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Send an Open Source Project to COMDEX
chromatic writes "O'Reilly & Associates is working with COMDEX to create an Open Source Innovation Area. We've nominated 21 important, interesting, and useful applications. Here's your chance to vote on the six most deserving applications. Steve Mallet has more details in his weblog." There's lots of good choices for applications on the list as well. Chances are that you've used one of them at least once.
In the past, I thought Linux and GNU were rather interesting projects that merited my attention. But in recent times, it has come to my attention that these projects often have stolen code incorporated in them from closed source software. This means that it is illegal to possess or use this software unless you have acquired a license from the copyright holder of the stolen code. Furthermore, this also means that at any time, should I be audited by an organization such as the BSA that protects the rights of businesses from pirates and code theft, I might be sued for a rather large sum of money. Clearly this is unacceptable, and until open source software stops stealing from closed source software, I refuse to use it or support it in any way. I hope you will join me in my boycott of open source software.
Women and Linux - My Experience
Women make up 51 percent of the population, and because of this, Linux
should be banned in government. Operating Systems like Linux discriminate
against women because of a built in difficulty compared with Windows and
Apple's OS X.
Women pay taxes, and therefore shouldn't be discriminated against in
getting employment with government agencies. If these agencies had used
Windows or OS X, more women would be able to persue dreams of a full time
job in government. Linux is by its nature a man's domain. Women are
designed to use social interaction and emotions to deal with complex
tasks, things the command line are ill suited.
OS X, and Windows have
friendly and female-intuitive designs that take into account a woman's
understanding of objects,ie. folders, desktops, Clippy, the XP search dog.
These help women operate the computer by giving her a relationship with
these icons, and helpful animated pets. It makes a woman feel at home
with her computer by allowing her to relate to it.
Linux, on the other hand is designed for command line and programming.
Sure, it may have a fugly GUI to hide its true being, but to get any
serious work done you must know a bunch of archane commands with hundreds
of options that change with every command. Something like this: chmod
a+rwx. Only enginners can understand this. And most engineers are still
men. This puts the female population at a great disadvantage when
appliying for work. Men know this, and that's why they delibratly try to
install linux in the workplace.
How would womens groups react when they read the studies that are being
commissioned by industry on this very subject? Surely, women, when they
learn of this, will outvote men and ban linux from the government.
-- The WIPO Avenger