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When RedHat went public in August 1999, I recall that many contributors were allocated initial public offering (IPO) shares. It's been awhile, but I believe they were at a discounted issue price.

"It was clear that Red Hat wanted all the open source developers who
had made its success possible to participate in its public offering. ...
Red Hat Director of Technical Projects Donnie Barnes spent three
weeks scouring the Internet, digging up all the contributor lists to all
the open source projects he could find. Red Hat then had to craft a
letter to this list of developers. ...
The final result was that well over one-fifth of the developers on
the list were interested, eligible, and able to participate in the Red
Hat IPO."

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/34...

My point is that RedHat *was* interested in rewarding the original source developers.

... fully supported in xSane and SimpleScan with *no* driver download

And not only that - the SANE daemon makes it easy to build a networked scanner (see http://www.linux-mag.com/id/16...); one that you can access from any system on your network. I use that at home - bought an HP scanner/printer in a car boot sale for £5, set it up on a RaspberryPi, and now we have a neetworked scanner and colour printer. And it is very good scanner too. I only use it from Linux; there is a way to do it from Windows, which I tried, but I don't use Windows for anything, so I don't know how well that works.

One of the FreeBSD developers gave a talk about this. FreeBSD has commercial users, and the new GCC just wouldn't have been an option for them. The older license-compatible version still in FreeBSD wasn't receiving updates, and it was beginning to affect developers too greatly.

Whether this compiler switch is a good thing or not depends on how much you hate the idea of commercial vendors using open source. GCC's strictness is admiral from an ideological perspective, but certainly not from a practical one. It should be noted that even Linus Torvalds adheres to a more pragmatic worldview:

There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

It's pretty damning when Linus himself no longer refers to Linux as free software because he doesn't like the extremism of the free software movement. And why should he? He's an engineer, not a religious fundamentalist.

2. Stop supporting CSS, AACS, HDCP and other forms of DRM

That is, stop playing DVD, Blu-Rays, and drop the ability to connect to HDMI and DVI displays? If you don't like the above mentioned technologies, you can play unprotected media and connect the PS3 via SCART, VGA or component cables anyway.

It's not that Sony, like Google, is plotting to insert DRM into the open standard that governs the Web.

3. Apologise for installing rookits on people's computers without their knowledge

Done. Seven years ago. And by the way, did Apple and other phone manufacturers issue any apology for installing CarrierIQ, which had privacy implications several orders of magnitude greater, on millions of phones?

4. Apologise for taking legal action against people who circumvented their digital restrictions

Do Google apologise when they do just that?

But now we see the strategy of Canonical and why the (at the time) weird decisions were being made

Um duh, it was made for Instant-On web devices, it just so happens that tablets fall into that category nicely.

But let's look at each point individually because not everything you stated relates to Canonical's desire to go to Tablet's, it's more along the lines of, "it just happens to also help them out towards tablets."

1) The nasty split, isn't any more nasty than other things in the Linux world. Canonical wants Canonical stuff in Canonical's distro. GNOME 3 is still used in Unity, but just differently. It's hard for me to explain because I suck at summing things up, but trust me, Unity is GNOME 3 at the core and Unity runs more with how people predicted GNOME3 to be used more as a platform and less like a standard desktop. The main facet is that it removes a lot of upstream push from the GNOME community. Canonical wants their desktop to look the way they want it to look, not what GNOME developers want it to look like. You'll see this type of mentality in a lot of Ubuntu. Also, let's face it GNOME developers are difficult to work with at best. It's very easy to paint the main developers as being the pearly towers (metaphor for someone who dictates how things should happen, but have little to zero real-world experience to back up exactly why that's right.)

2) The choice to use Wayland over X boils down to the same debate that was had on xgl versus aiglx. Mark thinks running direct to the video card is a better method than the way X provides. This has been a common thing that comes up ooo, I'd say every five to six years. Someone comes up with a better way to run direct to the card and someone jumps on the band wagon. Usually there is just too much inertia to make the jump from X to the something else happen and we all go back to using X happily. There's a lot of misconception that Xorg (specifically) and X11 (in general) are bloated, slow, won't run well on older machines. X11 is a pretty hefty "standard," but not everything in it is in every implementation. There are multiple of X11 implementations (I'm given too, Google can help you see more) that target embedded systems that run quite well. Xorg implements a lot of stuff to keep backwards compatibility with older machines. Wayland doesn't. However, don't confuse that because just because it is implemented does not mean that it gets loaded if it is not needed. You aren't going to be using XRender when your video card offers the ability to use OpenGL pixmap to texture. The biggest problem with X is drivers (and that shouldn't surprise anyone) and the low quality those drivers exist in. That problem will not go away with Wayland. The idea is, and to me it's a bad bet, if we make the model more simple (remember the X11 "spec" is a pretty big tome) then vendors will be more incline to write better drivers since the model for those drivers is more simplistic. However, as bets go, that's immaterial to why Canonical wants to go Wayland. It really boils down to the fact that they want to do Window Decorations the way they want to do Window Decora

But it is deeper than that. It's about Novell working with MS in principle ... Once a company is tainted by working with the likes of Microsoft or say Oracle, that's it.

Linus Torvalds has said he has no problems working with MS or any other company. As he put it, "Microsoft hatred is a disease".

I'm a big believer in "technology over politics". I don't care who it comes from, as long as there are solid reasons for the code, and as long as we don't have to worry about licensing etc issues. I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out. There are 'extremists' in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do 'free software' any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred.

"extremists" - in other words, freetards like RMS, and, evidently, you. Sad, really.

And further, here:

âoeI agree that itâ(TM)s driven by selfish reasons, but thatâ(TM)s how all open source code gets written! We all âoescratch our own itchesâ. Itâ(TM)s why I started Linux, itâ(TM)s why I started git, and itâ(TM)s why I am still involved. Itâ(TM)s the reason for everybody to end up in open source, to some degree.

So complaining about the fact that Microsoft picked a selfish area to work on is just silly. Of course they picked an area that helps them. Thatâ(TM)s the point of open source â" the ability to make the code better for your particular needs, whoever the âyourâ(TM) in question happens to be.

Does anybody complain when hardware companies write drivers for the hardware they produce? No. That would be crazy. Does anybody complain when IBM funds all the POWER development, and works on enterprise features because they sell into the enterprise? No. That would be insane.

So the people who complain about Microsoft writing drivers for their own virtualization model should take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they are being so hypocritical.â

So, since Linus cooperates with Microsoft (even the SAMBA team is now taking patches from Microsoft), what OS are you going to switch to? OSX? They've cooperated with Microsoft in the past. Plan9? Won't you be running that on Intel? Intel cooperates with Microsoft. And Microsoft is now working with ARM ...

I guess it's time for you to stop being a hypocrite and go on eBay to look for an old Atari800, since ALL Linux, and all current hardware, is "contaminated" by Microsoft. Let us know how that works out for you with your 8k of ram (48k max)... oops - Atari BASIC by Microsoft. Sorry. Guess you'll have to stop using computers entirely now.

Why hasn't it occurred? Because powerful computing hardware has never been so cheap and abundant. That is the new, disruptive change. It still growing by leaps and bounds. You can already buy cards with 64 cores running linux and put them in your PC or robot. Mobile devices are already going multicore. Distributed machine learning is already a reality. Those things did not exist before. and that is why there hasn't been 50% unemployment due directly to automation. Forget Asimov and Bradbury, they did not foresee it. Try Marshall Brain instead.

You are confusing profiling with tracing.

The Nehalem Xeon runs 1.8 times faster, generates 7.3 times as much heat and costs 22 times as much as the D510 Atom. The performance is 7.7 times faster, but when you factor in the price-to-performance the Atom is 3 times better than the Xeon solution. Interestingly, the TDP/performance ratios are almost identical for both processors.

this article has some comparisons with Lustre:
http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7744/1.html

The article is frustratingly light on details. There's nothing about what type of flash transistor they're using (there are several variants on the basic stacked-gate NMOS design as well as more wild types). They don't say whether they're actually shrinking the bits (which you don't have to do) or just the support circuitry. All it says is that Toshiba is making NAND flash in a new process node, probably 22nm.

My day job is working with embedded NOR flash. I'm not really a process or solid state physics guy, but I think I know enough to comment, unlike a lot of the people running their mouths. (Seriously, folks, if you don't know what you're talking about, *shut up*. Misinforming people with wild guesses is not helpful, no matter how much it strokes your ego.)

First off, the flash transistor itself is not 22nm long. It's probably at least ten times longer, if not more (obviously Toshiba's not giving exact numbers). When you go to a new process node you don't necessarily shrink every feature by 50%. The limiting factor in flash size isn't lithography (manufacturing), it's leakage.

Flash works by storing electrons on an isolated (floating) material sandwiched inside an NMOS transistor. If extra electrons are present, the transistor is forced off (0). If they aren't, the transistor can turn on (1). The problem is that over time the electrons leak out of the floating gate, eventually causing bits to flip. If you shrink the circuit enough you hit a point where you can't keep electrons in the gate for a reasonable amount of time. At that point, we'll need a new memory technology -- maybe FRAM, maybe something else. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's been researched already -- a lot of the major research papers for flash memory are 25+ years old.

Also, I said this elsewhere, but NAND flash is called NAND because the flash transistors (bits) are in series, like the NMOS transistors in a NAND gate. It isn't made out of logic gates or anything like that. Flash memory is analog, like DRAM -- you need special analog circuitry to read it and output a digital signal.

I also site this article in Linux magazine: http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7643/1.html

"Site" is a noun. It means a physical location. When verbed it refers to the act of placing something in a site.

The word which refers to quoting a source or mentioning something in support of your statement is to "cite". See also the word "citation", which you may have heard once or twice.

If you're not familiar with the difference, please look them up as a favour to the Ghost of the English Language.

Mandriva Linux. Especially if you get the Powerpack. It has all the extras built right into the DVD so you don't have to go out and find it. I would also recommend getting the 32-bit version since it's more stable. I also site this article in Linux magazine: http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7643/1.html

Not sure about ports, but the use-flags in Gentoo Portage also allows for compile-time pruning of unwanted features, resulting in smaller, faster apps.

Linux-mag did some testing not too long ago; http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574/1/. It seems especially in some cases, there is quite a lot of performance to be had in compile-time tweaking.

But yes, it's only worth it if you consider your own time very cheap.

Actually a big part of the RAM usage *is* Xubuntu - see the 'simple comparisons' section of http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7520/1.html where it talks about RAM usage immediately after boot including Lubuntu, which is a much lighter LXDE-based variant of Ubuntu. Lubuntu should become an official Ubuntu derivative using LXDE. The RAM usage stats from that page are:

* Lubuntu 58 MB
* Xubuntu 157 MB
* Ubuntu 154 MB

Yes, Ubuntu used slightly less than Xubuntu, which is a surprise - presumably this was a recent Xubuntu version which is more bloated.

When you have various apps running including Firefox, Lubuntu apparently used about 150 MB vs over 300 MB for Xubuntu / Ubuntu.

Since Lubuntu is quite hard to track down, here are some links:

* http://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Operating-Systems/Linux-Distributions/Lubuntu-50492.shtml - Lubuntu 9.10 Beta 14 - final release was due Oct 29th but isn't yet available.
* http://download.lxde.org/lubuntu-9.10/ - betas 14 and 23.

Or you could try the LXDE project's distro, or Debian with LXDE: http://lxde.org/download

That's because the Xubuntu team (on Jaunty at least) decided to destroy all that is good and wonderful about Xfce to the point that Ubuntu actually uses less recourses than Xubuntu. I'd wait for Lubuntu to come out or do as another poster suggested and install LXDE from another Ubuntu flavor.

Or you do what I do: use xubuntu. I cant imagine running full ubuntu on less than 1gig.

Have you actually tried Ubuntu out with 256Mb? I ask because what you're saying directly contradicts this article which says Ubuntu is actually easier on the memory than XUbuntu: http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7520/1.html

And the subject of the article is of great relevance of course, LUbuntu, which supposedly beats both XUbuntu and Ubuntu's pants off.

That assumes that the value of the software is the same, value being usability, performance, etc. For netbooks, servers, and small dedicated devices I don't think Microsoft can compete at all.

More netbooks sell with Windows than Linux. When IT staffers were asked "the operating system of choice for IT netbooks is Windows 7". Some are hoping that because of Moblin Linux will regain market share in netbooks. MS IIS comes in second in webservers, behind Apache. While down from it's high IIS still has a market share of 18% in webservers, excluding Apache more than all the others combined. I don't think Microsoft is in any danger of losing it's market share anytime soon.

I'm all for Linux, but it can't completely replace Microsoft just yet.

For most people both Linux and Macs can replace Windows. People just have this "Microsoft software is needed" attitude. Like a lot of other switchers before switching from Windows to first Linux then OSX I evaluated what I wanted to do, the tasks not the software. I then looked to see if there was any software available for Linux and OSX that could do what I wanted. Other than there being no drop-in replacement for Photoshop for Linux the answer was I could get software that would do what I wanted. And with WINE or Crossover Photoshop CS 2 will run on Linux.

Falcon

No, not MILFs.

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7345/1.html

This GC stuff is only needed as long as the FS uses small blocks. File systems should be able to use arbitrarily sized blocks.
Hopefully btrfs will be able to use large blocks efficiently too.

Got to love the Stallman haters. Must be the definition of not having a life.

I know what you mean, I get the exact same feelings of the hoardes of frothing at the mouth Microsoft-haters. Hell, even Linus these days seems to come across as just tired of it all.

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out. There are âextremistsâ(TM) in the free software world, but thatâ(TM)s one major reason why I donâ(TM)t call what I do âfree softwareâ(TM) any more. I donâ(TM)t want to be associated with the people for whom itâ(TM)s about exclusion and hatred.

Over at http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7439/ Chris Smart has a short article on the subject in which he publishes an interview with Linus Torvalds about this issue. Linus is generally in favour of including the Microsoft driver code.

Linux Magazine cloaks their articles, and Google hasn't penalized them yet. Here's an example,

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/1180

Visit that normally, then with a googlebot UA string (or visit Google's cached version) and watch the "you must log in" disappear. Like Expert Sexchange I whish there was a way to auto-remove Linux Magazine from my search results.

You beat me to it, but in the spirit of adding value, there's a good article here. Another benefit of nilfs2 is that you can easily snapshot and undelete files, giving it a sort of built in "time machine" technology (to use apple's terminology).

I'm just surprised that none of the linux distros are talking about it yet. You would think with the apple and ibm laptops using SSD today that there would be some option somewhere. I think everyone is distracted by btrfs.

NILFS - http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7345/

First, you're potentially dealing with more than one problem here you're trying to solve: slowness, and naming convention. I'm guessing they're somewhat related (large directory listings due to lack of organization), but there might be a deeper infrastructure issue that needs to be dealt with, too.

As for organizing files, You need a naming convention for your project files, first and foremost. Throwing a bunch of disparate files at a CMS is going to do nothing but complicate things more (from a sane-management perspective).

Data categorization is key. You need to figure out a way to organize it in a fashion which is both contextual to how people use it as well as how it relates to the other data (in, say, a project).

For instance, you will want (at a minimum) the equivalent of user-level and group-level data shares. This would, in all likelihood, get kind of tricky with shifting working groups. For this there are multiple ways to use ACLs (as opposed to just user/group/all permissions) within Samba (with or without shackling the machine to a Windows domain/authentication server). ext3 and XFS both have the ability to use ACLs (XFS natively), last I checked. Ultimately, this would probably be better than just using user/group, as it would be more extensible.

As for a Solution...

Something to look into specific to samba, is the "veto files" directive for smb.conf. It is per-share. I am uncertain whether it supports regex (it didn't in early 2005 when I last used it), if it did it could be very useful for enforcing a specific namespace (going forward).

I would recommend "enforcing" namespace. While this is likely a self-created problem (ie you or your predecessor did not set things up properly in the first place), you really need to push to your users the importance of this. You need to tell them "organize your files, it'll make things faster" if there's any bitching.

There was an article in LinuxMagazine a while ago about determining the age of data. Utilizing this in some sort of auto-sort script to move "old" data to a "pre$date" directory within the original messy directory might speed things up. Also, archiving (or at least moving it to an "old shit" directory) past, unused data is important. It eases the "human element" of data organization.

Projects should all have a reference number (because there is, in all certainty, hard paper associated with the projects, and sometimes you need to cross reference). Keeping this consistent is important. Use what works, keep it short/demarked so users don't avoid using them. I like each project folder to have the project number to relate to contract/etc. start (short) date (eg. 080112 for Jan 12th, '08) followed by a 2-3 digit number (depending on how many projects are started per day) followed by major revision. End result: something like "080112.01.a Jennings Construction" Or organize by client ID. Or something.

Requiring and/or encouraging project naming conventions through the managers (at the bequest of your manager/CIO/whomever, or just pleading) might also be worth a try. One department out of 5 doing it would be better than none.

IMO, once you've reached this step, you can consider putting it in a CMS to help perpetuate/encourage the organization. But remember that a CMS is not a panacea, and might even complicate things further (ie, instead of navigating to a file, -everyone- just searches the whole index, slowing things down further).

I was actually referring to this interview:
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7313/1

Linus talks about infrastructure changes here that made linux scale up to 4096 processors.As a result the kernel works just as effective on 4096 cores as it does on 2 cores.

by Ronald McCarty
Linux Magazine
Monday, April 13th, 2009

Ubuntu Server has one of the cleanest and easiest Linux distribution installers. However, in many cases, its designers choose to ignore security in favor of ease-of-use. The result? An install that is not secure by default.

During the last couple of years, Linux distributions have focused on improving the installation process of Linux in order to make the freely available operating system available to more people. It is a noble goal, however, when making anything in computing easier, a common approach is to make a number of decisions for the user; decisions that can put an inexperienced (and possibly an experienced) Linux installer at risk.

more at the link

What I find unbelievable and amazing is that Linux wrote the first version of Git in about a week as just a qick fix to the BitKeeper problem, then Git went on to be a major player in the VSC world. Heck, it may be the leader in DVCSes.

Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

What's missing in the article is that there are only a few windows-based systems in the top500 and there numbers have been declining over the years.

Actually, Microsofts share has increased, they went from nothing to 5 installs in a few years.
http://www.top500.org/stats/list/32/osfam

"OS Family" "Count" "Share %"
Linux 439 87.80 %
Windows 5 1.00 %
Unix 23 4.60 %
BSD Based 1 0.20 %
Mixed 31 6.20 %
Mac OS 1 0.20 %

I congratulate Microsoft on making the top ten. I'm not sure if the 5 HPC Windows installations do anything useful other than provide PR for Microsoft Marketing (TM). This is from a company that charges a CAL to print to a server.

That being said, I'm pretty sure the Microsoft solution won't allow you to mix and match different computers (and OS to a certain extent) like you can do with Linux HPC. Knowing Microsoft, you can't reuse your valid NT/2000/2003/2008 server licences within the cluster. Past history has shown any update from Microsoft will take down the whole cluster instead of a single node (London Stock Exchange). Microsoft probably will provide better cluster management software making it a better choice for customers requiring HPC without having in-house HPC knowledge.

Linux Magazine has some good articles on HPC for linux http://www.linux-mag.com/solutions/hpc

Enjoy,

The HPC Cluster people have thought about this stuff for a while. One approach that I have thought about is described in the article:Cluster Programming: You Can't Always Get What You Want There are two follow-on articles as well Cluster Programming: The Ignorance is Bliss Approach" and Cluster Programming: Explicit Implications of Cluster Computing.

Of course if you really want to know how I feel about this: How The GPL Can Save Your Ass

enjoy

Every time these "connect desktops to become the fastest computer in the world" articles come up, I have to dust off my Cluster Urban Legends article to clear up the mis-conceptions that abound. I also did a piece on the Linux Magazine site as well that debunks much of the spam-bot supercomputer legend (need to register for that one)

http://www.linux-mag.com/channel/back-issues/may20 03

"The Year of the Linux Desktop:

2003 will be marked by the emergence of three new enterprise desktop offerings. Corporations seem interested, especially with Microsoft boosting prices. So, once again, we ask: Is this the year of the Linux desktop?"

http://www.linux-mag.com/downloads/2003-03/puzzler s/

The most recent issue of Linux Magazine had an editorial article on needing bigger, more powerful laptops. I agree completely - my HP zd7000 laptop sits on my desk at home until I take it to work where it then sits on my desk there. I need it to be powerful and portable, but not necessarily great for working on at an airport waiting lounge. As long as it runs FC4 on VMWare fine, I'm happy.

• restricted Bash
• ulimits
• iptables owner module w/ the DROP target
• chroot jail

BSD is older. It doesn't need as much hacking. So if you're a new person learning how to hack, BSD was not as good a place to go. It didn't need as much work. Linux grew up with the Internet. By the time the Net came along, BSD didn't need the same level of work and wasn't as amenable to getting people interested in it.

When you already have several million lines of code, it's not as much fun to work on. Linux was a great thing because it allowed a lot of people to get involved in learning about operating systems by helping to finish this system. That process of creating something is the process of creating a community.

The FAQ is wrong.

LM: Who thought of the name Apache?

BB: I had some friends at a company called Enterprise Integration Technology, and somebody there asked me, "What would be your ideal Web server?" So I wrote about a bunch of stuff that I thought was missing from NCSA's server -- some stuff that still isn't in a lot of Web servers like revision control and stuff like that. I put it on a page and said: "I should come up with a name for this." The name literally came out of the blue. I wish I could say that it was something fantastic, but it was out of the blue. I put it on a page and then a few months later when this project started, I pointed people to this page and said: "Hey, what do you think of that idea?"

Someone said they liked the name and that it was a really good pun. And I was like, "A pun? What do you mean?" He said, "Well, we're building a server out of a bunch of software patches, right? So it's a patchy Web server." I went, "Oh, all right."

LM: That never occurred to you when you thought of the name?

BB: When I thought of the name, no. It just sort of connoted: "Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass."

Direct cite for the person who chose the name 'Apache', saying it wasn't named because of the patches:

Someone said they liked the name and that it was a really good pun. And I was like, "A pun? What do you mean?" He said, "Well, we're building a server out of a bunch of software patches, right? So it's a patchy Web server." I went, "Oh, all right."

LM: That never occurred to you when you thought of the name?

BB: When I thought of the name, no. It just sort of connoted: "Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass."

Can't get more authoratitive than that. Apache wasn't named after the patches. Period. Anybody who says otherwise is deluding themselves.

The Year of the Linux Desktop: 2003
2004: The Year of the Linux Desktop?
2004 Won't Be the Year of the Linux Desktop
2005 Will Be the Year of the Linux Desktop

I wasn't talking about copyright. I was talking about recognition and respect. When researchers publish their work they will cite tons of other research that they used as a basis for their own. Many times they can do their research because of grants/funding from commercial entities. Too many times you see free software advocates deriding commercial unixes and other proprietary systems. I think this linux mag interview with Bill Joy is a good read for people with an open mind. It's a bit dated but still interesting but it's a world apart from what Theo de Raadt said. From what I've seen it's not so much the core developers of open source software that do this but the developers that come later and some users. A lot of this is also fueled by the IT press. Like when wired magazine wrote "Linux Sucks" on their cover when they had an interview with Bill Joy. He never actually said that. What he said was more along the lines of linux is good for developers that were 20 years younger than him, he had no interest in writing a kernel he already did it. He wasn't even working on Solaris anymore. If someone comes up with a good idea for a new operating system and they ask Linus to be a part of it they'd probably get a similar response. Unfortunately Bill Joy gets painted as a wacko sometimes too because of one of his other wired interviews. Unfortunately those people probably haven't read this either.

Basically I think linux, gnu and other free software owe a lot to the work that was done before them that isn't properly attributed and is instead mocked.

"I make money by charging for my time, not other people's products. Typically I hear about someone or some company that needs some piece of software, or I think it would be beneficial to them. I push as much free software that I am familiar with on him as I possibly can, and hope that he will need some revision to it with the understanding that he can go anywhere he likes to get those changes. Very often he comes to me to get them, because I have earned his trust. End users give me my bread and butter."

It sounds like you're doing more integration rather than innovation and I don't mean that in a bad way. But you're still being paid to develop software. When you're done I'm assuming you contribute the code changes back so the next time nobody gets paid. A lot of open source is reengineering commercial software. Who is going to pay for the r&d to come up with the new stuff if they can't make money off their research? Who is going to do the boring work that comes with software development?

It's not that I'm opposed to free/open software. I use a lot of it. I just think that the goal of all software being free isn't obtainable. Not because free software is in anyway inferior but because the way society works doesn't support it and free software isn't the type of vehical that can make those types of changes to society. Just like free television. PBS wouldn't be around without gov't funding as well as corporate and private donations.

What I see being more practical is better synergies between free and commercial software. Where software progresses more like a tidal wave. Commercial software and funded open source projects are on the break of the wave and as the wave passes and levels out free software is a greater force. This is the model I think will work for making better software. There needs to be an impetus for people to break new ground and not just customize existing software. In our world that's money, so people need to be able to make money off their work at all levels. No cat fighting between groups either, especially between unix and linux. The goal should be for unix and linux to grow, not for one to grow at the expense of the

In case you haven't noticed open source is fairing quite well in business and in government.

http://production.linux-mag.com/linuxsolutions/LNX Sol_GovHome.html

There is no need to wait and do an assessment, there are plenty of case studies you can use for an assessment now.

Perhaps the article is "loaded in such a way as to imply that working toward an open source future is a good thing" because in the opinion of the speaker it IS a good thing.

In case you haven't noticed open source is fairing quite well in business and in government.

http://production.linux-mag.com/linuxsolutions/LNX Sol_GovHome.html

There is no need to wait and do an assessment, there are plenty of case studies you can use for an assessment now.

And if you do check out some of the case studies please note that these are not developing nations benefiting from open source, they are governments and businesses with established IT infrastructures.

burnin

http://www.linux-mag.com/content/view/41/112/

http://www.edu.cn/20050303/3130012.shtml

Here is a tutorial of what I believe you have done. Haven't tried it myself (yet), so I can't comment on its usefulness.

Simplifying Remote VNC Logins

-AC

January Called, it wants its news back. This was covered in an Interview by Linux Magazine back in January. The article is available on the web here.

Tovalds: I personally also feel that ppc64 is interesting, and that's actually what I run on my personal desktop( it's a dual G5 Apple box, although it obviously runs Linux, not OS X).

above link is from Linux Magazine Online - January 2005

I thought we liked Carly? http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-02/fiorina_01.html

What am I going to do with all these signs?

http://www.linux-mag.com/2004-10/xen_01.html/

Oz

http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-04/behlendorf_02.htm l

Quote: The name literally came out of the blue. I wish I could say that it was something fantastic, but it was out of the blue.

I don't know what you mean by "Wall Street", but most brokerage houses, banks and even the actual NYSE never used Windows for anything except desktops. The business has always been run on big iron IBM OS/390 and Sun boxes.

You are wrong, but even if you were right, investment firms won't have any patience for companies wasting money on Windoze, desktops included. My point was that they had moved away from that themselves and I find an abundance of information to back up my vague memories. Given the wrongness and insult of your reply, it's easy to see why it was posted AC.

My memory was of a stampede away from Windoze on the desktop after the early M$ dissasters, Melissa and Iloveyou arround 2000, 2001. The worms might have helped. I can't put my fingers on those articles now but I do find these, which offer much more. The time frame is correct, 2001, but the speed of adoption is faster and wider than I remember. Read and enjoy:

• A 2002 report of part of the stampede I remeber.
• Merril Lynch Complete top down implementation by one of those companies.
• NYSE replacing "dumb" x terminals with Linux for all the reasons M$ uses to sell their stuff.
• Some people from big companies who should know.
• The most informative article of all. Tracing the roots of the migration and it's totality, including taking desktops from Microsoft.

I've worked here (in NY) for the better part of the past six years as a consultant and I've never come across a major financial institution using Linux except for web and file servers. The desktop is still Microsoft's and the business is still IBM's and Sun's.

From the above, I'd say you are out of the loop. Microsoft is not on the desktop anymore. Sun may still be around, but people think it's expensive and IBM is doing well because they reduced costs with free software. Who do you service, hot dog vendors or dopes like Bankone?

The topic of disccusion was responsiblity and accountability for "security". I identified the biggest security headache out there, it's ramifications and why no company employing fall guys is going to get away with it for long. The bankers know, from first hand experience, what the problem is and what the solution is. They are not going to fall for blame shifting and excuse making when they look at IT budgets bloated with Windoze induced costs. The bottom line is what's inspected.