Nope -- but, Microsoft certainly is a threat to all the rest of us with their insistence that Secure Boot be implemented industry-wide. And who controls Secure Boot? Why, the Evil Empire, of course (and you have to pay for a license to be be able to shut the damned thing off so you can install Slackware or pretty much any other distribution). A couple of distributions are licensing the on-off switch (so you can install them), but, hey, take a guess at who wins in any event. It's bad enough that you have to pay the Microsoft Tax when you buy most any off-the-shelf box but paying them to shut their crap off? Sheesh.

How about them apples, folks.

Don't know what Secure Boot is? Start here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_restrictions) and then Google is your friend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZeYVIWz99I

In the Age of Information... its no longer easy to hide things... Everything is out there if you are willing to spend time with the research, ask questions etc...

Thus saying so,

Practicality shall Triumph over Popularity... because with information Practical shall become Popular in distros. In other words the Product Shall speak for its self.

Revealing a systems Complexity as opposed to hiding things by dumbing things down makes things more complex (refer to my Cups Printer Post on Fedora). Quickly managed Automation and leveraging unnecessary work to computer as opposed to doing it all by your self increases speed of the power user. Stability and hence the key to stability = Correct and Precise Code (limiting code minimalism). Easy to configure and use.

I do not know what you were smoking but your post does not make any sense to me.

There is no threat its all in your head. You are talking about the Old World Order, where things used to be that way. Microsoft is at a downward spiral... Its falling and it can't get up. It can not match with Open Source OS and GNU License. You can't force feed people with Microsoft especially when it is built on wrong principles. When you start with Correct Principles only can you sustain yourself. Everything else eventually turns into a world trade center (no offense). Tower Tarot Card.

I am basically trying to say that "Big Corps" are not a threat if they do not function correctly and are not built on sound principles.

There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, like some crazy Danish prince used to say. After reading your post, it even looks like there are more things in your philosophy than are dreamt of in heaven and earth.

I've smoked this morning and he still doesn't make any sense.

I think Slackware is, in a way, a threat in a competitive sense. It's a living proof that 4 or so people can release a GNU/Linux distribution to match any commercial OS out there: to outmatch, even, in the opinion of many Slackware users. While this may not be a threat to M$'s bottom line, it is an outstanding reminder that there exist viable alternatives to the proprietary hell: simpler, cheaper, more stable, and respecting the freedom of the end user. One day Slackware may inspire a commercial distribution built on the same principles, and then we will see slavers (M$, Apple) and traitors (Ubuntu) running for the hills.

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Another such - commercial - distribution existed between 2002 and 2005, IIRC. Libranet Linux, based on Debian testing long before the first Ubuntu came out. Essentially a three-people team: Jon and Tal Dantzig, as well as Daniel de Kok, whom most of you will surely remember as a long-time Slackware user and author of the Slackbasics book. Libranet was a "Desktop Debian made easy", where everything JustWorked(tm). Unfortunately, the distribution was discontinued after the premature death of its founder Jon Dantzig.

I don't want to get into trouble here, so no, I'm not about to identify culprits. It's quite obvious, to me at least, that certain people have been trying recently to dumb down the Slackware forum by submitting irrelevant, inane or otherwise infantile posts. This is reminiscent of efforts elsewhere in the FOSS world to dumb down, for example, user interfaces at a critical point in time, just before they finally mature into desktops genuinely capable of threatening the big market players. Of course this is only guesswork. Nobody can ever prove it one way or the other. But suspecting it doesn't make me a conspiracy nutjob; it is a legitimate inference given the track record of certain IT players in conspiring against their competitors.

None of this would matter of course if they had confidence in their own software to do the talking instead.

Well---we all walk a fine line at one time or another. I regularly post comments critical of the MS Empire, and I do no shy away from making postulates about their behavior, strategy, etc.

I would, however, try to avoid suggesting that forum members are somehow underground agents.

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It would be extreme, in every sense of the word, but not beneath them, to have people posting on these forums.
Back in the earlier days as that company known as the "evil empire" was growing into the monster it has become, it was paying PR companies to plant false testimonials about their products in various computer publications. This came out during one of the many trials against mickeysoft and was published in the Los Angeles Times.

Answer: no.

There aren't enough developers for Slackware. Hence, Slackware is normally released with more bugs than it should be. It's understandable given the restricted manpower. Frankly, I have much larger problems with the marginal quality of the Linux kernel than Slackware. Pat and crew do a fine job overall with Slackware given the questionable quality of the kernel and some associated software pushed by major distributors such as Redhat.

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I think my point was simply to avoid accusing members at random. Even if we can agree that the corporate ethics are low enough to play such games, we can also probably agree that they are smart enough to avoid being too obvious. Even if I know to a certainty that the "plant" is here, I don't want to randomly suggest that the person could be any of us.