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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?"
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
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.
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.