New York Times Staff Editorial Promoting Linux

cotyledon writes "Today's New York Times editorial (Free Blah-Di-Blah) describes Linux as good for consumers and good for programmers. It recommends "Government units abroad and in the United States and individual computer users should look for ways to support Linux and Linux-based products. The competition it offers helps everyone." This is the paper's opinion, btw, and not a guest columnist."

Comments

Use the free registration generator

[Professor Collins]

It baffles me why Slashdot continues to post links to the NY Times with nary a mention of the NY Times random login generator. It makes my perusal of the news so much nicer.

Re:Use the free registration generator

[Professor Collins]

Save the page to your local machine and run it from there. It still works perfectly, just not from the site that hosts it.

Re:Use the free registration generator

[Rooktoven]

I've been registered for over 4 years and haven't got one pice of spam (that I am aware of) from the New York Times.

Re:Use the free registration generator

[Kunta Kinte]

Amen bro!

I couldn't agree with you more.

The NYTimes is asking *so* little for their content and use of their servers. Abusing their registration system is being extremely unreasonable IMHO, since for one we are not *forced* to use it.

If you don't want to give the information then don't read the articles!!

I for one would perfectly understand if NYTimes some day decides to banned links from slashdot.

*continues laments about sense of fairness in todays society...*

Re:Use the free registration generator

[NickV]

Do you really really really think that the New York Times, the most respected news source in the world BAR NONE, would risk ruining it's reputation by selling their email lists (which also means lying in their privacy policy) to some penis-enlarger spam guys?

Or maybe you just think that the world's "paper of record" (not to mention third highest circulated periodical in the world) is going to go bankrupt in a year and sell their assets (of which their most prized one is not the second tallest building in NYC [currently under construction] but their EMAIL LIST?)

This isn't fucking googl.com. It's the New York Times. They say they're not going to spam you, they won't. They are a very tightly-run organization and to this day none of the aggregated data has been stolen. Do you shop online at all? Do you have a slashdot account? Do you go to restaurants? Do you live in fear that your data will be used against you when you do any of these things?

The Times' reputation is FAR more important for them to risk selling their data or not protecting it closely. The Times is a family run business, so they don't need a quick buck (hence they avoided the whole rush-to-the-internet-consolidate-everywhere craze) and they're not a do-it-quick web operation.

If you don't believe in the free registration fine. But don't go onto the Times web site and fill in garbage information to read these articles that you obviously want to. I still can't believe the audacity of people on the Net. They're giving you their CONTENT FOR FREE, except for a small registration form which they won't sell.

I can't help but laugh at people who think the Times is some joe-smo dot.com publication.

It's in the print edition, too.

[socratic method]

This editorial appears in the print edition as well. Needless to say, the NYT is quite a prestigious publication. While I am surprised its editorial board has taken such a strong stance on such a geeky issue, the positive press will surely be good for open standards and free competition.

We mustn't forget that competition is the cornerstone of a free economy and that Microsoft makes a significant contribution to technological innovation. Without Microsoft's constant competitive pressure on OSS developers, the quality of open source software would suffer. Certainly Microsoft has shown that it is more than willing abuse its monopoly status and it is the duty of the Department of Justice to protect the consumer against economic hegemony. Under the Bush administration, the DoJ is failing to perform its duty. In spite of this, my sincerest admiration goes out to the OSS kernel and application developers who choose to challenge the Giant rather than merely whine about its existence.

sm

Got your registration right here

[Russellkhan]

login: spamfree
pass: spamfree

This was posted some time ago in the discussion of another NYT article. I've been using it (for reading articles linked by /.) successfully since. Enjoy!

Russ

Re:For those that don't have subscription

[gwernol]

communitarian spirit"?

This is an extremely odd choice of words. I would have used 'cooperative', wouldn't you? I wonder if their intent was to conjure up another commun- word. We may never know.

Communitarian has a very specific meaning that describes a recently-popularized political philosophy. Both Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK have talked about their political philosophy as inspired by communitarian ideas. As the name implies it proposes that communities are a central political unit.

You can find out more at places like: RadicalMiddle

I believe that calling the Open Source movement communitarian has some useful connotations.

Re:ObSimpsons

[vistas]

w-w-w-w-wwwwwait a minit!!!!

AOL is the frigggin crapolla that alters how WinSock.dll interacts with the rest of the system. I can't tell you how many times I've had to restore someone's internet connection because they innocently installed that stupid AOL software. Sounds like AOL/Netscape FUD to me.

What about, when installing AOL/Netscape/Winamp, RealPlayer no longer .... etc.. etc....

Re:For those that don't have subscription

[Bistronaut]

I would guess that Slashdot would immediately take the post down if they got a Cease-And-Desist letter (as required by the DCMA {I think - IANAL}). Otherwise, I'm sure Slashdot's policy is to not try to police the posts on their site. Once they started to do that, they would have to continue doing it, and it would be impossible for them to do it with any degree of certainty (how would they know that I had not copied this post off of another site - they couldn't).

The thing is that the sum total of copyrighted material out there is practically infinite. You couldn't possibly check every Slashdot post against that large of a set of information (not to mention aLL pOSSiBLE trANSfOrMatIONS) even if they had access to all of it.

Re:Arent they supposed to suck?

[grytpype]

You can use user and pw "slashdotac" to log on. You don't need to register. If you wanted to, you could, and it's free.

Times very pro-linux recently

[neslon]

The Times has been all over Linux and Open Source recently.

There was the September 10th article about Hewlett-Packard firing their open source evangelist, Bruce Perens, which managed to state his case pretty well, including his outrage over the flamingly hypocritical microsoft-backed "Initiative for Software Choice" overseas lobbying group.

And there was their original September 5th article reporting on that lobbying group (and really, if there's anything that Microsoft has done that screams "We want to go to hell in a hurry!" it's creating that organization). The times tossed in a nice zinger there that hinted pretty strongly about how they feel: "(Illegally stifling choice, of course, was precisely what the federal courts in the long-running antitrust case ruled that Microsoft did in the market for personal computer software.)"

The Times articles may no longer be free, but we did write-ups of them here (sept. 5) and here (sept 10) and we quoted the articles fairly heavily.

neslon

Re:It was a bad idea to begin with...

[karmawarrior]

Nah, Linux is free markets. Capitalism can be about free markets and it can have nothing to do with them. The constant assertions that one equals the other has done enormous harm to political and economic discourse.

Capitalism is about private ownership. It isn't about choice. You can have a free market where the majority of producers are cooperatives operating from government loans, and you can have a monopoly driven economy where all ownership is in private hands.

Those are, of course, extremes, but they are illustrative that the free market = capitalism equation really isn't right.