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Linux Advocacy From the Trenches
An anonymous reader writes "Tom Adelstein, longtime Linux advocate and consultant has spent the last year working closely with state, local, and federal government open source software initiatives. Tom launched Government Forge,spearheaded the Open Source bill in Texas and other programs. Tom shares the grass roots efforts that have offered him an insider's view of what is propelling Linux toward critical mass and the desktop. He shares his view of Linux "from the trenches" in this interview."
Our customers and support at other banks will not be happy if we start mailing them open office documents.
Then mail them RTF, which is a textual encoding of a Word document. OpenOffice.org Writer for Windows does a good job of exporting RTF. If they demand to receive .doc, send them RTF renamed as .doc; Microsoft Word will know how to handle it. Likewise, OOo Calc can export spreadsheets that Microsoft Excel can read just fine. The OOo filters are often even more reliable than Microsoft's own filters at reading Microsoft Office documents, especially damaged ones.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Shortly after he started Bynari, she got a job working for them with their then business model of acting as a US support center for Mandrake. It looked like a good opportunity at the time, but it went sour pretty fast.
I spent some time talking to Tom and was shocked to find out he didn't apparently care all that much about OSS. He mostly cared about finding ways to make money off it. He was positively giddy when describing to me various turnkey vendors he was talking to who were building net appliances (consumer firewalls, etc.) which ran GNU/Linux but were themselves closed systems. They were pretty upfront when talking to investors that they were able to do this legally by making sure all of their mods were routed through kernel modules which were written in such a way they could stay proprietary. A lot of big vendors do this without trouble, it was more these guys' attitude that they were so clever for getting a free ride on Linux this way. It disgusted me.
Anyway, Adelstein continually was trying to change Bynari's business model to find something that would make the big money. He reminds me of nothing so much as the Loki top brass fiasco stories or the Caldera/SCO stuff. He loves to talk himself up and position himself as a big name Linux consultant, but in my experience cares very little about software freedom for it's own sake or has any kind of deep technical understanding of what's even going on.
But then maybe I'm just bitter because he fired my wife less than a week after finding out she was pregnant (draw your own conclusions), based on (foundless and unsupported) claims that she had been actively working to impair and destroy their systems. Then he refused to pay us the moving expenses he owed us until we got lawyers involved and reached a settlement. A few months after that was over we got contacted by the former Bynari CIO who had been fired after Tom reportedly claimed he was selling company secrets to the Japanese. I really tried to lose track of him after that.