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Linux: Fighting the FUD of Forking
sebFlyte writes "Fighting the MS FUD machine is a full time job for some open source developers, especially now Microsoft have thrown in the issue of the possibility of Linux forking (as Unix did)... it would also seem that Gates has moved on from telling people to 'get the facts' and creating FUD around patents and IP to criticising the open source communty's ability to create interoperable software."
Here we've got the masters of embrace, extend and lock out criticising Open Source software for lack of interoperability. Uh huh. Maybe it would all work together if they'd bother to use open standards, or to actually document what they did with the ones they DID use.
Microsoft did NOT CREATE Interoperable Software, they just refined it a lot, and made it worm and virus friendly. Amazing the power of marketing and the ability to re-write history. Microsoft's #1 achievement is making incompatibility, and money.
Apple and Convergent had IS first, about the same time as Digital's 'All in One' office suite, when all MS had was DOS!
OSS is getting better. FireFox and Samba demonstrate this. And at least these interoperate with the OS, without bypassing the OS security model.
Slackware runs a vanilla kernel as far as Im aware..
Forking creates a micro-market with micro competition. Software evolution is completely analygous (sp) to biological evolution. You have to have micro forking (microevolution) in order to evolve. Then the best traits are selected and carried on. Following the thoery of "punctuated equilibrium", those which have micro-evolved traits that are of significant advantage will be picked up by the others then the population of' those with the traits will explode. It is Natures way. No point in fighting it.
In IT though maintaining many microlines is viewed as a bad thing, unlike with biological life where things maintain themsleves. This is where the FUD really is. But one should realize that it need not be a big concern if the developers take that concern into account. An example of how to mitigate this is to use XML for settings. Any microline specific sub-tree of settings need not interfere and is only used by the microline.
HOWEVER this is an area where OSS has been deficient. Backwards-compatibility is not a highlight of OSS. OSS has gotten better, but even as recently as a year ago it was the policy of Mozilla to have the user manually do a uninstall before an upgrade. Such annoyances contribute to the magnitude of fear. What is more, backwards compatiblity policies vary from project to project. I do expect this to get better, and it has notten a lot better.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The difference between MS, Unix and other propriatory systems and Linux & OSS when it comes to forking is that linux "forks" (such as the kernels that most distros ship) are compatible and indeed pretty much every "fork" or variant of an OSS program has tried to remain compatible (i.e. the kernel remains compatible with all linux apps except mabie those that talk to the kernel directly like kernel modules and drivers and so on)
And programs like Apache, OpenSSL, OpenSSH and others are based on standards.
On the other hand when Microsoft and other propriatory software vendors make forks, they are often incompatible by design.
here an idea:
:-)
pick one (use any criteria you desire), learn it.
Pick another one, learn the differences.
Try a third, more difficult distro (pick gentoo)
learn it inside and out.
Give yourself a long break from Windows (a month should do it) now go back to Windows and hate it properly.
Then never ever ever again ask What is the best distro..... as the answer will always be Gentoo anyway (ok ignore that last bit
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Now, this is just a suggestion so feel free to ignore it, but maybe you should consider not releasing your code under an Open Source Licence if the idea of someone "stealing" your code bothers you.
The majority of Open Source and Free Software is written either because the developer enjoys doing it, in which case they couldn't give a shit if someone else uses their work, or because they're truly being altruistic and believe in Free software, in which case they couldn't give a shit if someone else uses their work. See a pattern?
If you're writing Open Source or Free software for some other reason then you're doing it wrong. If you're going to freak out about someone else "stealing" your work then you've totally missed the point and should probably just sit quietly in the corner until you get it. Of course I bet you have no problems downloading all that free work from someone else to use in the creation of your masterpeice, do you?
I love these discussions of interoperability from Microsoft. I've been supporting Microsoft products for the last 10 years and...
1. Each new version of Windows breaks some applications. Discussions about how much effort Microsoft puts into being compatible with older products only have relevance to you if you are a multi-million $ consumer of Microsoft products. Everyone else just sucks up the cost of many application upgrades whenever another version of Windows comes out!
2. Microsoft's own products don't interoperate well. Flame me if you must, but I have personally experienced the difficulties of working with Word documents from one version of Office to the next. And I went through one interation of the Basic macro programming language in Office that caused me to scrap every damned macro I wrote and do it again from scratch (there may have been more than one, but I didn't ever consider it again so it wasn't my problem anymore).
3. Microsoft always feels free to hijack existing standards to create their own, proprietary standard that they refuse to release any details on to deliberately keep people from interoperating with them. The recent hijacking of Kerberos authentication protocols is one example of this.
Microsoft made a deliberate choice of not supporting interoperability. They love the "churn" that they cause in the market. As long as everyone is busy fixing their applications to run with the newest version of Windows, discovering and then implementing their newest version of a hijacked standard and upgrading/reinstalling new applications nobody ever has the time/energy to devote to any real innovation in the market. The more Microsoft ties up everybody else's resources, the less that Microsoft has to worry about any real competition.
I find it kind of hypocritical for Bill Gates to accuse others of not being "interoperable".
A simple explanation is not hard to find.
I read this far. The parent was high enough for me.
i ngStarted/
I would agree that you should get your hands on Fedora. (And one day you'll end up on Gentoo). In the install screen you'll want to install Apache, PHP and mySQL and install that. (...and before you get to that screen, whatever it proposes for drive partition is probably fine, in linux you need to define the amount of space for memory to overflow to) - A quick Google found this guys guide: http://www.johnmunsch.com/articles/FedoraCoreGett
Those crazy Linux commands can be dificult to learn, though powerfull. Are you going to be near this box a lot? If not it might help you to learn more about VNC and use the GUI interface remotely over the network - it functions like Remote Desktop.
Lastly, it's not really forking. At the moment their just diffrent implementations of the same standards. The linux distros are closer together on 'the linux standard' than Netscape and IE were on HTML.
.\.\att Clare
That's a daemon, damnit!