That's mighty nice of Groupon to drop money on 28 trademark applications just so the GNOME Foundation (who incidentally do more than make the GNOME desktop environment) can boost their end of year donations. They even managed to get Debian and Fedora in on it too!
But really, it must be pretty disheartening to see people accuse your organisation of running a scam, just because they don't like design decisions a number of developers on a handful of your products made. Especially when the software in question has nothing to do with the discussion.
In the United Kingdom, we have a whole slab of second-level domains for specific purposes. .ac.uk for educational establishments beyond school, .sch.uk for schools, and .bl.uk for the national library. On top of that we even have ones like .police.uk, .parliament.uk, and soon .judiciary.uk. I believe Japan has a system like this too. I can't seeing it getting much use in either. Then again, not every country has this, so it probably should be released.
South Africa has a similar system, with .ac.za for academic and tertiary institutions, .city.za for municipal governments, .co.za for commercial and generic registrations, .edu.za for distance-learning institutions, .gov.za for government departments, .mil.za for the military, .school.za for schools (with provincial sub-levels like .wcape.school.za) and .org.za for non-commercial entities. It removes the need to have a .edu domain when .ac.za suffices.
It’s always interesting to browser Mozilla’s public suffix list to see all the weird and wonderful second level domains around the world: http://publicsuffix.org/list/
Personally, I feel that the more people who learn to code, the better position we as members of society are placed in. While I certainly have no need for my local member of parliament to play perl golf in his/her spare time - I certainly do have a need, or at the very least, a want; for them to have some form of understanding about softare development. Informed people make informed decisions, and a higher number of people who are informed in matters that relate to things like software patents, the easier it is to garner a sympathetic ear when we say "Look - this isn't right, they shouldn't be able to do that."
I recall reading an article about the term 'programmer' and how it should be avoided when applying for jobs, rather, something like 'problem fixer' (I don't recall the actual example given, sorry) should be used, due to the negative, hermetic/wizardly air that supposedly hangs around those who program. I'm not a programmer, so I can't say if it is objectively true; but if it is, it seems logical making coding a more common skill would certainly remove some of the supposed semantics.
I'm not quite sure about that. I suppose I'm being used a testing data for RHEL by using Fedora. But on the other hand, I'm not submitting bug reports or any other form of data to Red Hat. I understand your point, and can think of some examples - but I'm struggling to apply it to the software I use.
It slightly irks me they moved from "Linux support is definitely on the table too!" to "a Linux version [...] beyond the scope of the project." But not quite as much as their move to add more technical content when they reach one million, rather than the expansion into GNU+Linux support.
I do however understand their reasoning. Their cold, realistic and undoubtedly true reasoning.
The solution is to be the only ISP in the area, and to strong-arm start-up competitors out of business with year-long contracts that force you to pay for months you have remaining upon cancellation.
Source: (I am secretly Brian Roberts - CEO of Comcast)
But really, it must be pretty disheartening to see people accuse your organisation of running a scam, just because they don't like design decisions a number of developers on a handful of your products made. Especially when the software in question has nothing to do with the discussion.