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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?"
Jesus fucking christ people, it isn't that hard
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
The enemy of my friend is my enemy's friend, or my friend's enemies are my friend's friends... Um, is this gonna be on the test?
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So who are these mysterious enemies of Linux?
Is it Mr. White of 42 Evergreen Terrace?
Perhaps the little old lady who lives across the road?
Or, almost inconceivably, the vicar's wife, Mrs. Candor?
Or, just perhaps, is this a thinly veiled attack against Microsoft?
Could it just be more FUD?
doesn't make them enemies.
Just very very very hostile.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Don't make your enemies happy.
Make up with your lover,
who's greedy to be back
in your good graces.
Daughter,
because you've taken anger to extremes,
you won't amount
to a hill of beans.
-Hla Stavhana
Let us not make a hill of beans for our enemies!
"Pinawella writes "It's reported on VNUnet that 'Enemies of Linux' are trying to undermine the OS with a campaign of disinformation."
Well that's a new tactic...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Why the BSD people of course. Everyone knows the BSD triangle of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD are out to get Linux. BSD stands for BKill SDamn DPenguin. What other free OS is there that could feel threatened?
Someone you trust is one of us.
If we still cant have consistant pasting between apps, I'd say we're our own biggest enemy. I've used linux since the 2.0 kernel days and even I still find it impossible to paste between different apps, especially with a different toolkit. Throw in an odd app like Mozilla and forget about it, you'll end up replacing your own clipboard with what you're trying to paste over, or pasting 3 lines into the url bar which happily takes newlines.
Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Er, so when did Linux stop being an OS and start being a cult-like religion?
It's a f-ing operating system for god(s) sake people. It doesn't have enimies, it has competitors.
The evil monkey commands you to dance.
http://www.antarcticconnection.com/antarctic/wildl ife/penguins/index.shtml
Sheesh slashdot editors, at least do a simple google search first!
Linux used to be like that little kid who mowed peoples lawn for next to nothing.. now the kid decided to start it's own business and has to deal with politics.
It's no real surprize that people want to get rid of it. If not for Linux we'd have a choice of two OS (Windows or OSX) and not many people want to buy a mac just for the OS.. Get rid of Linux and Microsoft's market share once again becomes uncontested, keep it around and it'll slowly dwindle untill Linux and Windows are running evenly.
I like muppets.
This is a good point, but asking OSDL members this question is somewhat akin to doing a survey of how many people run IIS among ASP developers.
I've only ever purchased one server with linux preloaded (from Dell). Every other linux system I've ever owned has come blank, except one workstation that had a copy of Windows preloaded.
Officially, I have 1 linux system, but in reality, I have probably 15 active systems.
Speak before you think
Nelson Pratt, marketing director of the pro-Linux organisation, which boasts Linus Torvalds among its top brass, said that unnamed vendors are trying to scare firms with a campaign claiming that Linux is inadequately supported for enterprise use.
Did anyone else picture Nelson Pratt coughing "MICROSOFT!" right after saying "unnamed vendor"?
I'm a big tall mofo.
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
Did they really expect for linux to be a viable product and not get criticized by the people whos market they are taking?
... If you insist on multiplying a single security vulnerability by the number of available distros, or tell people that they'll have to recompile their kernel every time they add a patch, or claim that software to do X, Y, or Z isn't available for Linux when in fact it is, or claim that open source development is inherently insecure, or that running proprietary software on a GPL'd OS will get you sued by the FSF, or make any of the other kinds of propganda attacks we've all seen on Linux (and F/OSS generally) from Microsoft and its lackeys ... then you have indeed gone beyond "competitor" to "enemy."
"Criticized" is one thing; "slandered" is another. Linux is far from perfect, and all but the most rabid zealots acknowledge this; there are many valid criticisms to be made, and in some cases the validity of these criticisms is sufficient to point users direction of Windows or one of the proprietary flavors of Unix.
BUT
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
They can do/say all they wish about Linux. What they forget is 'Linux' isn't a tangible entity. It's a bit like shadow boxing.
:)
Nobody owns it (apart from !SCO), anybody can release their/a version of it, and more important, all the coders and developers don't really give a shit who uses it.
People that USE it though know the truth, and my Financial Manager likes it too, even though he doesn't really know what it is. He knows what £0:00 is, though.
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There are several companies who make products that Linux threatens directly. Any firm selling, for instance, an operating system, would feel threatened by what is becoming the standard OS much as TCP/IP became the standard networking protocol.
But to call these "competitors" of Linux is to misunderstand the nature of the threat.
Linux is not a business, it is not a strategy, it is not a concept.
Linux represents the brutal and unflinching march of technology towards the zero price point. Linux - and all free & open-source software - exists because all the barriers to its existence have been gradually razed.
The first rule of competition is that all players must be playing the same game. How can anyone seriously still think that Linux and (e.g.) Microsoft are playing the same game?
The game is not over - there is no game, and there never was.
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Now that IBM, RHN and Novell are in the ring, Microsoft, Oracle, CA and everyone else are starting to see Linux as a competitor. The problem is that most people in FOSS are not used to competition, they prefer enemies. Enemies are easier to vilify and ridicule. Competitors who are eating your lunch are not. This whole "we are holier than thou and you are so evil" thing is not going to work out there in the real world. Linux needs to compete, not be surrounded by fanboys who can pick their noses and chuckle when they write "Microshaft" and "Windoze".
Slashdot has been the main front in this whining battle for the past few years. It's gone mainstream now, of sorts, and people are starting to notice the ridiculous "OMFG WINDOZE IS TEH SUXX" headlines that adorn the front page day in and day out, complete with borg icon. And don't complain about Microsoft saying this or the other about Linux when most of you spend your waking hours claiming that Windows cannot be secured or otherwise used as a computing platform, using anecdotal data points to build feel-good statistics that only you believe.
Grow up and compete. The "some dude said something bad about Linux"-style whines like this article are starting to sound more and more like Suckdot.
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.
Welcome to the real world.. Time to grow up and watch your back.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Well, I'm not sure who would have standing to sue in this case. Linus Torvalds? Red Hat? The FSF?
In any case, I wasn't trying to make a legalistic distinction. I don't know, and don't especially care, if the FUD Microsoft et al. are throwing at Linux rises to the legal definition of slander or not. (I also don't believe that corporations or organizations should be able to sue for slander at all, but that's a whole 'nother argument.) But it is definitely slanderous, rather than critical, in tone and content: that is, it's "words falsely spoken that damage the reputation of another" rather than real analysis of the relative merits and flaws of Linux as compared to other OSs.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The whole "Enemies of Linux" thing comes across as deeply paranoid. It makes it sound as though these organisations are evil forces that want to destroy the heroic land of Linux.
A better slant would be that software companies who have compete in the same market space as those companies that use linux are using their usual dirty tricks and misinformation to undermine the competition while the competition simultaneously uses similar tricks and lies to undermine them. But it's hardly news is it?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Surprisingly, the developers are a tiny part of the "cost" of commercial software, and there is no reason why open source developers cannot be very well paid, and no reason why excellent developers should be doing less challenging work. There is a huge market for the best people. I know - this is my business.
I said that technology moves towards a zero price point, not that people's labour does.
The price of labour is affected by a different equation, namely the elimination of barriers that previously stopped other people competing for the same jobs.
Any student of economics will understand that competition is a positive force. Seeing one's salary undercut by competition is tough, but it may be the incentive you need to rethink your job, your productivity, and your role in society.
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They'll all start posting comments soon. They're regulars here. :)
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
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.