Trolls writing articles?

Trolls writing articles?

I get the distinct feeling that recent articles by Ladislav are either maliciously discriminating against Mandrake Linux, or are simply trolling (such as ZDNet and friends do, hoping to gain readership by posting controversial articles).

I paid my membership fees to LWN to get LWN-style content, not rehashes of Distrowatch's biased (against Mandrake by the slant of most articles) opinion. If I wanted to get more of these articles, I would support Distrowatch.com, but now you're making me wonder if I should rather support a less biased news site ...

Mandrakesoft was looking to provide a service to the MandrakeClub members, as well as not shooting their boxed sales in the foot. Bittorrent is an ingenious solution to this problem (and I don't see anyone noting that ...). Sure, there have been teething problems, but over 10TB of data was served in under a week (please, go and budget for distributing that amount of data via private FTP and tell me what it comes to before you criticise them).

Also, the article states: "Of course, Linux is about choice and those unable to accept any form of commercialization or restrictions on availability from a Linux distribution can always turn to non-commercial Debian, Gentoo or any of the dozens of smaller projects for all their needs."

I have two questions on this:

1)Why is Gentoo classed as "non-commercial" when Mandrake isn't? Mandrake is just as open, and the entire distribution was released freely on the FTP mirrors at the same time the ISOs were made available to the Club members. Mandrake sells boxes and pressed CDs of their product, as does Gentoo!

Sure, there is a price difference, but the 2-CD Discovery Pack includes a printed manual for the difference, but a price difference doesn't make a competing distro "Free-beer", only "cheaper".

2)How many full-time developers does Debian fund working on KDE and GNOME and other projects (yes, funding distributions by buying product is a good way to support development!)?

Then, it seems that Ladislav is not aware that Mandrake already has a development community:

"Then there is Red Hat. Always innovative and always different from the rest, Red Hat has decided to buck the trend and turn their distribution over to the Fedora community for further development."

I find it hard to believe the "innovative" bit, since it seems more like Redhat is playing follow-the-leader. Mandrake already has heavy community involvement, with a number of packages in the main distribution being maintained by non-employee contributors. I don't see the need for LWN to do marketing spin for Redhat.

Maybe it's just me, but I haven't seen a positive article from Ladislav (except maybe the package management shoot-out which wasn't entirely fair ;-)).

BTW, I am "on a dial-up connection" (28.8k to be exact), and have club membership, but I am not "unhappy". I will get my pre-ordered CDs quite soon, but I believe that offering the ISOs to Club members (I got mine for free being a contributor) is a good idea, and adds value to the Club.

Please, give me a reason why I shouldn't rather be supporting Mandrakesoft than these trollish articles (considering LWN subscription and MandrakeClub membership fees are almost identical). Or maybe Ladislav wants to write an article on why LWN is no longer "Free-beer"? You restrict content to subscribers for a certain time, what gives you the right to criticise others who do it? Should I suggest readers should go elsewhere for their content (and not /., since they also give preferential treatment to paying customers)?