> Most of the lights are going toward distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro.. And those shiny new distributions.
OpenSUSE I don't think really compares against any of those distros. SUSE Linux and OpenSUSE really compare better agains RHEL/CentOS. I think the biggest reason that SUSE lags behind most other distros has less to do with other distros being "shiny" and more to do with strong network effects. I tend to use CentOS or Ubuntu LTS simply because I know that googling "centos 7 <problem I'm currently having>" tends to yield a lot more high quality resources than most other distros.
I'm not sure how this will work out as far as long term strategy goes, but in the near time I am very annoyed. It seems like they can't decide what to do with Hangouts. Vacillating on core functionality like this every other year only serves to frustrate end users.
You should probably qualify that with a Andy-Weir-is-not-a-lawyer disclaimer. There are a few space treaties that probably supersede some elements of "maritime" law.
The biggest shortcoming I see compared to the other big players (AWS, Azure, Google), and it is something they don't mention, is that they only have one datacenter, compared to the several from the other big players. The pricing is quite incredible though. I suspect if enough people hop on board with this they will probably look into setting up another datacenter.
I'm not sure about CA specifically, but some states only do full inspections on newer vehicles every other year. e.g. In a particular year the odd year models get the full inspection and the even year models just get a quick inspection and then vice versa in the next year.
This is not to mention that even if it were open source, it is not likely that the tool chain used to create it is even available, let alone open source. Firmware blobs are just a fact of life, for now at least.
In the beginning I don't think so. We've seen recently with Apple and Google, that there is such thing as a non-backdoored encryption product that agencies (both US and abroad) get upset about. That doesn't preclude there from being a backdoor requirement in the future, similar to a wiretap law.
As other commenters elsewhere in the thread have pointed out, we don't know much about the implementation at this point. How it is implemented I think will make or break this product.
The more I have sat and thought about it, the more use cases I can come up with where there is a business case for it. One big one that comes to mind is foreign companies that don't trust the US.
I think the biggest distinguishing feature of this is being able to have it encrypt emails with customer provided keys stored on their Key Management Service. This hypothetically should prevent three letter agencies from accessing emails, but I'm not sure that is the top feature on everyone's mind when they are looking to set up email for their company. It definitely piques my interest though.
I'm kind of disappointed they are trying to sell this before they have actually gotten a free BIOS and firmware for those locked down pieces. Without those, this laptop is no different than any other laptop that I can buy and load with free open-source software.
Probably the closest I've seen to a truly open source and free laptop is Bunnie's Novena.
> Kevlar has generated several billion dollars in revenue for the company. Ms. Kwolek did not directly benefit from it financially, however; she signed over patent royalties to DuPont.
This is kind of sad to me. I realize it is more or less standard practice to sign over all IP rights to your employer, but this was a significantly greater contribution than your standard invention. Reminds me of the engineer who created the blue LED who only received a bonus of <$200. He later sued and got closer to $9m. (http://www.out-law.com/page-5208)
OpenSUSE I don't think really compares against any of those distros. SUSE Linux and OpenSUSE really compare better agains RHEL/CentOS. I think the biggest reason that SUSE lags behind most other distros has less to do with other distros being "shiny" and more to do with strong network effects. I tend to use CentOS or Ubuntu LTS simply because I know that googling "centos 7 <problem I'm currently having>" tends to yield a lot more high quality resources than most other distros.