Bruce Perens Aims For OSI Executive

mutube writes "Open Source advocate Bruce Perens began petitioning for support in election to the OSI Executive Board. Because it's a self-electing board, demonstrable community support is needed to attain a seat. Perens is standing on a platform of reducing over-representation of vendors in OSI leadership in favor of developers. In his petition notice, Perens suggests that recent Open Source involvement by Microsoft could lead to their being offered a place on the board. With his background fighting SCO and the Novell-Microsoft patent agreements, Perens would be a good counter-balance."

Comments

Re:Fighting Microsoft at OSI.

[Blakey Rat]

I considering myself a pretty neutral person, and I have to say the FUD flows both ways. Talk to any Slashdotter about Vista, for instance, and try to correlate the information they relate with reality. I don't react well to propaganda, and I see a lot more anti-Microsoft propaganda than pro-Microsoft, so maybe it's something of a knee-jerk reaction. (It also doesn't hurt that Microsoft indirectly pays my bills.)

I guess what I'm really opposed to is this destructive "us vs. them" philosophy that you seem to convey, along with a lot of other posts on this site. Despite how "evil" Microsoft is, you have to admit that they've done a damn sight better job at making an OS that actually works for the average Joe and has features that American corporations drool over. As a person who doesn't give a flying crap about "Freedom" (don't get me started on that particular piece of 1984 doublethink!), I'd much rather use OS X or Windows Vista (or XP) over Ubuntu, because from my experience OS X and Vista actually work while Ubuntu doesn't.

(Of course part of the problem there is more propaganda from the Linux community, telling me that Ubuntu is just as good as XP, I should give it a try. So I give it a try, and nothing f-ing works! My wireless doesn't work, my computer doesn't go into sleep mode, applications crash left and right, installing an application in the prescribed manner doesn't put an icon on the desktop or "we ripped off the Start menu"-widget. I was disappointed with that, but even more disappointed that, given the opportunity to start from a clean slate, the UI was an exact Xerox of Windows-- is nobody in the Linux world even slightly concerned about usability? Ugh.)

Anyway, sorry for the rant. I guess the big picture is that I don't react well to propaganda and blatant lies, and I see more of those from the Linux community than any Microsoft community I talk to, including actual Microsoft employees.