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Taking Free Software To the Streets
An anonymous reader writes "It's that time of year again; the nights are drawing in, the leaves are beginning to turn, and literally hundreds of teams of dedicated F/OSS enthusiasts from around the world are preparing to hit the streets in celebration of Software Freedom Day 2009. In an effort to increase awareness of free and open source software among the general public, SFD teams will be standing around town centers and shopping malls, holding talks at schools and universities, giving demonstrations and handing out Linux and FOSS collections for Windows on CD. With money being tight and paranoia about malware and viruses at an all-time high, the time is right to help consumers switch to the myriad of quality open source applications available. If you would like to check for an SFD team in your area and consider attending, be it to help out or simply learn more about free software for yourself, there's an interactive map to help you find your way."
"terrible documented"
Well, that is just a lie.
Of course, documentation is not that important, but free software is better documented than proprietary software.
And of course, its documentation is complete, while proprietary software producers only document what they think you need, it's easy to reach a point where there is no more data to fix your problem.
And then there is tech support, I have worked with proprietary tech support. They are great at reading manuals and troubleshooting guides aloud. In 15 years working with both proprietary and free software, only in free software I can get a technical person to help me with my issues. Proprietary support under millions of dollars is just crap.
This post was about free software. If you don't care about free software, it's your problem. Proprietary software affects you a lot more than your coffee maker. At least it's somewhat like environmental issues. Using proprietary software does harm yourself and everybody, both by giving away your freedom, and by acting against technological advancement. Just ignoring it is not going to make it go away. Of course, much like environmental issues, there are wacky ways to create conscience, and there are reasonable ways to do it, but it doesn't mean it's OK that people don't care.
That's funny, when I click on last year's file created in Word, it just works. You know, seeing as both Microsoft Office seamlessly installs in Linux with Wine and works just as good (if not better with faster loading times due to superior and quicker file systems) as it does on Windows. Of course, who needs to pay for Office when OpenOffice is free and also opens up those Word documents for me.
That doesn't change the fact that installing Ubuntu will FORMAT THE FUCKING DRIVE. You gigantic douchebag.
Hey, I don't know what a 3 dongle is either, but I can damn sure tell you this: My Novatel USB720 I got from Verizon works like a dream. I just plug it in to a fresh install of Linux and click connect. Within 5 seconds, I'm online. No bullshit drivers or crapware to install. Contrast this with Windows where I have to install said drivers and crapware, start up the craplication to connect with, wait the requisite 30 seconds to a minute for it to connect and then be consistently dropped every hour or so necessitating going through the whole 30 second process again. And since we are trading anecdotes here, I'll indulge you further. My zd1211 USB wifi network adapter just worked. Windows, ha ha, install the driver, use the shitty software and again, get a connection drop every hour or so. Yes, I tried it, yes that is what happened. Ethernet adapter, in Linux, of course it worked. Windows, of course install more crapware.
So when these people hand out the Ubuntu CDs, they're also going to hand out known-compatible hardware to ensure that everything on their system works correctly?
The point of the exercise is that they're handing these CDs to random people on the street, people who could have *any* random assortment of hardware. Sure, we all know that if you have supported hardware, Ubuntu works fine. That's not the point. The point is that there's no way of knowing whether these people have supported hardware or not!
So. You completely missed the point, once again. You gigantic douchebag.
You proprietards are pathetic with your bullshit.
Woot. I'm a proprietard!
Comment of the year
Have you ever been to the Ubuntu forums?