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EuroBSDCon 2004
Anonymous Reward writes "During the final weekend of October, nearly 200 people attended EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe, Germany. The event offered a keynote by Apple's Jordan Hubbard, 23 talks organized in two tracks, a social event inside Luigi Colani's exhibition, and multiple coffee breaks to socialize. ONLamp.com has just published a report with funny pics..."
Pros, Priests and Zealots : The Three Faces of Linux
By Rob Enderle
TechNewsWorld
10/20/03 1:32 PM PT
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/31899.html
Last week, in writing the column "Zen and the Art of Being Happy with Microsoft," I began to see parallels between Microsoft's image problem and my own view of the Linux community. Much as the Linux community sees just one aspect of Microsoft, the bad one, I tend to see just one aspect of the Linux community.
Generally speaking, our view of a person, initiative or company often comes from select perceptions. If you read Slashdot, for example, even regular participants seem to comment that much of the discussion there is not based on what people have personally perceived but on what they have read about others people's perceptions. Often, even these perceptions are based on second- or third-hand knowledge. My impression is that the vast majority of folks who are critical of my own columns have actually done a very good job avoiding actually reading them.
But just as many perceptions are colored by the opinions of what appears to be a large number of uninformed individuals, my perceptions -- and the perceptions of several of us in the media -- are colored in much the same way, and probably by some of the same people. So I thought it might be useful to share how my perception of Linux has been created over the last several months by a minority of those who back Linux. In reading this column, many of you might see similarities to how you formed impressions about Apple, Linux and even Microsoft.
In thinking through this issue, I've come to learn there are three general types of folks who write to me about open-source software: Pros, Priests and Zealots. My opinions of open-source software have been formed, to a large extent, on the basis of the activities of the Zealots. As you read this, put yourself in the position of an analyst or journalist faced with meeting similar people and ask yourself which group would have the greatest impact on your beliefs.
Linux Pros
The Pros are platform agnostic. They just want to get the job done, and when they write to me they simply want to make sure I'm well-founded in my position before they take what I've said and use it to back a decision.
The Pros generally see things like the SCO legal action as someone else's problem and have done their best to distance themselves from any related issues. They don't love Linux or Windows. They are simply focused on finding the right tool for the job.
Rather than picking and promoting a single platform, these Pros are the most likely to tell me of things I could have been more critical of on both platforms. Also, they actually spend time discussing what they like about both platforms. These Pros are balanced and opinionated but not religious. In other words, these are people I would either like to work for or have work for me.
These folks will spend an inordinate amount of time helping me understand the daily problems they face and helping me see what is important to them. If they favor any platform, it is often BSD because it is simply less distracting than any of the other platforms while retaining many of the advantages associated with Unix and open-source software.
In addition to being Linux or BSD experts, the Pros often call themselves Windows experts and generally live in mixed environments -- not because of some diversity driver, but because the environment grew up this way and is running just fine, and because fixing something that isn't broken isn't a priority for them.
Linux Priests
The Priests are nice people, but no matter what the question is, open-source software and Linux are the answers. Discussions with Linux Priests are more like one-sided lectures than give-and-take conversations. Priests can write page upon page of dogma, referencing link after link of online material, and they tend to be long on beliefs but short on facts.
What facts the Priests do have seem t