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From the Article: "Mitnick, who began using ham radios when he was 13, said it cost him more than $16,000 in legal expenses to convince the FCC to renew his license. Typical renewals are free. "It's the most expensive amateur radio license in the world," Mitnick said. "

Though I think it's bogus that the FCC requires that you use windows to access their site: article

Linux World review

Game homepage

It's an FPS, it currently runs on Win32 and Linux (including ppc). It's at the early beta stage (current version is something like 0.3) but already very playable, and it's been reasonably stable for me on SuSE 8.0 with the stock kernel. YMMV, obviously. It's also Open Source.

The graphics still need some work, but I'm getting up to 300fps on a 700MHz Athlon with 384M RAM and a GeForce 2 GTS, so it should run fine on all of your machines. I haven't tried multiplayer yet, so I'm not sure if that works as well as the single player.

I woke up one morning to the realization that Microsoft was going to announce a port of Microsoft Office to Linux. Now that would really be an icebreaker at LWCE. Such a port has been the subject of speculation for some time, so much so that Microsoft has actually denied it, thus giving the notion even more credibility.

1. Hoover Dam
2. Golden Gate Bridge

You'd think that Virginia would want a piece of them too...

Hell, a P75 works fine as a Windows NT4 PDC for a small network and can also handle low-to-medium file serving for around 20 users at the same time.

Then there's the idea of using Linux network client stations, as in "How to create a Linux-based network of computers for peanuts", to which this site linked more than a year ago. This system can even make use of 386s -- I've already tried it. True, performance is a bit slack, but just how much power do you really need to write documents? A network-based 386 (or one running Slack 2.x) with Abiword or maybe pico/vi/emacs (some people do actually like those) works just fine.

woof.

Linux will be ready for the desktop when Gnome or KDE drop dead (I can't wait) and some consistency settles in. Until then, I'll run BSD on my servers (the documentation is much better as a result of the consistency) and Windows on the desktop.

Then you should look at
Xandros Linux
Which is based on debian/corel linux and is quite good

Or
Lindows

Or
Lycoris

All of these are quite good Windows replacments and they will get better. Have a look at each and their prices/policies. Lindows has click'n'run which you have heard of. Lycoris I have used and is quite good.

Reviews are available from

Xandros Review

Lycoris Review

Xandros Review

Xandros Review

Xandros Review

Lindows Review

Xandros Review

Lycoris Review

Xandros Review

Lycoris Review

Lindows Review

How about tis quote directly off the xbox media player front page:

On another note, and this is one I have to address myself, our friends the GPL zealots are complaining that the win32 build in the download section is violating the GPL because it does not contain sources. The win32 player on this site does not contain ANY GPL source code. I should know since I wrote the codec completely from scratch reverse engineering the divx 3.11 bitstream myself. The switch to ffmpeg happened when RUNTiME and I joined forces. I'm quite pround of my codec. Although it didn't support nearly the range of codecs that ffmpeg does and it didn't even support divx 3.11 as well as ffmpeg does it was about 20-25% faster than ffmpeg, using some unique optimizations.

They opened it when they started including GPL'ed code

Can you prove otherwise? It's going to take more than some RTFMing jerk making unsupported accusations to convince me.

Mark Cappel
Editor
LinuxWorld

Mark Cappel
Editor
LinuxWorld

It already can serve as a Debian installation CD - and is arguably THE EASIEST Debian distro to install.

LinuxWorld has an article about this capability: here

The Knoppix-as-Debian-install-cd howto: here

"is this all thanks to Jon Johansen"
No. Jon Johansen had nothing to do with creatinf DeCSS, he was only a member of MoRE, the group that created it. A full article can be found here

TCO = Totally Cool Operation

At least acording to Linus in this article.

I'm very interested in this subject, also. Here are some links:

SQL Ledger Accounting

Hansa Business Solutions

Compiere

Cheap & easy business accounting with Linux

Nola

STFB

Open source Java projects for business and accounting. But... Is Java slow and with non-standard GUIs? A prisoner of Sun politics?

Open Systems Accounting Software

GNU Cash. Impressive.

Slashdot discussed personal finance packages. Thoughts: Where does "personal finance" end and business finance begin? Wouldn't it be better just to have one package for all accounting, so that you didn't have to learn more than one? But business accounting software has been difficult to use. Accounting software requires much more learning than word processing software. Learning more than one may reduce the quality of your life, not raise it.

Why do so few companies copy Epic Games' lead with UT and give consumers all OSes for the price of one? After all, you've already paid for the code and it would be perfectly legal for you to use it in an emulator. Any pirating-prevention schemes that were developed for each OS should still work with combined media.

The only reason I can think of to sell different OS versions seperately is to finance the cost of porting. But Adobe can't use that excuse as they already have a huge market for both sides.

Question: Since you have a license for the software, would you be breaking any laws by pirating the version for the other OS?

Actually if you look at www.xboxmediaplayer.de you'll note that they claim that their beta includes no GPL'ed code.
Care to prove otherwise?
Everyone should keep in mind that these accusations are being made by "the project from hell"

Wrong, Journaling filesystems insure a sane metadata state, they do nothing to protect data.

Er, you're wrong too. It depends on the FS and on the options you give it. Ext3, for instance can be told to journal file data as well as meta-data (using the journal=data option), but it's a pretty big performance hit.

links: RedHat, LinuxWorld and LKML.

Here in Norway, DeCSS co-author Jon Johansen has become somewhat of an icon in the fight for rights in the digital age. There's an interview with him here, in which he speaks about how he got involved with DeCSS, and the whole thing about the controversion trial. Also, the EFF has supported him tremendously with legal assistance. Their official Jon Johansen page is here.

i started using linux a little over two years ago. i went to linuxworld 2000 in nyc and came home with free copies of several distrobution's cds. i went cold turkey off of windows and into redhat. after about a month, i realized that i wasn't really learning much from redhat.
that night i decided i was going to find a distro that i liked. i installed everything (suse, turbolinux, debian, conectiva). finally, i installed slackware an was amazed at its simplicity. it was remarkably voodoo-free. there were no crazy scripts to confuse me, everything made sense.
now i use debian. i forget when or why i made the switch. i still love slack, but i'm hooked on debian's package management and software availability. slackware is the best distro to *learn* linux on. it forces you to do things yourself, and that's important. it's not quite as hardcore as linux from scratch, and i've heard crux and gentoo are similar, but slack will always hold a special place in my heart.

Thanks Pat.

From this article:

The use of Bitkeeper for the Linux sources has a grave effect on the free software community, because anyone who wants to closely track patches to Linux can only do it by installing that non-free program. There must be dozens or even hundreds of kernel hackers who have done this. Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance about the presence of Bitkeeper on their machines. What can be done about this?

One solution is to set up another repository for the Linux sources, using CVS or another free version control system, and arranging to load new versions into it automatically. This could use Bitkeeper to access the latest revisions, then install the new revisions into CVS. That update process could run automatically and frequently.

Mark Cappel
Editor
LinuxWorld.com

Recent article on Linuxworld Apache & Plan9 which describes another solution to identity management.

And I share your feelings against Linux-only software. It seems as if there's a whole generation of coders, aimed at writing Unix software for Linux and nothing else. Fortunately however, the last geneation is still around, among the coders in stable projects such as X Windows, Gimp, XMMS and so on. Mplayer is a particularly good example of the "new" generation of hothead Linux coders, and I'm not the only one who noticed it:

Q: I compiled MPlayer with libdvdcss/libdivxdecore support, but when I try to start it, it says: error while loading shared libraries: lib*.so.0: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory I checked the file and it is there in /usr/local/lib.

A: What are you doing on Linux? Can't you install a library? Why do we get these questions? It's not MPlayer specific at all! Add /usr/local/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig. Or install it to /usr/lib, because if you can't solve the /usr/local problem, you are careless enough to do such things.

Perhaps instead of taking the time to flame the person asking the question, the smart aleck could have simply answered the question graciously, then spent the time saved by skipping the flames fixing bugs in the installation script.

Eventually I negotiated my way through the installation minefield created by the agonizing installation and poor design. I stepped through it one gotcha at a time. I won't bore you with a tedious play-by-play, but I will mention that I had more bite marks than I would have if I had napped in a fire ant mound.

There's a better article about SNORT and ACID on LinuxWorld. Also, if you want to investigate SNORT, check out the following links:

• CERT's HOWTO on ACID and SNORT
• SNORT's manual on installing SNORT, MySQL, ACID on RedHat
• A variety of deployment guides provided by SNORT
• A collection of various IDS documents and white papers, including a good piece by Marcus Ranum on benchmarking

You obviously don't have any real idea as to what the Macintosh is all about other than "it's supposed to be easy to use."

Admins ... shouldn't be dependable on easy-to-use interfaces.

And your point about the Macintosh is...? You insinuate that to use a Mac server one must be "dependable" on an easy-to-use interface. This is flat-out false. (Why you think it's easy-to-use is a Bad Thing is a whole other issue. I believe it goes to show how the vendors you prefer have lowered your expecations over the years regarding interface design - "if it's easy to use it's got to suck.")

Standard server system are much cheaper even with the obligatory redundancy stuff.

No they're not.

Sorry, but I don't see the points for Macs.


But it's refreshing to know that you did your homework before deciding. Not.

I don't want to dampen the Linux love fest at all, but I want to know if any attendees picked up a Mac OS X user's lunch tab while they were there.

Lunch in SF can be pretty expensive, and Mac users have already given their shirt to buy a Macintosh, so... :)

Heh. I bet you think this is the worst of it. Does she have long beautiful hair? Say bye-bye to it by the third year. Enjoying a regular sex life? Watch that vanish like free tchotchkes at a convention. Got any interests of your own? Fuggedaboutit.

Jack

From my own experience, his evaluation of mplayer is completely on the mark.

Part II

Here's something interesting:

Cheaper & faster, too
Several readers, including an Apple sales rep, sent me references to a set of Xserve benchmarks on the Apple site. All of these show the Xserve beating competitive models from other companies, including IBM, Sun, and Dell.

What makes two of these results particularly interesting is that they show the value of optimizing software to take advantage of the hardware, reversing an effect I think of as "regression to the dumb" to achieve impressive results.

"Regression to the dumb" reflects, I think, the marketing tendency to focus on simple things that are easy to communicate in a volume market and elevate these simplifications to the level of de-facto standards. Engineers then have to accommodate these standards in product or process design.

The "megahurtz" wars, long a sore point for both Mac and Sun users, seem to illustrate this perfectly. Each new generation of x86 CPUs does less per cycle than the one before, but it drives the claimed megahertz number up because that's the number that moves product. Along the way, some very good technologies have been abandoned, and software developers have been taught to avoid making their code dependent on chip-specific features that could easily go away with the next iteration.

What happens if you look carefully at the technical advantages you've got and optimize your code and hardware accordingly instead of just going with industry-averaging practices?

1. Apple's PowerPC has an underappreciated facility marketed as the "velocity engine." This is actually a short-array processor with powerful features such as hardware FFT, but, like SPARC's VIS/SIMD, it's more honored in the breach than the observance.

   In this case, Apple's Advanced Computation Group, working with Genentech, modified an application widely used in genetics and related research to make maximum use of the facility. As a result, the Blast benchmark, which searches a genetics database for matches, shows the dual 1-GHz Xserve beating an IBM x330 with dual 1.4-GHz P3 CPUs by factors ranging from 5.8 to 21 (and a Sun V100 by up to 52 times) depending on the length and precision of the matches.

2. Internally, the Xserve has DDR (double data rate) memory feeding a 4-gigabytes-per-second data path to the CPU cache along with four ATA controllers -- one for each disk -- that operate as one. Using Bonnie to compare I/O to a Dell 1650 with dual 1.4-GHz P3 CPUs; SDR (single data rate) memory; and, a single Ultra160 RAID card with 128MB of buffer, Apple finds that the Xserve can be more than twice as fast as the Dell.

   Technically, I believe that there are two factors at work here: the Xserve has faster memory and a cleaner data path to the CPU, and Apple's four-way ATA design is both faster and cheaper than the single-path RAID card.

In both cases, better technology used in smarter ways wins. As in, duh? But managerially what they've done here is pretty cool because they're standing up for excellence instead of collapsing the technical tent and going off in search of volume.

Taken from the Greplaw link, copy pasted and formatted. Originally by "Seth Finkelstein".

As Jon Johansen put it himself in an old interview:

Jon Johansen: I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened ... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part.

LinuxWorld: The other two people that you had worked with to make the player are remaining anonymous -- is that right?

Jon Johansen: Yes, that is correct.

...

LinuxWorld: Do you know why they want to remain anonymous?

Jon Johansen: They are both a lot older than me, and they are employed. So I guess they just didn't want the publicity, and they were perhaps afraid of getting fired.

EEF information on the Jon Johansen case.

Read the indictment. in Norwegian.

Linux World interview with Johansen.

Swedish coverage of the case.

EEF campaign to free Johansen.

Old slashdot article about original indictment.

i agree if youre gonna run snort, you gotta run puresecure. it is a really nice peice of software. there's an article about it at linuxworld linuxworld article that got me to try it. i haven't tried the windows version (yuck!), but the unix one is tight.

Read the article. It shows a Solaris setup is actually cheaper than a corresponding Windows setup. Since Linux is cheaper than Solaris for all except the really big systems, the math becomes pretty easy.

OK. Now that is frankly ridiculous. Even if you disagree with some of his comments about OSS, that does not make the rest of the article meaningless.

Not meaningless, unimportant. There is plenty of meaning to all of the details there, but the lie that is told is that USER ECONOMICS are behind the shift at many companies. Unethical people and companies have a hard time grasping that some people try to make their livings honestly by doing what is best for their friends and neighbors. The unethical just can't see beyond extortion. The proof is left as an unpleasant exercise for the reader.

Tony writes:

The secondary costs of installing and using MS-Windows is about the same (or perhaps more) than installing and using Linux. That, coupled with the primary costs of using MS-Windows (licensing and media fees) puts MS-Windows at a higher cost than Linux.
...
This idea that MS-Windows has no secondary cost because it has a primary cost is stupid.

Yes, and to add some figures behind your statements, Paul Murphy has done some extensive TCO studies of Windows vs Various unix systems, and found that in many cases, a sanely configured Solaris solution (far from the bargain basement of the *nix world) can often save over 60% compared to the comparable Windows solution. The real world numbers are likely even more slanted towards Unix, because he leaves out the expensive hardware replacement that Windows pushes on you to keep running their software.

A strategic comparison of Windows vs. Unix, LinuxWorld, October 2001

Take it from some folks who've been there and done that -- in a much smaller way and have nevertheless gone through a lot of pain.

For the transition from WebObjects 4.5 to WebObjects 5.0, the developers at Apple created a converter that transforms Objective-C source code to Java source code. This was done by parsing the Objective-C source, creating a parse tree, and then running scripts against the parse tree. Simple pattern matching was found to be inadequate.

This was a much smaller project than the one that you seem to be involved in. Why? First off, as computer languages go Objective-C and Java are very, very close in terms of structure and design. Second, even with the talent involved in this project -- whom I am completely in awe of -- they only created an 80% solution. The goal was to produce something that could get a developer well down the road on the way to a conversion, not do the entire conversion.

Then, the Apple engineers tested this tool in the harshest environment possible -- their own code. It was used to convert the entire WebObjects source code from Objective-C to Java; they made it work before releasing it to customers.

Management needs to take a step back and ask, "what the heck are we trying to do here, anyway?" Unfortunately, it sounds a lot like your management has their heads 'way up in the wrong place. A useful piece that I read recently is the Happy Valley Tax Authority case study. <HINT>Consider yourself lucky that your resume is relatively current.</HINT>

--Paul

Back in 94 I started using Linux because the HURD wasn't ready. The HURD still isn't ready. That's OK, things take time. But what's not OK is for RMS to write:

Huh?

Well, no, Richard, I'm sorry. This is like saying 'this is out bridge, because we built the handrails'. Linus did the hard bit, the bit you couldn't do; and he did it brilliantly well. In fact he did three entirely different hard bits, all of which you couldn't do. The first is, he wrote an operating system kernel which worked. Now you're entitled to say that a kernel is not in and of itself an operating system, and that's true. But it is the critical structural element without which a heap of assorted parts don't constitute an operating system. So that's Linus' first achievement: a technical achievement, and a big one.

The second hard bit that Linus did which the Free Software Foundation has clearly failed to do is to evolve a development methodology which allows - encourages - very many people to take part, and which manages to integrate and exploit the fruits of all their labours. That's Linus' second achievement: a social achievement, and a big one.

But Linus third achievement is the key one, and it is key to your project of making Free Software available to ordinary people all over the world. He has brought the system to critical mass, where it's robust enough and stable enough for many people to use it, and in consequence many people are motivated to port many programs to it. This is Linus' third achievement. It's a cultural achievement, and it is an absolutely critical one without which any Free Software movement is ultimately vacuous and solipsistic.

Yes, Richard, my system is a GNU/Linux system. But it is also and equally a KDE/Linux system and an Apache/Linux system. Your contribution - the Free Software Foundation's contribution - is critical; but so is that of the Apache crew and of the KDE crew and the Debian crew and many others. And although I agree that your contributions - especially on the issues of licenses and of the underlying social principles of what we are doing - are critically important, without Linus achievement your achievement would be a footnote on the eccentric fringe of history.

Disparaging Linus not only does you no credit. It actually undermines what you are setting out to achieve. It not only distracts from the important work you are doing on defending the information commons on which we all depend: it undermines your authority to speak on our behalf.

I know that you are a great hacker. I use Emacs every day, and appreciate it greatly; much of what I do depends on things compiled with GCC. But you must realise that your philosophical work is much more important - much more critical - than your software. You were prescient in seeing the assault on the information commons and in making a stand against it, and that will be the contribution for which you will be remembered.

I have no doubt that one day the HURD will be usable. I have no doubt that the HURD, when usable, will be an interesting opererating system kernel. But the critical issue is that you, and your team, could not deliver it when it was needed, and that Linus could. It does you no harm - it diminishes you in no way - to recognise and give honour to that achievement. And it is peurile and childish to pretend that the conrtibution of the Free Software Foundation is any more important to the operating system on my desktop, on my servers, than the contribution of the Apache Foundation and its contributors or of the KDE project and its contributors. It is mean spirited to pretend that without the critical, fundamental contribution of Linus Torvalds, there would be a usable free operating system for ordinary people around the world to use.

Life is not fair. It isn't fair that the Debian KDE/Apache/GNU/Linux operating system on my desk just gets called Linux, when it comprises 796 packages by literally thousands of different authors. After all, forty or so of those packages are GNU softare. Roughly one tenth, or to put it differently, 60% of the KDE project's contribution. But, I say again, the single, critical component that welds the work of the KDE project, and the Apache foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, and hundreds of other contributors contributions into a usable whole is Linus Torvald's contribution and it's only reasonable that he should get top billing.

Grow up. Give credit where it is due, and concentrate on the parts of your work which are really critical - not just to you but to all of us. Concentrate on articulating the principles which allow an information commons in software to exist, and defending that commons from all encroachments. That is your task to do, which you do uniquely well. The honour which Linus has earned does not diminish or detract from the honour which you have earned. It is your carping, your disparagement, your evident jealousy, which detracts and diminishes your honour. Grow up and stop it.

What RMS actually said was:

Bitkeeper issue
The use of Bitkeeper for the Linux sources has a grave effect on the free software community, because anyone who wants to closely track patches to Linux can only do it by installing that non-free program. There must be dozens or even hundreds of kernel hackers who have done this. Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance about the presence of Bitkeeper on their machines. What can be done about this? ...

Linux, the kernel, is often thought of as the flagship of free software, yet its current version is partially non-free. How did this happen? This problem, like the decision to use Bitkeeper, reflects the attitude of the original developer of Linux, a person who thinks that "technically better" is more important than freedom.

Value your freedom, or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.

That's a very profound statement. It's easy to sneer at it, to dismiss it ad hominem. But he raises important points which deserve to be addressed in depth.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Here's the direct link to Stallman , although you should read the first story first.

The French have a saying that goes roughly, "Those who refuse to play politics usually die by politics."

There are many reasons to hate the strictures of the GPL. It's very unforgiving. But it also has the effect of binding a number of people together into one coherent group and coherent groups are the only ones who have power in a democracy.

This coherency is even more important than ever in the face of the new proposed laws for curtailing the power of personal computers. Some say that the content companies like Disney would like to turn every PC into a set-top box controlled from Hollywood. There's plenty of truth to that. The GPL, for better or worse, to serve as the one ring to bind them all.

That being said, I have profess some confusion about BitKeeper. Although I haven't looked at the product or the license lately, I was pretty impressed by the logical conundrum created by Larry McVoy. The default mode of the product FORCES all of your development work to be free. You have to pay cash to take the project proprietary. That's a pretty clever notion, if you ask me. It seems like something that's even more likely to encourage and enforce free software than the GPL. Okay, RMS will disagree with that statement. I'm not even sure I believe it. But cash is a powerful force.

All the benefits of the open source would still remain if the lead developers remained anonymous (except maybe for ego purposes)

It is EXTREMELY stressful to be an anonymous developer for legal-risky work. Let me tell you, I know.

As Jon Johansen said, in an old interview about DeCSS:
(emphasis added)

http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-01/lw -01-dvd-interview.html

Jon Johansen: I'm 16 now, I was 15 when it happened ... and the encryption code wasn't in fact written by me, but written by the German member. There seems to be a bit of confusion about that part.

LinuxWorld: The other two people that you had worked with to make the player are remaining anonymous -- is that right?

Jon Johansen: Yes, that is correct.

...

LinuxWorld: Do you know why they want to remain anonymous?

Jon Johansen: They are both a lot older than me, and they are employed. So I guess they just didn't want the publicity, and they were perhaps afraid of getting fired.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

That's the point of the LinuxWorld story. Please, people, read before you post!

A link to RMS's home page is at the end of the LinuxWorld story. Read the story before you post!

You want lower cost-per-seat and easier maintenence overall? Spend half that money on a powerful server, and convert the desktop machines for use as thin clients. No more tweaking settings on each system! No more cleaning up after settings screwed up by users on each system!

I'm surprised not to see more references to the stories about other organizations doing this, such as:

Binson's Hospital Supplies

Newspaper Association of America

(vendor) Integrity Networking Systems

City of Largo

Home Depot

. . .

And if you'd like to really cut down on MS licenses, don't forget about Crossover Office.

One app that is going a along way to making PGP slightly easier is Evolution. It has the best PGP solution I've seen yet for email. Easy and simple to use, even Joe Barr agrees.

But, the problem is you still must maintain your GnuPG bits manually on the command line. That was the beauty of NA's program. It had a slick GUI. Of course, in the end it didn't take me very long to pick up how to use gpg via the command line, but for the general populace it's still a barrier.

http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2001/1018.t co.html

http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/08/10 /1 441239

You don't need to spend $1,000 per user to create a modern, friendly, fast & productive computer system.

I am awaiting the release of StarOffice6 & Openoffice 1.0 with baited breath.

That is, ask the students: What would it be like to be Montag? How's it feel to have The Hound (take it as a symbol for the legal system) nipping at your heels, or seeing it devour others? To have your employer give you an "out" for your activities, and would you take it? What if someone could advance their career by doing ill to fellow booklovers?

Now, honestly, Jon Johansen and DeCSS is actually a better individual example. It's not inconceivable that one of the students could find themselves in a similar situation (below is one of my favorate quotes, where Jon is responding to reporter Declan McCullagh, given Declan was arrogantly giving Jon a hard time for not immediate returning Declan's request for comment):

Date: Wed, 10 Nov 1999 21:26:23 +0100
From: Jon Johansen (Micro Media ADB) digitech@m...
Subject: [Livid-dev] Wired article on legal threats

I assume you've read a great deal of articles on the subject? If you have, you might have noticed that I'm only 15 years old; which means I go to school. Norway is GMT+01. You should be able to figure out the time difference, and when I would be available for comment :)

That is, Fahrenheit 451 takes place in metaphor. But there's real battles going on right now, right this minute, and there's real-life opportunities to be Montag. But beware The Hound.

Here you go for an example: http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0114.k ernel.html.

Furthermore, you can explain briefly how with the source code available, special changes to the software for specific needs can be done by any programmer and the city won't have to buy $100K of custom software -- $100K will easily get you a couple full-time programmers in Charlottesville for a year.

Just remember, voters don't want things complex, and TV and papers will almost never let you discuss anything in detail, so it's got to be something simple and quick. "If we change to Linux, our base costs will be less and our long term costs will save the city X dollars over Y years." "Remember Virginia Beach and the Microsoft audit! One hundred twenty-nine THOUSAND dollars for software the city already bought!!!" You get the idea, otherwise, give up politics. (:

woof.

WHile you're post doesn't say what kind of distribution you are looking for, it may be easier to sell you boss on a commercial solution that sells specialized distributions. does just that, I have never used their products, there are some reviews out there, linux journal has a review of the web server, Linux Mag loved The Web Server, Thick Book has a review of The Firewall (run through google to avoid PDF), as does Linux World.

Hope this helps you sell a linux solution