| HN Mirror

>Suppose that GNU/Linux had only one distribution

This is like saying "suppose the US was a totalitarian dictatorship". It might be an interesting thought experiment, but it ignores reality to the point of being utterly useless in any practical sense. GNU/Linux is based around the idea of free software, which by it's very definition make it impossible to restrict it to one distribution. (This is not to say that the US will never become a totalitarian dictatorship, but rather that despite the huge flaws of the US political system, the features of totalitarianism are antithetical to the ideological basis of the current US political system.)

>Anti-trust somehow only picks targets from which it can squeeze money. That's what it's about, not any morality of the situation or what is good for consumers. Those are just pretexts.

Even if you assume there is a correlation between anti-trust litigation and the resources of the companies exposed to this kind of litigation, that alone does not prove malice on the part of the government. The actual reason anti-trust litigation hits companies with money is that it's designed to fight monopolies . How many monopolies are going bankrupt, and how many of those who do, need government intervention to limit their damage on the overall economy...?

>The very fact that Russia is eagerly aping this concept speaks volumes.

It really doesn't. Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, and has been since before the October revolution. That they're jumping on western concepts and adapting them to suit their need of political control doesn't say anything about the value of the ideas they're corrupting.

>Auntie Ayn on anti-trust laws: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/antitrust_laws.html

Let's consider a quote from your link: "Under the Antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does." This is trivially false since companies (i.e. people who have gone into business) have been cleared of antitrust charges. It's also an an excellent example of Ayn Rand's simplistic, and in my opinion, childish excuse for proper reasoning and logic. (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to refute the rest of Ayn Rand's quotes in the article, in the hopes that it might cure some people of their objectivism.)