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osOpinion has just posted an update to their story. Now stating that OS X has achieved UNIX certification. Appearently Open Group has updated their list of UNIX approved OS's. score 1 for apple

there is an article on this very topic. It contains the point of view of the Opengroup folks, who notably have not attacked apple for trademark infringement. Because of that, the article argues, they must be sanctioning apple's use of the term UNIX. Frankly, I think that this is not a subject worth contending, because regardless of whether it's a *nix or not, OSX is an ugly operating system with some extremely powerful software behind it. Once somebody makes it look a bit more professional, I'll jump at the chance for such a slick, *nix based system. If only it were as easy to customize as Linux....

I used to find myself in the position of being a guru to friends, family, and neighbours. I'm very reluctant to do so now.

The big problem is complexity, as a lot of other posters have pointed out. Hardware is sourced from all over the place; the system manufacturers go for the bits that give them the biggest margins, and damn the quality of the accompanying documentation and drivers. Then there's the software. A lot of modern software is unforgivably arrogant, sending its tentacles into parts of the system that it has no business going near and demanding the lion's share of the computer's resources. The result is machines that are constantly teetering on the brink of meltdown.

Now, I'm in this business because I like messing about with computers, but I got sick to the back teeth of sitting in friends' and neighbours' bedrooms, interminably rebooting their balky machines, hunting for drivers, and re-installing Windows, while the person I'm supposedly doing the favour for hovers over my shoulder, sending out vibes that this is all somehow my fault. Eventually, I had to stop. It wasn't worth the heartache.

What pisses me off about the whole thing is that people like me are in a way responsible for this whole cock-up. We're the early adopters who played with the first personal computers in the '80s and told anyone who would listen that computers were The Next Big Thing. It was our evangelism that made the fortunes of companies like Microsoft and IBM. And it is our unpaid tech support, in our roles as gurus, that sustains their fortunes. Think about it: each time you unwedge your next-door neighbour's Windows box, that's one less irate customer onto Microsoft or Corel or IBM, flaming them for the fragile, barely-usable crud they have been inflicting on customers for years. Of course, the execs of these companies have built themselves a nice thick insulating layer of minimum-wage phone jockeys between themselves and their customers so they never have to listen to the anguish.

So, if any friends, neighbours, or relatives ask me to look at their computers anymore, I decline politely. If they persist, I ask to be paid. People do get snotty at that, but I'm fucked if I'm going to let the assholes in Microsoft or Compaq off the hook by providing free technical support for their customers.

Gurus of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. And, um, most of your friends. :-)

on OSOpinion.

One of the points brought up about using the XBox for apache server farms was the commercial appearance. Imagine you are walking through a potential webhosting location that you are considering to host you new online business and you see your pages being served up by XBoxes. How fast would you be out of there?

Someone doing this would be a prime candidate for both fuckedcompany.com and the top 100 dumbest dot com moments.

I wrote a two-part article about this on osopinion.com last December (here are part 1 and part 2). - adam

I wrote a two-part article about this on osopinion.com last December (here are part 1 and part 2). - adam

Coming soon to your wallet, Microsoft Universal Citizen Id Cards. Well, not yet but read this: http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/8563.html

After reading up on the Microsoft Hailstorm crap I'm beginning to believe it.

Scary stuff huh?

http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/8563.html

"The rug is pulled out from underneath high-paid help desk and sysadmin positions because everything is centralized and run at Microsoft. MBA's rejoice and switch over to the new model in droves."

now theres some creepy stuff.

This sure ain't getting marked as +1 Informative, but had you considered checking with the SuSE teams? As one of very few distros that are processor-agnostic, I bet they've done some tests of their own.

FWIW, OS X server on a PPC outperformed Linux on an Intel 450 PII by 23%, according to osOpinion. (YMMV, read the fine print, etc., etc.)

-Waldo

I will not rest easy until OEMs can ship PCs without an OS. Currently, you are not able to buy a desktop that lacks an OS because the OEMs are told by MS "You will lose your good pricing if you do that." My company doesn't have the guts to tell MS to stick it. It seems other vendors (Dell, Gateway, etc) are in similar situations. What gives MS the right to tell a vendor what they can and can't ship?? Until the gov't makes this practice illegal, we will all be paying the Microsoft tax, even if you buy a PC with Linux preinstalled.


--------

This would be the part where MS realizes that "oh my, maybe we *should* do something to crush this threat to our way of making money". Whatever to do? Well, according to the halloween documents, it was embrace and extend open source protocols (kerberos was an example). This just takes it to another level. Attack Linux and open source in general.

This falls perfectly in line with this osopinion article about Ballmer's ideas on how to "attack" (not "compete with") linux.

This is an interesting tactic though, using the 'ol american patriotism against open source. The thing is, to "us" (the geeks of the world) this is complete BS and we know it. However, to the average american (I'm guessing (I'm .ca)) will probably think that "hey, they're right! damn those open source people!" I'm surprised they haven't taken it to the supreme court to force legislation against anyone doing any of the evil anti-american stuff.

I wonder if this sort of tactic will work against big companies. Sure, the average geek is ignoring this, but how about the average fortune 500 CEO?

From Burg's article:

His crime was referring in an offhand way to OS X as a "throwback" during a recent interview, saying "Look at OS X, that Apple's coming out with: everybody who works on it says it's a throwback to the 1970s in terms of structure. It's UNIX, it's backwards."

What "recent interview"? I'd like to see Raskin's comments in full, but Burg doesn't cite where this quote came from - for all we know he could be quoting out of context, or even making it up! How do we know? Not very good for a professional journalist.

Why are you all taking Burg's unattributed quote of something Raskin may have said so seriously? Sheesh!

This is how they plan to win the Java war and it will work for them as it has in the past.

As I have said before, C# is just another Microsoft retake of Java, .NET is just another retake of the JVM.

Microsoft's method is to publish something crappy (either by buying comething crappy like the SpyGlass browser, or by making a slightly broken variation-on-a-theme like J++), then re-work it and re-announce it as if it were the Second Coming, then do that again, and again, and again until the buying public gives in. It's a war of attrition.

Java may suck in some ways, Java may not be a truly public standard, but compared to .NET it's a paragon of virtue. Microsoft have made no significant technical improvements over the JVM (indeed, none over the TCL browser plugin) with .NET - the entire purpose of it is to take market share from Sun and all of the other Java companies. And it wouldn't surprise me if an internal Microsoft email turned up which says just that.

Meanwhile, in allowing a cracker to take them off air for a day, Microsoft have graphically demonstrated that they are not competent to provide the underlying distribution (lock-in) system for the .NET platform.

I say tell them where to stick Microsoft .NOT, and go with more open standards and methods. I say computing power and storage is increasing so rapidly that a physically centralised server-push system like Microsoft's .NET/ASP vision is beyond silly.

Linux should take a cue from Microsoft if it wants to succeed.

Californians are in desperate straits due to the fact that a huge percentage of Windows PCs are located there. The news media has finally made the connection between bloated PCs and bloated power consumption. OS/2's higher efficiency (requiring less hardware power to produce the same or better productivity and performance) means that OS/2 should be on every government hot-list to resolve the energy distribution problem.

Californians are in desperate straits due to the fact that a huge percentage of Windows PCs are located there. The news media has finally made the connection between bloated PCs and bloated power consumption. OS/2's higher efficiency (requiring less hardware power to produce the same or better productivity and performance) means that OS/2 should be on every government hot-list to resolve the energy distribution problem.

I was referring to a specific claim made in the article under discussion, which I quoted: "All of the alternatives mentioned above are completely free. If a new version of Debian comes out, you can download it without charge." I am aware of arguments made by RMS and others that the word "free" is not supposed to refer to payment. However, large segments of the free and open source communities are continuing to falsely insist that Linux is free in the commerical sense -- which it is not. A serious, pre-integrated, cross-platform Linux package such as RedHat will cost you the same as Windows or MacOS.

Second, I've been through 3 linux distributions, and not paid a penny for any of them.... On a cable modem, I downloaded the Redhat and Slackware current ISO images in just about 6 hours each. This was not wasted time, though, since I left my computer downloading the images while I attended classes, and came back to find them waiting for me.

Using the RedHat list of mirror sites, it took over two hours to even find a working mirror; the vast majority are broken or require a user account. I have just now tried a random sampling to confirm that this is still the case, and it is. There are a handful of sites on that long list that actually work and are open to the public, but it takes quite a long time to find out which ones they are; and once you do find them, half the connections terminate in the middle and have to be restarted by hand, requiring a babysitting process.

If you actually have a way to reproduce the six-hour hands-off anonymous download, feel free to share it here. I don't believe that you do.

Furthermore, not once have I had to restart a download, and none of the servers have choked.

Then you must be using some very special server, rather than one on the Red Hat mirror site list. It would be good to know what server that might be, but it doesn't change the fact that this arcane knowledge is not something that is accessible to the average end-user.

As far as TCO, a term I'm sure Microsoft has perverted far beyond comprehension, your statements are simply not true. You must consider the TCO when you are running Linux (or some other Free UNIX) in the hands of an experienced administrator. Microsoft, and you, expect to calculate TCO from a vantage point of a skilled Windows administrator. They include training and general "figuring-out-time" in the cost of setting up a Linux system. What about training and "figuring-out-time" for Microsoft systems? If you insist that the Linux admin knows nothing about Linux from the start, you must assume the same about the Microsoft admin. But if you assume your admins are skilled in UNIX, installing Linux is trivial. (I should hope any company would be cautious switching operating systems when their administrators don't know about the new OS.) No matter what UNIX-like operating system an admin comes from, it is trivial to become acquainted with another one.

None of the above has anything to do with reality. You are unaware of the TCO differences between GUI and command-line software, and you are ignoring the flakiness of free software. As Monty Manley wrote:

A quick look at freshmeat.net lists the reams of software being written, most of it for Linux, and damned little of it unit-tested, much less system-tested. Will application x cooperate with application y? Will daemon x coexist peacefully with the MTA? Does application x fail gracefully? Odds are very good that the programmer didn't think about any of this, much less test for it, and expects his hapless users to do his QA for him.

Commerical software is at least tested. Use a free package for anything important and you may literally be taking your life in your hands. Everyone who has ever been a UNIX system administrator knows that Unices of any flavor generate problems on a daily basis and require constant tweaking to even keep running. The same has not been true of Windows systems for the last five years, and it was never true of MacOS systems. UNIX TCO is a disaster -- a disaster that is profitable to those who work as sysadmins.

Furthermore, in the hands of a skilled admin, installing software in Linux is trivial.

Simply not true. Most of the people who say this seem to be unfamiliar with current desktop systems. Guess what -- on MacOS and Windows you almost never have to mix and match versions to make sure your packages will play together, you don't have to hunt down trivial driver settings to make basic hardware like monitors and keyboards work, and you don't have to search all over the web to find the libraries you depend on before you can install. To the UNIX devotee, somehow these costs don't count, but looking at the situation objectively, they are a huge time drain for the administrator. And that time is real money.

Of course, most Free software is also free monetarily, which cuts the initial cost to 0.

If you don't have to pay your system administrator, and your own time means nothing to you, then this is true.

I never need to memorize manuals when installing software under Linux. I don't know why you expect this is necessary.

If you don't RTFM, you can't use the software, because it's not self-documenting. Every UNIX program requires training by self or others, whereas few GUI programs require training. Again, this is one of the TCO losses on UNIX which UNIX devotees think is actually a benefit.

The vast majority of software installation breaks down to little more than "./configure; make; make install", and often, the ./configure part is not necessary.

That's assuming you have already spent hours resolving all the dependencies and version conflicts, and reading through README and INSTALL files to figure out which set of options you need to use.

Don't forget about package systems, either. RPMs and debs make software installation trivial, especially with a package management utility like apt. Software installation with apt is no more difficult than "apt-get install ", which automatically downloads packages, satisfies dependencies, sets up a default configuration, and drops you back at a shell.

It says a lot about your set of assumptions that you'd consider a cryptic command-line method of software installation "trivial." Have you ever opened a single book on user interface design? RTFM!

I will admit I have had to hack some makefiles in my day, but any experienced UNIX admin will have no trouble doing that.

You are admitting that just to install free or open software, you are faced with difficulties that would not arise on commercial platforms. Once again, these hidden costs somehow are waved away. To you they don't count, but in any objective TCO investigation they would loom large.

Plus, the advantage of being able to modify code far outweighs any benefit (I consider it a drawback) of a nice, "keep-clicking-next" install interface.

A benefit useful only to the .00001 percent of the human population that is made up of computer programmers.

There is real control in UNIX software installation, and little added difficulty.

Huge added difficulty. Contrast both difficulty and time consumed in changing a configuration file and rebuilding as against clicking a checkbox in a self-documenting preferences dialog.

We haven't even considered support costs. Microsoft Windows, a closed system, often has problems which are unsolvable by anybody but Microsoft. This means you must call them, and wait on the phone, to talk to somebody who probably doesn't know what he's doing anyway. Often times, you must repeatedly call, talking to a differnt person each time. To top it off, Microsoft charges for support calls after you've exceeded a certain number of calls. This gets expensive.

Not as expensive as a huge staff of on-call UNIX sysadmins 24/7, which is what it would take to maintain any significant network of end-user UNIX systems. If UNIX is confined to the back office then the support costs are probably about the same as for a Windows NT server network; but move it out to the end users and I would be surprised if support costs dodn't go up a factor of ten compared to a Windows or MacOS network.

An open system, like Linux, is much cheaper to troubleshoot.

Only if the software is of the same basic quality level, which it isn't, due to the lack of testing in most free or open source software.

Attitudes are important in troubleshooting, too. Linux, being an open system, harbors a community phenomenon that Microsoft Windows just can't sustain. People who use linux feel like part of a tightly-nit, minority group, and are therefore much more willing to help, without expecting something in return.

More of a closed community of obnoxious losers who desperately need to get a life out in the real world, from what I've seen. To quote Manley again, "Linux, more than any other OS, suffers from a surfeit of testosterone-poisoned young men who know little but speak much.... They are, in a word, punks. And Linux has far too many of them."

In pragmatic terms, anyone who wanders into this community of obnoxious young hackers asking for help is likely to be immediately accused of stupidity, have "RTFM" and less polite terms screamed at them, and otherwise face social conditions that the vast majority of the population would find intolerable. Not this closed community, though -- it loves to flame newbies.

You were right about it not being about money, though. Still, Linux can be totally monetarily free, and cheaper in man-hours than any Microsoft or Apple product.

Assuming we simply ignore all the hidden costs, it certainly can.

However, I don't think most LINUX advocates are trying to be deceitful by covering up the costs. Like Windows 3.1 users, they honestly don't realize there's a better way -- they really think it ought to take hours to install a piece of software. It's sad, especially since better ways have been in mass distribution for more than fiteen years now.

(Oh, to respond to one of the flames in your message: Both my download and CD installs of Linux were successful. I learned to kernel hack on BSD on a Sun I at C-MU back in 1984, and have worked as a UNIX administrator.)

Tim

- adam

If anyone cares, I wrote an article for OsOpinion.com which gives my view on all this.

- adam

If anyone cares, I wrote an article for OsOpinion.com which gives my view on all this.

- adam

http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/DeanPannell/Dean Pannell5.html

Dear Me,

I'm not sure if reading this letter is illegal. I thought it only fair to warn you; it might be better to just destroy it. [...]

Dear Me,

I'm not sure if reading this letter is illegal. I thought it only fair to warn you; it might be better to just destroy it. [...]

IBM? That sounds strange to me. I mean, IBM has pretty much embraced the open source and open standards world. Their alphaWorks pumps out some really cool, free stuff. I'm sort of surprised they'd embark on YetAnotherSecureDigitalMusicFormat. Short of a noir futuristic scenario of pervasive thought policing I can't imagine there is any way to get around the plain physics of media distribution.

\begin{rant}\begin{flame}{FULL}Get your head out of your ass. MS is breaking ASCII and RFC 822, Just try and read a comersal webpage without IE, notice all those lovely ?s they are MS fucking over ASCII and ISO Latin-1. isn't nice to know we are going to a world where a company dictats all modes of comunication? Just think about what will happen when the DMCA and the UCTIA get in full force there will not be an internet. Just think Right to read and Letter from 2020 and tell us that this is the world you want to happen. The corret resonce to someone who does these things is a FULL FLAME respoce in hopes that either a they get with the standards or commit suicide. (virtual preferd but real aceptable.) \end{flame} A full diplomate discorse my also be usefull, take your pick. Breaking standand is a bad thing, actully MS should have bin given the INTERNET DEATH PENATLY long ago but alas they are too big. \end{rant}

.....it'll save all that depressing 2020 bother.
- Derwen

(...)We will never want KDE to extinguish GNOME, or the opposite to happen. We want all the advantages of BOTH of those wonderful environments, and to keep alive the potential for even more. And we want this for all free major components. With this spirit, let's all take Free Software even further and higher without being distracted by yesterday's money makers who don't understand what freedom is about.

Would be worth a post on Slashdot by the way!

It's here

Mod erotus' post up. That's a good link: http://www.osopin ion.com/Opinions/DavidNimmons/DavidNimmons1.html

Read this excellent essay article on OsOpinion "call for cease-fire in the KDE-Gnome war": http://osopinion.com/Opinions/GaelDuval/GaelDuval1 .html

I could only agree with that!

what really matters is freedom of the internet - i don't care so much what happens to napster, but i care alot about laws and regulation of the internet. we need to stand together on this one. we can solve the music issue later. right now we need to keep free speech on the internet. kindof like what this guy was saying.

wish
Vote for freedom!
---

On the other hand, here is an article that explains why GNOME is a better platform for the future. It seems fact-filled and flame-free to me.

I would like to see an article from the KDE camp that is as sensible and reasonable.

steveha

osOpinion has an article by Tom Nadeau which gives a rather different take on Dell. http://www.osopinion.com/Opinions/TomNadeau/TomNad eau50.html

Actually, this thread is pretty much redundant, cos' they've got their own discussion going on.

pt

Check out The Practical Manager's Guide to Linux. A lot of the issues you'll face are addressed there.

It's bad software design, folks.

Redhat is less of a hardcore/server distribution than, say, slackware, because, as you say, it tries for both the desktop and the server market.

You are certainly wrong about general users wanting or needing PCs in the future. Did you even read the article? The first issue that is brought up is 'the metaphor crisis.' Because PCs must support many different applications and varieties of hardware, they are hard(er) to use, because the mouse/keyboard metaphor is not optimal for many applications. Let's say, for example, that a door, a lamp, and a TV were controlled by a generic PC interface - a mouse and keyboard. It would be horribly backwards, because the interface is not optimized and adjusted for the application. A door has a handle, because it is the most logical interface. A lamp has a switch, because it is the most logical interface. A TV has a remote control - because it is the most logical interface. What happens is that the PC is divided into many appliances, each with its interface AND hardware optimized for its application. Things finally become easier to use - what the user wants. Keep in mind that the general user is the guy who bought an iMac to check 'that internet' out, not the linux junkie worried about where his shell prompt will go.

The corporations will not largely affect information flow, either. Mass media corporations like aol/time warner can certainly do their share, but the Web will still flourish as it does today. Most information will be free, but, sadly, some things will be littered with ads. But, then again, the same happens today.

In the days of redhat 5.2 (apollo), their distribution was praised for its great RPM technology. But ever since the 6.0 release, Redhat has been more aggressive in the market than anything else. The redhat distribution now focuses on the ease of installation and maintenance. By doing this, they are capturing the desktop (newbie?) market. Assuming that linux is the future (and it may not be: PCs are on the go. IAs are moving in.), Redhat needs to take the desktop market in order to win the general server share. Here's an example of why: how did Microsoft win the early server market? Not by pushing a better server product, but by winning the desktop market (windows...). The same people who are buying Redhat for their desktops, because they know no other linux, will buy Redhat for their servers, just out of convenience (and ignorance?). Maybe by acquiring openBSD, redhat could turn things around and put out a great, secure server linux.

I think that by making these moves they've gotten alot of news (man, look at their stock prices) and business partners (almost every big corporation "involved in the open-source revolution" ships with redhat linux, no other), but they've lost alot of support from the hardcore open source community. Now, a lot of people blacklist redhat, associating it with newbies and ignorance. But, as I said before, maybe they will push a good server linux too.

Repeating the exact same rhythm accurately is a skill that takes years to master. It sure doesn't happen by accident.

Memory of rhythm fades rapidly. Unlike the patterns that grow on the ends of your fingers.

Supposing that people did have characteristic patterns - by ear, a trained musician can easily copy and conterfeit them.

On top of that, *nobody* is going to be happy about getting a retinal scan or anything remotely resembling that before they can play a piece of music they bought and paid for. This idea is so far out in left field that I can't see it as anything other than grasping at a straw - an act of desperation.

I was reading a fine piece today that sums up exactly my thoughts, better than I could. The problem is defined perfectly, and the reasons why recorded music is *never* going to be expensive and restricted again, like it has for much of the 20th century. (The solutions he proposes for compensating musicians in that piece are too utopian, IMHO, but other solutions *will* work.)

The RIAA and their toadies are on the run. They may be able to attack dotcom's and bring them to heel, but they can't successfully overwhelm the entire net.

Disclaimer: I would *never* encourage anyone to violate a copyright, even to hasten the demise of an evil cartel like the RIAA - instead, listen to the music of musician's that *want* you to, and don't unfairly restrict you.
--

Some of it is a bit far-fetched, but the idea is certainly interesting. The most important part of the editorial is that it explains the reason copyright was put together in the first place. The major reason that copyrights were created is so that there would be more music for the people to enjoy. The fact that this allows artists and corporations to profit from it is only a side effect.

--

This really sounds like an article for OSOpinion.

But besides that

The major productivity applications such as the oft-cited Microsoft Office run on Mac OS, making it a useful computer for day-to-day tasks in a way that Linux can only dream of.

Who says Microsoft is going to keep supporting the MacOS? Remember, there's no GPL. The decision is entirely up to MS.

But now Apple need fear nothing from Windows, Inc., as the applications the Mac OS needs are made by Microsoft. And it is in Microsoft's best interest to sell as many copies of it's applications as possible, without concern for the operating system. This dynamic will benefit Linux, and possibly others, as well.

I wish! There are many other company's that only sell products for Windows. And many of them are not affiliated with Microsoft. What makes you think the application division of Microsoft will act different?

Steve announces that Mac OS X for Intel includes a Windows Migration Kit that simplifies the conversion of a PC from Windows to Mac OS X, while retaining all customer data. Included are coupons from major software manufacturers for low- or no-cost upgrades to the Mac OS X version of their applications.

Would that migration kit be something like Wine? People wouldn't need coupons if they choose Linux.

Millions of Windows users tired of IRQ conflicts, eternal consultant visits, convoluted interface design, and painful aesthetics can now install Mac OS X on their existing computer, keeping their data and their applications. Millions do.

Linux is much more a hype (bad word choice, but I couldn't find a better description), why would people be foolish to choose MacOS X. Even their beloved Ziff-Davis magazine will warn them of the risk that Apple can stop supporting the Intel platform at any time.

Apple's hardware sales decline as people take advantage of cheap PC hardware, then increase again as the platform gains momentum and former Intel users upgrade to Apple hardware. In any case, Apple can do without it's hardware entirely, as it makes more money as an operating system vendor than it ever did as a hardware manufacturer. Apple hadn't been concerned about that anyway, because a certain company in Redmond had already proven there was gold in operating systems.

Why would people upgrade to the expensive Apple hardware if they can get Intel at lower cost, besides. Observing the obsession many company's have with Wintel most MacOS X producs *would* be Intel only anyway. Apple wouldn't even be able to sell its OS because people would (have) switch(ed) to Linux.

With it's BSD/mach core and Aqua interface, Mac OS X starts to make serious inroads as a server operating system. Companies requiring high-end hardware redundancy can now use the Mac OS on suitable Intel-based server hardware. With the availability of single-rack-unit servers, Mac OS X finds a place in major hosting farms, as Mac OS users outsourcing their hosting needs begin to demand it.

Why would they care what Unix it ran, it's not like they need Quartz.

What about Linux? The vast majority of computer users--even professionals--want nothing to do with a command line. Witness the earlier success of Windows NT. Although Windows, Inc. makes Office available for Linux, the lack of a first-class unified graphical interface severely hobbles that platform for the majority of would-be users. People begin to realize that Linux has little to offer that Unix hasn't offered for years, and with Mac OS X's BSD core and Aqua interface running on cheap hardware, the needs of even die-hard geeks are being met. For those in the Open Source movement, Darwin is all they need.

Have you not seen Gnome/KDE? Linux users may soon not need the CLI anymore. And I don't think people in the Open Source movement will be satisfied with an OS of which only the very core is opensource (see Debian-KDE story).

Face it, Open Source/Free software is here to to make a difference.

As for the postings of AC, it's a real pain to have to register before testing something out. But, the trolling is also a big nuisance. So who do you want to piss off more: new users and trolls or your regular posters and readers?

-- Diana Hsieh

The Real Microsoft Killer: Open File Formats

--jd

Anyway, I read this over on OSOpinion ... but could MS's implanting of Outlook in nearly everything actually be more damaging than their inclusion of IE in DOS?

There have already been a bunch of great ideas; here are mine.

Build community ties. By helping out with other projects, you get your own name out there. When people know who you are, especially when you have helped them with their projects, they will be more likely to use and advertise for your site. How can you help out others?

• Offer to code review projects you are interested in
• Offer to write content. Sites like osOpinion, OS Online, and Kuro5hin are always looking for content. themes.org has been advertising for help for a while, in a bunch of areas, inclusing webmastering, PHP development,and mysql management.
• The GNU project is always looking for help, and has a large tasks list; helping out the FSF is a great way to establish yourself.

Once you have content up on some of these sites, its easy to reference your own site, whether through direct links, author bios, or something similar. I'm not advocating using other sites for your own gain; I'm advocating reciprocation. You help them, they help you. You may even find that your site has a very natural tie-in with another site, and you can work together to share data, user info, stories, and the like.

Of course, you can always just stick some advertising in your /. sig.

darren

A search for "Small Business Server Upgrade" and "Joyce Park" revealed the source with the first hit. Try this out.

Choosing a good license model is important. According to this article you can make decisions on this, which won't be appreciated. Choose a license, and be clear what you want with open source.

You want complete control? Do you want control like Linus Thorvalds has? Do you want control like Sun has?

What do you want to give to the community? What do you expect to get back (i.e. customers?

Is it a project with a couple of sequal projects (like MS-Office can be seen as a sequal for Windows, Windows is step 1, Office is step 2)

I think you can only think of arguments for or against the choice of going open source when it is fully clear what you want, and what you don't want.

We've had this discussion on our local lug listserve, i've heard many positions on it, and can only come to the conclusion that it's a one of the worst ideas.

Linux has not come this far by going head to head with the fud-master!

Unfortunately many linux enthusiasts are starting to emulate the ways that the Opensource movement has despised.

Advocacy is something that is done on a daily basis, not just for one event. I wonder how many of the rocket scientists here on /. are actively participating in their local Linux User Group? , and if one's not available, starting one? Here in Phoenix we have a couple of very active LUG's, with leaders that are motivated and actually follow thru, to make every meeting worth the time to attend.

I will not be participating in any W2K/Linux activism, instead I will continue to work with our LUG, which is currently developing a pilot project to introduce linux into our local school systems, and insuring that our teachers have the skills required to utilize these systems. As well I will keep plugging along, enhancing my linux skills so when the business requirement at work comes, and it's between a NT box and a linux box, i can effectively and with confidence recommend and implement Linux.

On another note, if your going to write an article or rebuttal on the win/lin debate, use the following article as an example on how not to introduce more FUD into the industry. This guy had an excellent opportunity to take and admin's comments line by line and give facts, but it was not to be, the linux-nazi rears his ugly head once again.
Lame Linux Rebuttal

On osOpinion... OS X on x86.