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Attacking Open Source
Paul Bristow writes: "John Taschek of ZDNET has written a superbly under-informed criticism of the entire open source movement, based on the fact that Mozilla isn't offically released yet. Look at the article here to see him completely ignore apache, the kernel, fetchmail, KDE/Gnome and all the other great open source projects that make the internet possible and livable in. " Remember: If you are going to e-mail them, or respond in here, respond in a calm, intelligent manner, refuting the points they make without flaming - we all represent the Open Source Community.
An article of this sort generally falls into the category of "punditry". The gentleman in question probably had a deadline and was a few hundred words short of a real article.
The solution in these cases is to put on one's pundit hat and literally pull a story out of one's [CENSORED]. Symptoms of such stories include:
What should be your reaction, O Gentle Reader? Ignore it. As others have pointed out, ZDNet will soon learn that anti-OSS/Freedomware stories = /. effect = page impressions = dollars.
People who receive attention tend to repeat the attention-getting action. It's just one of those things :)
be well.
--
"Don't declare a revolution unless you are prepared to be guillotined." - Anon.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
As cynical as this sounds, this article was probably written specifically to get our (collective) goat. Pretty soon the site is going to be slashdotted, and most of you are going to read the Talk Backs and probably enter some of your own. Every single one of these page views is 2 banner ads they push out there! This is all about ad revenue, folks! They have to know that this article is flamebait -- the author may work for PC Week, but ZDNet is not stupid -- but flamebait draws flames, and each flame is half a dozen banner ads.
Whatever you do, view these pages with images off. Don't give them the satisfaction of the ad revenue.
darren
Cthulhu for President!
(darren)
Now that Mozilla has a 'only accept images from originating server' option you can easily browse without ads.
Ho, ho, how ironic.
by Bero, Red Hat
Richard M. Stallman, the closest thing GNU has to a cult hero, calls Microsoft Windows a disruptive technology.
Microsoft Windows is not a disruptive technology. It's a wannabe operating system, and OSes aren't a thread to anyone - and if they were, it surely wouldn't be a good thing. Richard apparently is referring to the proprietary software movement and the sea change behind Microsoft products that has made them unsettling to more than one or two OS vendors.
What amazes me most is that proprietary software has gained so much momentum without showing any goods. It's a dot-com--all-hype and speculation and no fundamentals. It's like an onion in a bushel of apples. Someone might notice that it looks and tastes different, but peel away its layers, and there's nothing there.
In several years, one of the more high-profile proprietary software projects at its time - Microsoft Bob - has released exactly zero used copies of its interface. It won't be until Microsoft throws a copy into open source that anything usable will be released. And the result is a product that might have some good but not earth-shattering.
In fact, the best parts of Microsoft Bob have nothing to do with proprietaryness. The most important part of Microsoft Bob is that it runs on Windows - it's Microsoft's obvious attempt to tie in the product to a bunch of for-profit wannabe OS products.
Although Microsoft has had incredible stock market valuations at one time, it's very much down to earth right now. This means that they'll quickly have to expand beyond valuations centered on Windows.
Microsoft took the bait, creating MSN, an online service that, while fairly bad, had not much to do with Windows. Perhaps Microsoft needed to add another color to its spectrum. Maybe it will next buy AT&T to flesh out its all-American offerings.
It's clear that Windows has a future and that it's still attracting dumb people. Proprietary Software, on the other hand, appears to be struggling.
The reason is simple: People gravitate toward products, and proprietary software is not geared to create but to make money at the cost of freedom, stability and usability. It's best at tearing apart the establishment because it locks out valuable programmers who might want to improve the products.
But proprietary software advocates should face the facts: Put up some goods or your establishment will be ripped apart, too.
Are you a proprietary software advocate, or do you just not care? Let me know with the "Reply" button below.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
From the last paragraph of the article:
But open-source advocates should face the facts: Put up some goods or your establishment will be ripped apart, too.
Are you an open-source advocate, or do you just not care? Let me know in the talkback below.
ZDNet writes articles like this every once in a while that are blatantly false simply to generate traffic and comments (if you don't believe me look at the size of the Talkback and compare to other stories on ZDNet). To put it simply, there is no way that a reporter that is employed as a technical writer for a tech magazine cannot know of the successes of Open Source. Apache, *BSD, most of the important Unix tools (thanks to GNU), Perl, etc cannot be completely unknown to this writer or whoever he bothered to ask while researching this article. I wouldn't waste my time responding to this obvious troll either by posting to ZDNet or bothering to send him an email.
I see a rather large smoking gun at the scene of the crime....
ZDNet is running from.... an Apache Webserver.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi