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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.
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.
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.
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.