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?"
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
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.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right! =)
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.
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.