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?"

Comments

How About The Games?

[Anonymous Coward]

They should make an OpenGames CD with FreeCraft, FreeCiv, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Tux Racer, etc. etc. Kids would love it.

This really has potential...

[b0ycheese]

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. :)

Target audience faux pas?

[JessLeah]

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...

Re:Target audience faux pas?

[Teach]

Sure, here and there a rabid OSS person will show it to all of their friends, and that's a Good Thing.

Exactly. And it all depends on how many "friends" you have. I teach computer science and webmastering at a largish high school near the "Silicon Hills" of Austin, TX. I've got over 100 students in my classes. And there are over 2000 in the school.

You can bet as soon as I get the ISO downloaded ("ETA: 14:27") I'm going to burn a dozen copies or so and make them available to my students. Especially if I encourage them to burn copies for their friends, too. There's a "healthy" warez scene at my school, so they know how to do that, at least.

My students influence their less-technical friends, influence their less-technical parents who will then influence their coworkers, and will soon influence their classmates when they go to college. It all starts somewhere.

This is the same reason I keep copies of the latest RedHat on hand which I loan out for students to copy/install. I collect a $5 "ransom", which they get back if they return the CD.

And as Apple learned in the 80s and Microsoft knows right now, making cheap products available to computer students can grow up a generation of people who may pirate now, but will probably pay for your product when they grow up and start getting paid.

Re:Overkill?

[AndersM]

I think the power of this CD with a load of goodies on it is that it can be downloaded by a LUG or similar activist group and duplicated (with a burner, or perhaps at a CD factory if the group has the financial resources).

Then they can distribute it to all those people who don't necessarily have the connection or the patience to wait for the big downloads to finish.

Remember, the target group here aren't the power users who have dsl or cable, but the home users who might still be happily downloading their mail with a 56k modem.

Put yourself in the position of a computer user without particular interest in how the computer works. When your computer-savvy friend hands you a CD and says "This disc contains a lot of good, free software, and no, it isn't pirated! Just pop it in and try!" - you'd be a lot more inclined to actually trying it out than if the same computer-savvy friend told you to check out an URL, and wait for long, long downloads, wouldn't you?

I certainly think the OpenCD is an excellent way of pulling people onto the bandwagon. It's already moving, we just need to give it more mass and more momentum.

Re:Mozilla

[stwrtpj]

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.

This is awsome.

[Lokist]

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.

Nothing new here ...

[jc42]

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.

--

Re:What a good idea

[bfree]

One small problem, the Gimp is NOT included. According to their faq this is because

• 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).