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Screw Microsoft. If Dell can reduce their OS bill to some bag of money they contribute every year to OSDL, instead of those big checks they write to Bill Gates every quarter, that's money in the bank for them.

Simply nothing more than a slippery slope towards communism. Let the "commnunity" provide it, instead of a business that makes profit for themselves, and for America through taxes. Considering your obvious disdain for lawyers, the communist model takes care of that too, huh.

Is indemnification a problem? Flick of the switch. They could do it individually, or they could pour some more dough into OSDL and do it through them.

Pure fantasy. These companies don't have any money, because the biggest draw of their product is that it is 'free', which means most customers aren't providing back any return revenue.

Don't believe it? Then why is Red Hat completely retreating from the retail market altogether? Couldn't possibly be that their products don't sell, could it?

http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=364

Simply nothing more than a slippery slope towards communism.

Oh good. More stuff about communism. Hey, if calling the activities of hardware manufacturing companies like HP and Dell "communism" sounds persuasive to you, then you should keep doing that. I personally find it ludicrous, but I understand that loud and vociferous name-calling is all you guys have.

These companies don't have any money

You're not paying attention, are you. You're talking through your hat again, instead of knowing what you're doing. Here, let me help you: here are just some of the companies funding Open Source Development Labs, which is where Linus Torvalds works: IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco Systems.

IBM is a big company. It's very famous in America. So is Hewlett-Packard. All these companies are. And in spite of your assertion, they have lots and lots of money.

Do you get the picture yet? This is Microsoft's distribution channel -- huge companies with billions of dollars -- funding the development of a common, platform-independent OS. If they want to indemnify the damned thing, they will... your statement that IBM etc. "don't have any money" to the contrary.

The only thing Gates can do about this is spray FUD in the air. So we'll hear plenty of FUD. Much of it from you, apparently. Oh well, no one expects him to go away quietly.