You cannot have it both ways. You either take the good (the next version of GNOME) with the bad (a dependency that may cause some issues temporarily), or you quit the game. You’ll be back in a year when the sound issues are fixed and there is a new “must-have” feature that made you choose Linux in the first place.

The reason why I am so confident that I can say the problems are temporary, is that Red Hat has the foresight and wisdom to take the profits earned from its corporate customers, and redistribute it to help maintain the health of the overall ecosystem. All of us.

You may see PA as a regression from where you stand, but you need to recognize that PA is an improvement to FOSS in the aggregate. And the responsibility the developers have to the ecosystem isn’t to you personally, it’s to the user-base in the aggregate.

FOSS is fundamentally different *because* it is and ecosystem. And that’s not just empty platitude. It means ill-conceived and world-altering come from the same place, face the same tests, and the the weak code is replaced with strong.

Coders are the producers in the food chain, and users the consumer. Without users testing software, there is no feed-back loop whereby FOSS software evolves faster than proprietary. That’s why it’s “release early, release often”.

Users who refuse to file bugs aren’t parasites, as they don’t do anything to subtract from the system. If anything they tend to do a lot of free advertising.

However developers who refuse to to submit potentially buggy code to people who might use it, are shutting down the mechanism by which FOSS evolves. Thwarting its entire purpose. Joe is dead wrong and an asshole to boot.

Joe. If you don’t like the possibility that your software may *temporarily* regress, as a natural part its evolutionary nature, then its evolution you have a problem with, and you should opt out the entire process by sticking with the last known good version of your distro.

Where do you get a negative (e.g. how did you somehow come to the conclusion that I don’t have a moral code on freedom of association?) from omission of mentioning freedom of association? I just said that my moral code against censoring means I have to live with annoyingly stupid arguments people post on my blog. I don’t think it has anything to do with association. Anonymous is fine too, I can still call them idiots.

It all just means I could have lived a quite life and these moral arguments would be moot because I wouldn’t have to deal with them. But really I just hate stupidity like fingernails on a chalkboard – a good counter argument is actually a joy.