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Celebrate Software Freedom Today
An anonymous reader writes "It's that time of the year again: when we all unite regardless of the (free) licenses we cherish and go out into the streets to let people know how Free Software has changed our lives. With over 425 events in 80+ countries, communities as diverse as Joomla!, FreeBSD and The OpenDisc, to name just a few, will be celebrating all over the world. Don't wait; grab your best arguments and join the wild masses of freedom lovers to the software freedom parties. Where will you be partying today?"
Why not have it on weekdays when most people don't have dates, wild parties or bar nights to check out the girls? What were they thinking?
>Where will you be partying today?
My basement. Alone. Where else?
I do not mind if there was a charge for Linux, although being free is nice.
I decided to try Linux because as each iteration of Windows came about, more and more things get locked down so the user cant do things. For testing I still have a Windows install (used rarely), but by going from WinXP to Win7, even silly things like recording "What you hear" from the sound system have been locked down. It's this constant locking down of features that drove me to Linux.
Leaving aside major changes like KDE3 to KDE4, at least I am free to change the desktop the way I like, and not some way Microsoft wants you to "experience" in Windows.
One thing I will say, sometimes you can't get people to Linux no matter how many Live Distros you run showing their really old computer can be used again at a faster speed with up to date Linux compared to an ancient copy of Windows (and is too old to run up to minute Windows).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
even lower than a Java based phone OS?
I clicked the link and got "There was a problem retrieving your account information. Please contact support."
If there is ANY CLI then YOU HAVE FAILED.
Then Microsoft has likewise failed because the Windows recovery console is not graphical, and because the process for specifying arguments to a program run as a scheduled task (Start > Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks) is not graphical.
How about a "find drivers" button, both of which your competitor has had for years?
Ubuntu has one of those: System Settings > Hardware > Additional Drivers. So how does one convince device manufacturers to make working Linux drivers available to Linux distributors from day one, as opposed to Windows and Mac OS X on day one and Linux as an afterthought? The only way to get a "find drivers" button is to make a kernel that can use another operating system's drivers, and ReactOS has a chance to succeed where Linux failed because ReactOS aims for compatibility with the NT 5.x kernel used in said ten-year-old version of Windows.
Its just human nature folks, humans are visually oriented creatures that like to touch and explore.
So how does one automate a task by touching and exploring? I thought the whole point of using a computer was to automate repetitive information processing tasks.
CLIs are about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design
That's like saying giving someone instructions in English is about as UNINTUITIVE an interface as you could possibly design. Better to point and grunt.
The current version of Ubuntu's system requirements are much steeper than XP's, and not far from Win 7's.
Nearly any desktop PC manufactured in the past ten years has a 1 GHz PIII or P4 CPU or faster and at least 512 MB of RAM (or enough slots for it), which is the minimum spec for mainstream Ubuntu. Lighter-weight Ubuntu flavors are also available: Lubuntu can run on a Pentium II with 128 MB. What are the specs of the machine that failed to meet the system requirements?
http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/CategoryTeam2011
Top Four by country:
India 53
USA 37
Philippines 28
Mexico 27
Looks like Open Source is quite active in the Philippines and Mexico.
I need to feed my family. I write code for a living. How do I get paid for doing this in a world where all software is free?
I would think the answer was pretty obvious. Write software for which there is no free equivalent, or write software that is better than the free equivalent.
Find free books.
How about if I withhold my software until you pay me? The free market will set the price. Is that OK?
Of course. Why are you setting up ridiculous straw-man arguments?
First you ask about how you can make a living in a hypothetical world in which all software is "free," presumably meaning that it's free-as-in-beer (doesn't cost money). But that world doesn't exist, and never will, for fundamental reasons. E.g., nobody is going to write an application for free for a corporation's internal use, to do something that only that corporation needs to do. Furthermore, nobody is calling for a world in which all software is free-as-in-beer -- not even people like RMS, who would like to see everyone use 100% free-as-in-speech software.
Now you seem to be asking whether someone's going to ... what, send the police to your house and force you to release your software for free? Nobody has proposed that.
Please stop trolling.
Find free books.
IBM, HP and many other companies make billions of dollars supporting free software. It's called customization and maintenance. You should check it out.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Richard Stallman had a printer,
whose code he could not see.
So he began to tinker,
And set the software free.
Half are trolls, most are useless, and few are above +3. Slashdot's demographics seem to have rotted out completely.
You provide services to install, configure, maintain, and customize the OSS core.
Or you use the OSS components to build custom solutions.
Except for wildly successful proprietary solutions, the money has always been in the customization. The only difference with OSS is you may have competition because other people also have access to that same OSS core.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Oh fuck off, hairyfeet.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I'll elaborate: despite your vendetta against the command line, do you use sign language instead of talking to people? The command line is far more natural and powerful than the GUI- it's like speech. Hell, even MS is implementing better command lines, does that mean microsoft is in decline? Or rather, is that the reason that microsoft is in decline? Not even, powershell is one of the most useful- or perhaps, the only useful administration tool they've introduced in years.
Ignoring your disgusting double standards and logical fallacies, your argument, or rather, conviction, is wrong as well. You hardly have to use the command line on linux if you don't want to, anyway, what- do you think this is still '95? One should never have to open the terminal in ubuntu, or mint for instance, to fix anything- it just makes it easier. What's more intuitive, "open up this program, browse to this menu, you sould see this, browse to this sub menu, click this button..." or "type this into bash and you're done"? Even if you maintain a CLI-free usage, you can still fix any problems that crop up in a... roundabout way. Your argument is both poor and totally irrelevent.
And, I know you're not likely to understand this as the biggest Microshill on slashdot, we don't want to castrate our OS for market share. Believe it or not, I, and many others, could not care less about being the most popular OS in the world- in fact, that'd take the fun out. I just want a solid OS kernel that powers distributions that I can run on stuff dating back to the 486, without issue- with good hardware support. What's the point of using linux if we've made it as unstable, crashy, bloated and locked down as windows, in a quest to emulate the biggest triumph of marketing over technology the world has yet known? Market share is irrelevant. What is relevant is making the best damn OS out there.
As for your bashing of OS market shares, even maintaining 1% is growth, as the number of computers in the world is much higher than it has ever been- however, the actual linux market share is 2%, most of that gained even in the past 3 years. Not to mention that little success that was linux on the phone, which you consistently refuse to acknowledge in your postings.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
It's called Technocracy, where not only would you not have to worry about being paid, but everything would be open source anyway. What programmer wouldn't love that, the ability to code to your heart's content, on whatever project you want, whenever you want?
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert
If you're trying to resurrect an old machine, consider Puppy. I liked it for the month or so I used it on an old laptop that had run Windows 98, until I found that its window manager's Alt+drag binding (if I remember correctly) interfered with a binding used by my favorite paint program, at which point I switched to Ubuntu.