Slashdot Mirror
TheOpenCD Launches First Edition
Emil fra Loeneberg writes with welcome news from TheOpenCD. "This article
on NewsForge describes a project which plans to
distribute Open Source Software (OSS) widely to Windows users.
You can download a CD image from a mirror site and start spreading
the OSS message. It's basically an OSS distro for Windows. This
project was also
mentioned on Slashdot
back in April and now they are ready with a first release. Any first reviews?"
Seems to me like there's gonna be a lot of unnecessary downloading of files you'll never use. How about just a floppy with the Program Browser on it, but links to download the file from the internet? Along with a comprehensive description of the program, users would only have to download what they want. And i don't think i'm being harsh in saying that anyone without an internet connection really needs to shape-up!
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
They should make an OpenGames CD with FreeCraft, FreeCiv, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Tux Racer, etc. etc. Kids would love it.
Blank cd's are cheap, so using them to distribute free software is a wonderful idea. If you can burn this, and give it to a few friends, co-workers, or family members who use windows, if they like it, most likely they'll burn it and pass it on (the probably already do this with other software anyway). This being legal, they'll actually feel good about redistributing it. The wider this gets spread, the less money goes into the pockets of people who head greedy corporations, and more money goes to the actual programmers. In my mind, if i'm getting all my software free, i'm more likely to be able to donate directly to the programmer(s) to keep the projects going, because i'm not wasting money on pretty boxes, or supporting company bureaucracy. Send copies of this or knoppix out with your christmas cards this year. Give people the gift of freedom. :)
The faux pas isn't the target audience itself-- it's a bad misjudgment of how far "market penetration" (if I must wax Corporate for the moment) will go among said target audience.
Or, to put it more clearly-- this CD is targeted at bringing open-source software to people who otherwise would not use it, or maybe even have heard of it.
But how many of those people are going to have heard of OpenCD.org? Joe Beer and his wife Martha surely aren't reading SlashDot. Or Kuro5hin. Or $OTHER_GEEK_HANGOUT_SITE.
Not to be a fatalist, but I don't think this CD (which is an EXCELLENT idea in concept) will get very many users. Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing. But one thing SlashDot readers (and posters) tend to underestimate is the colossal "mindshare" Windows and Microsoft products in general hold. People, realize-- to many people in this country, Bill Gates is a "great business leader", to some almost a hero. Many people aspire to be like him, and hardly anyone (excepting geeks) has anything against what he's doing. We at SlashDot aren't quite so complacent-- but the great masses of people in this country ARE!
Going against the MS monopoly with this nice OSS CD is like... well... To make an analogy to Star Control 2, it would be rather like going up against a fully-loaded Ur-Quan Dreadnought in a Shofixti Scout. With the Glory Device broken...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It's really too bad Mozilla won't be included on the CD.
It deserves as much press time and attention as possible.
I thought this at first also, but then I realized that Mozilla still has a little ways to go to be usable for the Windows masses. This is not a troll about Mozilla; I use it myself all the time on my Linux box. But I have spoken to a few people that I had try out Mozilla on Windows, and they all reported little quirks here and there that people like me might ignore, since I'm used to that sort of thing in some OSS products, but for a windows user used to more or less smooth running of their apps, it is unacceptable.
Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but Mozilla's newsgroup reader is atrocious (random hangs, no way to mark all read without clicking on article first, no yEnc decoding, etc etc etc) I just barely tolerate it myself.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Does anyone care about this? Surely anyone who is aware or interested in OSS would download this stuff themselves to get the latest version? Anyone who doesn't know how to do that is probably also incapable of installing these programs.
Did you read the article? Seriously, I'm not trying to troll here. The article states that they took a long, hard look at which apps to include. From the list that they picked, it appears that they chose ones that are easy to install. Remember that this is specifically targeted towards non-OSS users.
Case and point: try installing OpenOffice some time. I did it recently on my older RH 7.1 box after my wife got a brand new RH 8.0 laptop with it pre-installed so we'd have the same software on both machines. Took about 30 seconds to install. The experience was akin to installing a Windows app. If its this easy to install on Linux, I can't imagine it being much harder on Windows.
Naturally, if someone out there has had a negative experience, please correct me on this.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
I mean, since Mozilla is "free" can they place distribution conditions on it and deny people the ability to distribute it?
Well, no. They can't force people not to distriute Mozilla, but they can ask you nicely not to, since that's not what the binaries are intended for. I suppose the OpenCD people could have told mozilla.org to get lost, but since there are plenty of alternatives, and it's not like they don't have a good reason for the request, why not play nicely?
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"
to have some people use Free software and see some of the benefits, than to have those people only use Free software if they switch away from Windows altogether?
A CD like this is helping users down a path, where you want them to climb a wall.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How many times have you Windows users had to download a shareware program that expires after 30 days? or have the program throw annoying popup windows after using it?
This is awsome for the Windows community. It brings a little bit of open source to a closed sourced world. Maybe we can convert a few?
Recently I sold someone a system that came with Windows XP. After debating if I should throw Linux on I decided that since the owner already paid for XP, they might as well use it... The problem was that they didn't have a word processor, they couldn't do graphics editing...they couldn't do anything... Whats the point of Windows without something to run on it?
I ended up downloading Mozilla (because as we know... we can't trust Microsoft), Gimp, and Open Office... Wouldn't it be great if someone kept things organized and put out one handy dandy ISO for it all?
If anything... This shows that the open source
world is not selfish... We are bringing our software to a system that wants nothing to do with open source.
See ya Bill Gates...
--
An active Open Source Advocate.
The worst thing that could happen is newcomers using bugzilla as their "discusion forum". I do agree though that some kind of gecko based browser should be added to the CD. What about phoenix? their is a HUGE user support group and lot's of related pages.
(phoenix forum )
(phoenix help/themes/extensions/etc. )
As the developer's say;
1.- What can I do to help?
Why not include it?We need all the distribution we can get. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your coworkers. If you're a student, get it distributed at your college. Submit a story to Slashdot and other news sites about the release. Make some noise on your blog. Spread the word!
In the next month or so, I plan to build my own mozilla and phoenix and re-distribute it. Would anyone be interested?
I think it's a good idea, because in one download I've got a whole bunch of Open Source software to check out, along with source code and docs.
Magazines have known about this for a long time - cover CDs can shift a lot of dead-tree publications if they've got good software on them. OK, so I got to burn my own CD, but that's not costing me much. Then I can find out what all the fuss is about - are The Gimp, OpenOffice, et al. really all that? - without having to tramp around the Internet.
As for 'but it's not the latest version!', well this is always a dilemma when compiling 'sampler' CDs, whether it's Open Source or not. Provided the version included on the CD is not really ancient, and is stable, then I see no problem.
And as for 'just get a warez copy', I'd rather take the free sample and stay honest, than be a thief, thank you very much...
-MT.
I have a number of friends who are stuck with using NT at work. They say they have an approach that works pretty well. They note that Microsoft claims that NT is POSIX compliant. They take this at face value, and start downloading the source for all the usual POSIX-based tools from the online linux archives. They compile them, and they mostly work quite well.
There are problems with the things that just don't work right, of course. But a friend put this in an interesting perspective. Back in the early days of POSIX, the committee sent out requests for specs for a system called WEIRDNIX. This was defined as a system that was technically in compliance with the POSIX specs, but took advantage of every loophole and ambiguity to do things in the worst possible way. This was a technique of pre-emptively adjusting the wording so that vendors would have difficulty violating the spirit of POSIX.
The Microsoft version of the POSIX libraries can be viewed as an implementation of WEIRDNIX. This should give you a good idea of them problems that you will encounter.
But in general, the gnu and linux tools are widely reported to work pretty well on NT. Better than the NT tools, anyway.
--
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Does this mean some rich person is going to fund the mailing out of billions of Debian CDs to every person in the US on a weekly schedule competing with AOL? Instead of "1000 Hours Free!" it could read "Your Life: Free!".
All kidding aside, some kind of grassroots movement for that might be cool even without some rich person to fund it all. You'd go to a website and grab a copy of a standard CD label graphic, burn 20 CDs of some distro, package it up, and then send them out (maybe to a list of addresses provided by the website). A distributed effort to mimic the AOL campaign for OSS benefit, coordinated by some volunteer website.
Although CD-R blanks are practically free, where can you get empty DVD cases for super cheap?
From the article..
"Given that we now have this fast, secure, desktop-ready, free OS, why doesn't everyone switch?"
Hate to argue the third point, but until Linux has a single, consistant, easily understandable set of user interface guidelines that most people follow, I don't think we are there yet. One of the main rules of UI design is consistancy, but a user's experiences will differ vastly from one program to the next, often not allowing them to take what they've learned in one program and apply it to another. (for example, toolbars get located in different places, menu layouts work differently, widgets don't behave the same way, buttons on standard dialog boxes are placed differently, some support context menus, some don't, etc etc.) I'm not saying it's any better or worse on the Windows side, but in my eyes, that really is a major hurdle we need to work on as a community before we proclaim Linux a "desktop-ready" OS.
slashdot!=valid HTML
This means that I can download the CD and when I work on computers for people and they say, "dang it! Word is crashing every 12 minutes and giving me a blue screen of death!" I can say, "Hey, check out this free software I have that is compatible with word."
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
- The installer is unreliable and complex
- It depends on GTK+
- The interface is clunky
- The program is very complex
- It doesn't support gifs out of the box
- Windows port lags behind the Linux version
Now they say they could handle a few of these problems, but combine them all and they think it's a no no. Personally I think the Gimp for windows is closer to the killer Free app than anything else (though openoffice.org is in with a shout) but I can understand why they think it would be problematic. I hope that someone will address some of these issues (installer could take care of GTK+ and be stablised, gif support could be simplified with a check box in the installer to download and install it and finally maybe someone could help get the windows version into step with the linux one).Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Could we actually succeed in seperating the windows kernel from the rest of the applications? What would it take to make GNU versions of Explorer (the shell) and other such programs. Could GNOME be ported to windows without Cygwin? And should GNU be changed to GNW in this case or GNMS?
As somebody who (like many /.-ers) provides cheap and/or free tech support to family and friends, I make my own "distro" of software for Windows that gets installed as needed. Being a pragmatist, some of the software I have used is less than legally pure. I try to find free (beer) and free (GNU) software wherever I can, but sometimes a few serial numbers come in handy.
As has been pointed out, nobody is going to install Beonix on somebody else's computer. You're either going to update their IE and leave it at that, or you're going to give 'em Mozilla at best.
Also, I'm going to keep giving people WinAmp. No, it isn't free in the GNU sense, but lots of people use it... It's not some wierd product that nobody has ever heard of and can't figure out how to use. And I always keep an installer of Adobe Acrobat around. Sure, I'm probably violating the EULA, but what the hell? I hate going to somebody else's house and waiting for a dialup download and then charge these good people by the hour when I have already spent a lot of time ridding their computer of viruses and I have better things to do.
Probably, the biggest question I am asked about the super-anal-free-GNU software I install on other people's computers is "why?". Why, when Winamp exists and is supported, would I install FreeAmp or anything else? People don't want to hear about RMS and the GNU philosophy, they just want their shit to work, and as cheaply and easily as possible.
To summarize, my personal softare collection will
My biggest wish from the OSS community (and I am not a programmer, and I don't have the time to learn), is for a good Windows virus scanner. I have used (and still use) free (beer) virus scanners because people don't want to pay a ton of cash to make their computer usable. I more-or-less like the one I am using now (grisoft), but I have been burnt by "discontinued programs" before. Bait and switch. I suspect that the scanner itself wouldn't be too hard to write, but updating virus sigs on a regular basis would be.
What would probably be more useful to people like myself is a "virtual" CD.... A list of freely available (but not anally or unnecessarily GNU-ized) collection of download links to software ... and the total download size magically adds up to 650 MB or less.
...but I offer my own Open Source Software CD to people at my school and recently on eBay. I used Slashdot's story a few months ago about what software for Windows to include on a CD-ROM to get about 666 MB worth of software.
First I gave out a few for free to friends. Then others that are in our computer science classes -- people I barely know -- started asking me for my "open" CD for the DJGPP compiler that's on it. My school uses the ancient Borland Turbo C++ 3.0, and DJGPP's IDE, RHIDE, emulates it very well -- a great alternative to paying $70 for the suite. So far a few tens of CDs were sold at my school and two online.
These CDs are quite popular.
Somehow I hadn't heard of (or forgot about) TheOpenCD.
:^)
I'm vaguely familiar (as in, two of my apps are included in, and I just submitted many more to) the GNUWin II CD. It's the same idea. A CD of Open Source software we all use and love; just Windows versions of them.
I guess I'm going to have to find someone who runs Windows and have them nominate some of my ported games to TheOpenCD.