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This is offtopic but important. Please read and mod up. The people affected by Hurricane Katrina still need your help! Please visit the following link http://uskatrinarelief.com/ and PayPal a donation to help those still in need! Thanks and God Bless.

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I'm a small business woman and in order to control costs, I have looked
at open source software as an alternative to MS. As a non-technical
person, it has been a very frustrating journey.

First of all, the term "free" seems misleading. It seems that you can
aquire a "starter" version of a Linux distro that is not production
ready for free. But if you want want that is tested and stable, one
needs to purchase an expensive yearly maitenance fee for each computer
it is installed on. My understanding is that one can aquire something
called "source" to the expensive linux distro version, but that the
source doesn't actually run the computer.

When researching, I read about "Redhat Linux" (sic ?). It seems that
they allowed one to download the complete "working" version for a while
but then they did a switchero and hid the working version download and
made it available to paying customers only. To pacify the rest, they
gave a "starter" ("Fredora" (sic?)) version to them. It seems they cut
off affordable support to those with the working version and replaced
it with something more expensive than MS.

My IT consultant put FireFox on my computer and it looks like another
switchero is in the works. With the members founding a corporation, it
looks like they will start charging for the good version and leave the
a "starter" version for the non-paying customers.

So is the business model of open-source to bait people with free
software when their software isn't as good as the commercial offerings,
and when it does become good or they get enough people on board, do
they just jack up the prices as much as possible? Seems to me this is
a poor business model, and I can't understand why a saleman recommended
it to me as a way to keep costs down. I would rather go with a vendor
where I can expect things to stay the same and a vendor that has a
clear business plan. That way they won't just change the rules halfway
like open source seems to.

Maybe it is a wrong impression, but that is what a good business woman
like myself sees.

PS Please consider Donating to help the victims of Katrina. They need your help.

As an aside: Please consider Donating to help the victims of Katrina

Linux is *not* user friendly, and until it is linux will stay with >1% marketshare.

Take installation. Linux zealots are now saying "oh installing is so easy, just do apt-get install package or emerge package": Yes, because typing in "apt-get" or "emerge" makes so much more sense to new users than double-clicking an icon that says "setup".

Linux zealots are far too forgiving when judging the difficultly of Linux configuration issues and far too harsh when judging the difficulty of Windows configuration issues. Example comments:

User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Linux?"
Zealot: "Oh that's easy! If you have Redhat, you have to download quake_3_rh_8_i686_010203_glibc.bin, then do chmod +x on the file. Then you have to su to root, make sure you type export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5 but ONLY if you have that latest libc6 installed. If you don't, don't set that environment variable or the installer will dump core. Before you run the installer, make sure you have the GL drivers for X installed. Get them at [some obscure web address], chmod +x the binary, then run it, but make sure you have at least 10MB free in /tmp or the installer will dump core. After the installer is done, edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and add a section called "GL" and put "driver nv" in it. Make sure you have the latest version of X and Linux kernel 2.6 or else X will segfault when you start. OK, run the Quake 3 installer and make sure you set the proper group and setuid permissions on quake3.bin. If you want sound, look here [link to another obscure web site], which is a short HOWTO on how to get sound in Quake 3. That's all there is to it!"

User: "How do I get Quake 3 to run in Windows?"
Zealot: "Oh God, I had to install Quake 3 in Windoze for some lamer friend of mine! God, what a fucking mess! I put in the CD and it took about 3 minutes to copy everything, and then I had to reboot the fucking computer! Jesus Christ! What a retarded operating system!"

So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.

It's a nice thought, but people are DEAD and dying. They need clean clothes, fresh water and a place to live. Please Donate Now and make a REAL differnce.

What George W Bush didn't want the public to know about New Orleans.

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