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German Linux Migration White Paper Updated
TheRealDamion writes to let us know that the German Federal Government Co-Ordination and Advisory Agency (KBSt) has released an updated version of their Linux Migration guide whitepaper. This guide, originally released in 2003, is incredibly detailed offering assistance on a wide range of issues that could be faced in a migration from Windows to Linux.
That's quite an idea: releasing an official guide on why and how should companies switch to Linux. CEOs rather trust an government-released official guide rather than geek speech.
Furthermore, they discuss the Berne Convention on international copyright, without ever mentioning the bureaucrats who originally drafted it in 1886. Surely they deserver their props?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Ultimately, the casual users (i.e. people who have no idea what a compiler does) will call it "Linux". Nobody will ever say "GNU/Linux" that matters. Nobody cares what parts of the OS Linux actually compromises. Linux could be a text editor that happens to get included with a specific distro and people would still call the system "Linux". If they install Red Hat, they will call it Linux; if they install Debian, they will call it Linux; if they install Ubuntu, SuSE, Mandrake, Linspire, or anything else, they'll still call it Linux.
This is the term that the public knows. Nothing else. Whining about it at this stage of the game is just pointless. If we'd called it GNU/Linux from the beginning, one of the names would have gotten dropped anyway (and it would have probably been GNU, since people tend to prefer "words" to largely meaningless acronyms).
The average user neither knows, nor cares about whether their software is free. They want whatever ultimately yields the highest productivity to price trade off. They will never compile a progam, will never change the source, and couldn't care less about what language, paradigm, or commenting conventions are used to create it.
Insisting on silly, minor points about naming conventions is going to do infinitely more to harm Linux, the FSF, GNU, and the computing world than somebody forgetting to give credit to GNU. Until the OS community stops and realizes that the people that they have to convince to switch platforms ARE the people who know nothing about computers, Microsoft (and other closed-source software companies) will prevail.
Oh would you please RELAX
You make it sound like there's some government conspiracy to hush the existence of GNU and the FSF.
They migrated to linux (yeah I don't use the gnu either) and wrote a 500 page document for you and anyone else who might be pondering a migration, and all you can do is beitch.
Write to them and suggest your inclusions for the 3rd edition.
A "net loss"? How can you be serious?
They offer a free document on how to migrate to Linux and that somehow is bad for OSS because they failed to mention some of your favorite acronyms? So according to you it's better to not inform citizens how to migrate but, as long as you call Linux "GNU/Linux"? Is that a "net gain"?
So Redmond has started to send patches to Linus?
Note that if Redmond was sending worthwhile Linux patches, I'd expect the Linux community to very carefully check them, and making sure that there's an official statement from Redmond that those patches are indeed properly licensed to be inserted into Linux under the GPL (and maybe let a lawyer check possible other pitfalls), make sure that all this is perfectly well documented, and then, if all those checks show no possible harm, accept those patches.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's not true. First of all, other parts of the system, such as X11, are of similar importance, yet noone (not RMS and his fanboys, that is) ever demand that the system be called "GNU/Linux/X" or so; similarly, most Solaris systems I've seen (for example) have the GNU tools installed, yet noone called it "GNU/Solaris". Also, the statement that you *need* the GNU tools is also wrong, as you can just as well replace them with something else, like busybox for example.
Sure, that's not typically done. But while it's true that most people don't give the GNU project enough credit, the right answer is not to give the GNU project *more* credit than it deserves.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
### GNU is the operating system. It is the environment in which the Linux user lives.
Sorry, but that is simply wrong. The environment in which Linux users live in these days is KDE, Gnome or Fluxbox or whatever, there might be a few 'command-line hippies' left that use a 'true' GNU environment, but for the majority the GNU stuff simply is a non-issue, an implementation detail hidden somewhere deep down below which you could switch to BSD Userland and hardly anybody would ever notice it. Even GCC is no longer maintained by GNU people and the C++ parts of it didn't origin from GNU either as far as I know. So calling the OS which people use GNU is equally wrong to calling it 'Linux', to make it correct you might wanna call it Linux/GNU/Xorg/KDE/Samba/Apache or simply call it by the name of the distribution as the paper suggested.
Or, to sum it up, handle it as any other patch.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yes, I already noticed this...
Considering the migration document is itself made in Windows, with Microsoft Word, I see nothing real happening in the next few years.
You cannot proceed from the informal to formal by formal means
If you rip out the X display system, you still have an OS.
You have a server OS, but not a desktop OS, which is what the average person needs to use a computer.
If you rip out glibc,
I don't know enough about alternate libcs to say anything on this one.
bash,
Personally I like zsh better, but if you just want sh compatibility (for running system scripts), dash is smaller and faster than bash.
vim and EMACS,
Neither vi nor vim are GNU software. Regardless, there are many, many text editors that people like and are not GNU software, so I hardly think you can say GNU has the market cornered for text editing.
the GNU compiler,
Only developers care about compilers. A normal user probably doesn't need one. Thus, it does not make up a significant part of his OS.
and all the other GNU tools,
Most common system tools that I'm aware of have non-GNU variants available, as well.
I do not doubt that the GNU software was a great help in the early days, but an average computer user (ie, someone who doesn't read Slashdot) could get by fairly easily with most of his OS comprised of non-GNU software. I find your dismissal of the X Window System especially amusing, as that is probably the most important component of the OS in terms of allowing it to become a viable desktop OS. Do you actually think that an average user could happily use a computer without a graphical display at this point in time? It's an absurd statement.
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Promoting critical thinking since 1994.