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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.
I, for one, welcome our new german overl.... or may be not.
My city: Barcelona.
The docu movies are soon to follow. Rumour has it that Micheal Moore's going to play RMS; and, RMS is going to direct. ESR plays a psychopath, mass murderer, coming out of the closet loaded down with firepower.
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.
Meanwhile, Vienna has made their own Linux version Wienux, which is based on Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 with kernel 2.6.11 and intended to be used in small and middle businesses and muncipalities, available for download.
Do not be alarmed. This is only a test.
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"?
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.
Spanish oficial distros (From spanish Wikipedia):
My city: Barcelona.
### 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.
The Chinese translation of the 1st edition of Migration Guide can be found here:
http://www.fect.com.tw/Docs/Migration.pdf
The translation effort is sponsored by the FSOSS dEveloper Center @ Taiwan, aka FECT.
Here are some more tools and whitepapers for migrations to the Linux operating system, for example about Solaris to Linux migration, filename conversion and more.