of creation. Inventing stuff is by design inferior to selling 
> stuff.

Laws of physics cannot be compared to the ways humans interact. 
And who knows, maybe the laws of physics are fair. After all, the 
amount of energy remains the same, there is no imbalance.
Without creation there can be no presentation of the same. 
Without Mozart there would be no symphonic orchestra "presenting" 
his work.


> And yes, I am very cynical towards culture. We have already 
> more books one can read and songs one can listen to in whole 
> life. That quickly and justly diminishes value of any new one 
> to the point where listeners attention may become more 
> expensive than authors time. Most authors won't get a penny for 
> their creations because they don't actually cost a penny.

It has always been like this. It's only that the internet has 
made it apparent (as in "any idiot can 'create' something"). In a 
way it is better and more democratic. A lot of the "real culture" 
we convinced ourselves to enjoy before the internet had been 
superimposed by an educated elite and their middle class tastes, 
beliefs and preferences. Shakespeare and Goethe, there is a lot 
of hype and hypocrasy involved too. Who knows how many good 
writers were rejected, because they didn't conform to a small 
elite's understanding of culture. Perhaps the problem is really 
just the clash of our old understanding of "culture" and new 
information technologies.

> But it is all about personal beliefs in the end and I am not 
> trying to convince you that there is aything inherently wrong 
> about your attitude. It is reasonable and solid. What I have 
> tried to show is that statements like "BSD is less free than 
> GPL because it does not enforce freedom" are very opinionated 
> and boil down to very core ideological preferences. One simply 
> can't use such statements  in article that is supposed to 
> provide any fact-based overview.

Haven't seen many fact-based overviews on the internet. I don't 
subscribe to any ideology. What I found interesting in that blog, 
however, was the mentioning of the wars in the BSD community. 
This is something to ponder on.