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"Enemies of Linux" Trying to Undermine OS?
Pinawella writes "It's reported on VNUnet that 'Enemies of Linux' are trying to undermine the OS with a campaign of disinformation. It's based on an interview with an exec from the Open Source Development Labs, but who are these enemies?"
I know some of them.
They are IT consultans who are afraid of Linux, probably because they are afraid of loosing their job. They never see any potential in other OSes than MS Windows, probably because they don't want to.
They spread FUD all fucking day long, I'm soo fed up with it
These IT consultans are many, and they are everywhere
Do Penguins taste nice?
It may sound like a strange question but people do actually eat penguins. In Antarctica there are research stations where scientists live for months or even years so for them having a penguin for dinner is much like us having a Sunday roast. From their experiences we have been told that they taste like duck and that they also have a high oil content, due to all the fish that they eat. Guano miners also eat penguins whilst they are working near to Humboldt colonies; this however is bad news, as the Humboldt penguin is now a critically endangered species. Guano is old piles of penguin poo and it is mined for as it makes a good fertiliser, this practice is also detrimental to the wild Humboldt penguin population.
Clearly, these people are trying to undermine Linux by spreading the word that penguin meat is tasty and nutritious.
"OMG they're eating Tux. You Bastards!"
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Heck, we're quoting Nelson Pratt -- the "marketing director of the pro-Linux organisation" -- at enormous length. Add a straw man to your press release -- poof! It's a news item!
This sort of thing, from Taco no less, doesn't help Linux's credibility much.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Enterprise customers have an entirely different set of requirements than home users or even small/medium business users. Enterprise customers want to drop boatloads of money on companies and then expect these companies to do whatever they want, and by whatever, I mean **whatever**.
I worked for an Enterprise software CRM company and we dealt with customers paying tens of millions of dollars. If there was a bug, any bug, even if it wasn't our bug, we were on the daily conference calls. There was one bug that was clearly a Microsoft SQL Server optimization bug, but I had to work with Microsoft over Christmas just because our customer wanted someone from our side there... **just because**. There was no logical reason for me to be there since it was completely out of our domain, but we still had to be there. This is how enterprise customers behave and frankly, since they are paying millions of dollars, I don't blame them to expect this.
However, with Linux, even with Red Hat support, there is no such level of support. We ported our apps to Red Hat Advanced Server 3, and the level of support we got from them was good but not enterprise level.
We ran into an IBM Java Run-Time bug... clearly a bug in the Run-Time, but Red Hat's response was, "Well, IBM has a certain SLA with us when we create a bug for them, and they may or may not get to it." That was it. There was absolutely nothing we could do at that point. They didn't own the IBM Java Run-time, so they passed the buck on responsibility. Which in some respects is understandable, but is completely unacceptable for enterprise customers. Linux is a mix-and-match of a bunch of open-source software and **no one was ultimate accountability** which is something that enterprise customers are paying for and expect.
As an exercise for my grade 11 students, I have them install a number of operating systems. Many flavors of Windows and Linux. Their assessment as to ease of installation and configuration? Linux is easier. Fewer reboots, you get everything in logical order, you can set up your network configuration while installing and all the hardware is automatically identified and configured (yes, I'm sure there are a few exceptions to this, but we've yet to come across them in our testing).
I had a look at the parent post's link and noted that it was from 2002 and even still there were a number of positive comments regarding Linux.
They key point from my perspective is this: nobody is telling you that you have to run Linux. All that is being said is that it's there if you want to try it and use it, and in a great number of cases, it's available for free. Nope, the gaming and some commercial apps aren't all there, but for the vast majority of computer use it's just fine.
I run dual boots on pretty all my computers at home except my firewall/gateway, which runs linux exclusively. I game more on my windows boots, and I work more on my Linux boots. Windows lacks the combined capabilities of bash, perl and gnu tools (unless you want to run cygwin). I don't mind spending the time to learn how to use the gimp. Like many *nix tools, it's great once you've spent the time to learn how to use it. Remember, however, that nobodies telling you that you HAVE to use linux. It's just an option being provided by your friendly OSS community.
Yeah. Most users would have a hard time with Linux if they have to find out about the differences between GNOME, GTK, KDE/Qt, Motif, (insert random toolkit here) applications, all with their own rules of usability, standards, and copy/paste. Heck, there are different methods for copy-paste that are inconsistent (some X apps use the middle button, others use a Windows/Macintosh sytle method).
Why hasn't somebody already came up with the "Unified Clipboard," which supports all of the common X toolkits (or better yet, why do the GNOME/KDE/whomever developers have to design their own clipboards rather than use what X provides?)? Is it really that difficult? Even though I'm a supporter of different choices (I feel it is great that there is a choice between GNOME, KDE, and many other environments), I also feel that there should be compatibility between these different toolkits.
Remember, most users don't (and shouldn't have to) care about the differences between KDE, GNOME, GTK, and the rest. They want to take advantage of a variety of applications, many times from a variety of toolkits. They want to copy some text from their web browser and paste it into a word processor without fuss, and they want copy-paste to work everywhere in the exact same way.
GNOME and KDE's mission is to reach out to the desktop users, right? Some competition with each other is a good thing, but the two different toolkits should have some compatibility with each other, especially in the realm of cut/paste.
Kinda like the difference between living in a dictatorship where everyone is well fed and gets all sorts of cool free stuff, or barely scraping by in a full democracy. Some people value the freedom and community input more than the material aspects.
It's all a bit hippie-like, but there is logic to it behind the fanaticism. ;)
And still then there's a lot of people who just like to tinker with code and such. Why do you think that projects like Syllable, FreeDOS, and MenuetOS have people who work on them, constantly reinventing the wheel? Because some of them just want something to do with their talents (if for nothing else that to avoid boredom).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Yes Sun do open source stuff but you just have to look at the way they're pitching themselves nowadays against Linux - head on. The whole Solaris 10 for free thing is to persuade people to stick with Sun even if in reality a "free" Solaris is anything but when you slap on support costs.
> This always seemed like a pretty stupid way of doing things to me
Fine. No problem. You don't want to relearn how to do a basic GUI operation that you've been doing the same way for years.
Neither do I. That's what this is about.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Back in 1948, during his first race for the U.S. Senate, Lyndon Johnson was running about ten points behind, with only nine days to go. He was sunk in despair. He was desperate. And it was just before noon on a Monday, they say, when he called his equally depressed campaign manager and instructed him to call a press conference for just before lunch on a slow news day and accuse his high-riding opponent, a pig farmer, of having routine carnal knowledge of his barnyard sows, despite the pleas of his wife and children.
His campaign manager was shocked. "We can't say that, Lyndon," he supposedly said. "You know it's not true."
"Of course it's not true!" Johnson barked at him. "But let's make the bastard deny it!"
Its also a teensy bit different since Red Hat provide the full source to their dist. The much touted OpenSolaris is just vapourware at the moment and won't be comparable until it is without restriction.
It's also a teensy bit different since Linux in general runs on vastly more hardware platforms than Solaris. Red Hat Solaris runs on Sun hardware first and a few select servers from the likes of Dell, Compaq etc. if you're lucky.
Both gratis and libre, and both of those are excellent reasons for me.
I'm curious about OSX, and I'd like to give it a go, but:
So Darwin is Open Source: big deal. The rest of MacOS X is the ultimate in closed software.
"Look at Oracle and IBM. Oracle is using Linux as the OS for its grid. This shows that there is a solution stack on top of Linux that is not just Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl, but a mixture of open source and proprietary software. ISVs such as Oracle, CA, SAP and IBM are fleshing out the Linux stack,"
I agree, it means Linux is becoming a general-purpose tool: home users AND scientists/engineers/hackers (using hackers in the comp-sci sense, not the thug) are now starting to focus on the benefits of an open development model.
That means that no one is really fascinated by Microsoft anymore. Oh sure, Microsoft can still spend bucks on PR and FUD, but there is no amount of that that will make users forget this other more fascinating thing that Linux is.
In the end it's a numbers game: Microsoft may have hired spectacular staff, but they can't compete against collected might of THE WORLD, can they? India and China will lead the way, no doubt.
And besides, Linux (for the most part) exists simply because people enjoy making tools out of computers, it's not about trying to raise revenue for the coming quarter, but (funny enough) it seems to be doing just that!
If Microsoft wants to matter anymore, they'll roll with it, like they did on the Internet; late.
MS should open-source some code and actually let the Wine guys run with it; they're the only ones REALLY trying to preserve Windows, by writing a great application suite, to support the Windows user.
I know MS have been accused of fighting Wine users, but it really is to MS's own detriment; it alienates more users.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
mac osx is very pretty, but the development tools are a mess.
:-)
trying to do anything scripted is difficult as apple still doesn't quite comprehend what character based applications are.
eg an application which links vs Carbon needs to have access to the gui even if it never touches it. kiss starting many applications via ssh goodbye. unfortunately apple still hasn't separated out all the purely character based functions from carbonlib. so a lot of pure character based applications can't be run from ssh or cron or anything like that. imagine something like sed or grep refusing to start up because it couldn't open an x11 window -- that's the kind of silliness you get.
trying to do scripted building with xcode is a mess, it practically forces you to use the gui, which makes automation difficult. transporting xcode projects from one machine to another can sometimes be difficult too, because of hidden full paths in the project description files. (microsoft visual studio sometimes has this problem too, but to a lesser extent.)
osx bundles are also another pita. yes they are cute and yes they suck less than the old resource/data fork madness of classic macos. but they're still a pain to juggle. and yes i realize this is nextstep legacy stuff -- but it doesn't make it right
and until very recently osx didnt even have a real working dlopen(). (yes, i know the "true way" is to use the osx APIs, but it makes porting unix applications a real pain. and yes i know third parties wrote a dlopen() emulator for earlier versions of osx, but it wasnt stock at the time).
then there's just plain nuttiness, like the fact apple's pico inexplicably corrupts long lines.
lots of former linux geeks might have decided osx is worth the money, but i doubt many of them were developers.