Five Things You Can't Discuss about Linux

gondwannabe writes "Here are Five Things You Aren't Allowed to Discuss About Linux. With considerable chutzpa, an insightful Rob Enderle takes on what he considers five dogmas in the OSS community and explains why they're wrong. Examples: Linux is secure, "communes" actually work in the long haul, and that Linux is "pro-developer."

Comments

Rob Enderle boycott by NYTimes

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it interesting that a commentator so thoroughly discredited as Rob Enderle would get a hit on Slashdot.

The NY Times has a policy of not using his quotes in stories.

Maybe someone should take away the admin privileges of the "editor" who put up this article

Re:Irony

[bigtomrodney]

I would argue it is Stallman and the GPL 3.0 do more to kill Linux than anthing Microsoft could conceive of This is a feeling I have had for quite a while now, though it's not usually a very popular view so I'm forced to keep it quiet. In the 15 years of Linux, it has almost universally called Linux. Rebranding it to GNU/Linux has never taken off and is an exercise in stubborness at this stage. It is when I see effort to rebrand or move to relicence Linux the I sometimes think the FSF forget that the code was GPL'd for all to use under those terms for better or for worse, even if that means it being used in a system that isn't prefixed with GNU. (I know, I know. I'm expecting my karma to go through the floor...)

My anecdote

[i_should_be_working]

I'm not a coder, I'm a scientist. Sometimes I have to code. Getting the tools to do so is many times easier (faster, cheaper, less confusion, etc.) for me on Linux than on Windows. A colleague recently suggested I try quantlib. He also mentioned that they require Boost which can be a real pain in the ass to get compiled and installed on an XP machine. I went home and installed both of these libraries in 10s of seconds with Synaptic.

So for me, Linux is very "pro-developer".

Re:Irony

[squiggleslash]

Given GPL3 cannot be applied to the Linux kernel, I can't see GPL3 killing Linux in any way except possibly in being so much better that an alternative to Linux that is licensed under GPL3 gains massive popularity, in part due to licensing.

Which is not impossible, BTW.

Personally, I don't care about the long term survival of "Linux". Linux is a kernel, and not even a particularly interesting one. What I care about is the long term survival of useful Free software. If Linux takes a bullet because, for example, Solaris has a better Free software license, then so long Linux. Nice knowing you.

Re:Some of this is just wacky

[computational super]

I advocate linux for the same reason that I advocate a lot of tools that work...having such things nearby makes my life easier.

Exactly. When Linux started to become mainstream, I took some time to step back and evaluate why I liked it so much, to make sure that I wasn't just jumping on a bandwagon. The truth is, I prefer Linux because I preferred Solaris when I was in college. Why did I like Solaris so much, though? It wasn't my first OS - the Commodore 64 "OS" was my first (and it was very gentle with me). I did DOS for years after that before a kindly soul who lived in the university computer lab opened my eyes to that tiny room of Sun terminals hidden behind the huge lab of PCs. Solaris - that is, Unix - just "clicked" with me. Everything was designed to work with everything else in a holistic, hard to characterize way. No longer was I working around deficiencies in the design of the system - the system was working for me. Going back to DOS (and later Windows) was just painful. When I graduated and discovered that the only jobs available to a non-top-ten university CS graduate were programming DOS or Windows, I wept. When I discovered that if I wanted a computer at home, I could choose between DOS or Mac, I gnashed my teeth in frustration. (I graduated college just about the same time Linus started coding kernel 1.0). When I first started hearing of Linux (Debian was my first distribution... and it was not gentle) - by all that is holy and good, it works like Solaris did! I have a C compiler! (The same C compiler I used in college, in fact) It's right there! It's bundled with the distribution! And look - there's vi! Ah - I was home again, at long last.