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?"
I don't think microsoft will be very happy with stallman for trying to call it gnu/Windows
Let's call it America's Open Library (AOL) and send it out in bulk mailings on cheap blue CDs. This has gotta be effective, right?
----------
I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
I've found that it's much easier to say to people 'hey, check out this software that runs on windows' than it is to say 'hey, ditch windows and use linux'. People are generally more responsive if they don't have to leave their comfort zone, then once they have a chance to use Free Software, see that they like it, that it's better, have used OpenOffice in windows, then say oh yea, Linux can do that, and more, and with more freedom. It's especially easy to nab programmers that way, because they get to see the source of what they're using.
I've been doing this for a while, building my own CDs and passing them out. First with Win32 software then a Linux distro. Knoppix was rad because it let me add another step to the conversion process. It's a step to change mindshare and for a lot of people OpenCD will be their first step towards computing freedom.
I leave a trail of little Linux users everywhere I go and this is the tactic I've been using for a long time. Now they've made my job easier.
I've been using Open Office on Windows for a few weeks, and it's just fantastic.
I think too many people focus on Linux when they talk about open-source software, when the beauty of this software is that it's portable and usable on so many platforms. When I have to use Windows, I love to be able to use The Gimp and OpenOffice, since I'm not locked into proprietary formats.
Microsoft's monopoly exists in their applications, which have always been much better than the easily available alternatives, until now.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
They should make an OpenGames CD with FreeCraft, FreeCiv, Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Tux Racer, etc. etc. Kids would love it.
And there's lots more good stuff that directly answers your question. If you ever get ten minutes or so to spare, I recommend giving the article a read.
Information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized anymore.
Free OSes (Linux, BSDs,...) have a lot of values, _one_ of which is their large library of free applications.
By bundling those for windows, people will have less reasons to switch to one of those free OSes. Of course, there are still reasons, but there is one less.
People who don't matter for ideology behind free OSes won't bother switching. ANd I'm afraid this means a lot of users...
There is some momentum which is needed with free OSes to have the attention span of big companies, and convince them to throw resources at supporting their products under those OSes. Having less people switch to those means less momentum, and therefore less attention.
On the other end, using those tools under Windows will at least render much easier data exchanges, and is therefore a first step in breaking the dependency on those proprietary and more or less closed formats.
I'm not sure if this is ideologically good or not. It will for sure be usefull for those who have no possiblity to switch of OS (because of job requirements, or games,...).
My 2 cents...
-- No signature yet.
I don't have a broadband connection, you insensitive clod.
Well, actually I do, but many don't.
Besides, URLs change over time, and if people were so inclined to download the software, a simple google search would do the job, why bother getting it from a CD?
Don't quote me on this.
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. :)
But openoffice already HAS Access functionality, and it's relatively painless to setup.
it requires an external database, anything that can be used via odbc, basically. unfortunately, i don't think it handles access files themselves *yet*.
see here: on linuxmafia for more information on this topic.
ashridah
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
They really have to catch up :) Go GNUWin team go!
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Read their FAQ ... or just the appropriate text pasted below.
Q. Why didn't you include Mozilla?
A. We were contacted by a developer in the Mozilla project, who asked us not to include Mozilla. The Mozilla.org project provides binaries for testing purposes only, as anyone who has read this page knows -- scroll down to the very bottom, and you will find a notice to that effect. In short, they do not want to wind up providing end-user support to people, and so they ask people not to re-distribute Mozilla unless it has been customized to make it clear that Mozilla.org did not provide the binary and will not support it.
Unfortunately, it is not at all clear what requirements we need to meet in order to be able to re-distribute Mozilla, or what level of customization would be needed to do so. Also, we didn't have anybody willing to take on that task. If you want to help us out with this, get in touch! Beonex is a fine product, but we tend to think that Mozilla is better, especially since it is updated much more often.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
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! =)
The reason this is a bad idea is because this is NOT how most Windows apps are shipped. Most Windows apps do not force you to go to a website to download the software, they come on an easy-to-install CD. The idea is to have users believe that OSS apps are just as easy to install and use as Windows apps. You don't want to point people to a URL to download, only to have it change, or to suddenly have what was once a stable production-ready release replaced with the next beta.
Also, recall that some of these apps are going to be GPL, which means they come with the source. Not everyone has broadband, and those source bundles can be HUGE.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
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)
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.
Beonex communicator is on the CD, which is a rebranded mozilla. I've never used it, but it looks pretty much the same as stock mozilla 1.0.1, but rebranded and maybe missing the debuggers, and chatzilla. It has mail, news, composer, and of course, the browser parts of mozilla.
If I'm not mistaken (*actually bothers to check the website -
Another feature from Beonex which isn't found in Mozilla at all (yet?) are options to set the HTTP_REFERER; I think you can opt to never send it, to only send it within the same domain, to always fake it to somethign else (not sure about this one), or to just send it always.
Where Mozilla preferences are set in such a way that they don't provide optimal security and/or privacy, Beonex has changed those defaults so they do. (Improved privacy & security are the main focus of Beonex as I see it.)
Beonex also comes with a spell checker by default, something which the latest version of Mozilla is still lacking. (Yes, the Netscape 7 spellchecker is currently once more working on linux builds, but not on windows.)
Of course, now I'm comparing Beonex with Mozilla, while what I should do is compare Beonex with Netscape 7. There you trade in integrated AIM/ICQ for popup blocking (though that's finally coming in Netscape 7.01 - even with whitelisting options), image blocking, better default preferences, and general lack of AOL clutter.
Basically, Beonex would be the ideal distribution for any geek if it wasn't for Mozilla itself appealing more.
From the What is TheOpenCD website:
I'm sorry, but what is exactly open source philosophy? Open source is about technical and economical advantages. Free software is about philosophy. Please do not flame me for saying the obvious. When Eric Raymond took Debian Free Software Guidelines and published them as Open Source Definition in 1998 he did it exactly because he wanted free software without the strong philosophy associated with the "free software" term since at least the announcement of the GNU Project in 1983.
I think that TheOpenCD project should not talk about philosophy if they want to promote the open source movement. But if they think that the philosophy is important, then they should promote the free software movement and change their name to TheFreeCD. Because the philosophy is exactly the difference between free software and open source movements. If they talk about "open source philosophy" they are being against the main priciples of both movements.
TheOpenCD project people should read these books:
Those books are not very long, but they provide enough background to let avoid using such unfortunate oxymorons like "open source philosophy." I strongly respect both free software and open source movements and I can not stay ignorant when people insult any of them, while the term "open source philosophy" insults both.
~Christopher Doopov
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.
- 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