Definitely. But then quite a few times I just end up smoking a whole pack of cigarettes, drinking cola, eating chips, deluded by the power and healing abilties of teh internets. I've been thinking to find alternative strategies.:-/
I admit I was lucky because this teacher was having problems setting up linux on the IBM servers, and I did it for him and got the chance to migrate the software environment for the whole college to *nix based platform.
My approach is this: 1) Provide a dual-boot environment for machines that concern the teachers, so they are not pissed off and at the same time the eager ones can check out the OSS alternative. 2) For students, provide a complete and customized OSS environment, the necessary software for lab work and if its totally inevitable, see if Wine can do the trick, and if not, then stick to Windows, so you are not hampering with the syllabi.
How I am going to persuade them (the students/other teachers): 1) Exposing their existing problems (reformatting, slow speeds, useless anti-viruses and the general disgust these things evoke). 2) Show them the stats and examples for OSS achievements and its increasing adoption rate across the world. Probably demonstrate clustering, and how these things get attention. 3) The money issue, which doesn't really concern them, as its not out of their pockets that the money is going, but the administration. But no risk in trying. 4) Fancy stickers and posters of tux etc.
Advantages: 1) I have observed students really don't participate much, windows at home, windows at university...so not much curiosity or willingness to play with the software. So by introducing OSS, that might change. 2) Contributions to the OSS world. The interested guys will play around, find bugs, do testing etc. 3)You gain experience, and the happy feeling.:) 4)Eliminating the redundant issues and the security risks, obviously.
Drawbacks: 1) The learning curve, depending on how well you customize the OSS and provide for some easy-to-understand, straightforward documentation. 2) The inertia factor, obviously. Well, if people start talking about it, undergrads et al, that could take care of it. 3) Availability of software, For eg, we here, have got used to Rational Rose, Maya and such, so providing alternatives (which are as good/user-friendly) for these is definitely an issue. 4) Troubleshooting the problems. Well, you just gotta be there when they arise. Probably training a few friends, undergrads might help too...spreading the information basically.
Seeing the current trends in this field, the competition between the major open source OSes(now) themselves and with Windows, will the *BSD variants get even more sidelined ? Guess someone won't be happy about the news.
Talking about that little rant:
Good marketing is not possible in the absolute sense until the GPL/LSB/FSF etc. have guidelines for that too. The number of distributions and the huge number of associated opinions about those won't allow for a central marketing theme (for example, Guideline 1. Don't use cheap phrases like "windows-like" on your main description page at least, advertise about the distribution and not if its windows-like with windows wallpapers! Guideline 2. Make them understand things in an easy way, don't go on talking about that enhanced rth1287986 wireless driver that the dev team got working on the front page....and so on...).
But then that's one of the consequences of OSS, it gives you the right to do and say whatever you want to...even if it sends out wrong impression or misconceptions about the system.
And good service could be achieved by just providing a link for the forums/discussions/mailing list (which everyone does) but filter out the unnecessary stuff, find out the redundant queries and get rid of them, better forum layouts...things like those.
Err...where's the DVD "release" ? All I could find was some stuff on *creating* dvds and some discussion shunning the idea of having a dvd release. Nothing on their official site as per a dvd "release" is concerned.
And Sherlock, when was the last time you installed a linux distribution ? You got baseless arguments against installation of linux distros ( fuck, you just used a windows analogy to hide the problems caused by freebsd installation.)
...you always have Puppy Linux,a small, fast and fully functional distribution. With a customized kernel, I was able to get a boot up time of around 30 seconds on a 900 MHz Celeron processor, 512 mb RAM.
Even with the default kernel, on my machine it takes around 38 seconds.
...cuil ?
And after the frenzy , the googl.err.s going wild, the adsense fuckin it up, one will be left asking whatever happened to Mozilla...the fire just went off. *sigh*
What kind of developers will actually want to believe Microsoft ? The good ones are sure to know the embrace-extend-extinguish policy, so they won't. The only-money-oriented developers are probably not to be found in the open-source world anyway. Then there are beginners or amateurs who *might* actually get lured by it.
However, the recent talks of Microsoft with Apache does create a feeling of doubt whether even good developers and practitioners are vulnerable to Microsoft's actions and plans.
...there are a lot of distributions, good (not necessarily too popular) ones, apart from ubloatuntu, red hat etc, which are in use and new ones are being developed all the time...how do they expect to keep up with all of these and vice-versa ?
Who's complaining anyway ? Everybody's in awe of open source and Linux. Introducing standards , man it sounds evil.
will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption?
No, not until the apple is replaced by tux or OSI, and a help file on why there's a short stupid fat penguin logo and what it means and its history and nix and OSS yadda yadda is made available on the otherwise beautiful desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely. But then quite a few times I just end up smoking a whole pack of cigarettes, drinking cola, eating chips, deluded by the power and healing abilties of teh internets. I've been thinking to find alternative strategies. :-/
I admit I was lucky because this teacher was having problems setting up linux on the IBM servers, and I did it for him and got the chance to migrate the software environment for the whole college to *nix based platform.
My approach is this:
1) Provide a dual-boot environment for machines that concern the teachers, so they are not pissed off and at the same time the eager ones can check out the OSS alternative.
2) For students, provide a complete and customized OSS environment, the necessary software for lab work and if its totally inevitable, see if Wine can do the trick, and if not, then stick to Windows, so you are not hampering with the syllabi.
How I am going to persuade them (the students/other teachers):
1) Exposing their existing problems (reformatting, slow speeds, useless anti-viruses and the general disgust these things evoke).
2) Show them the stats and examples for OSS achievements and its increasing adoption rate across the world. Probably demonstrate clustering, and how these things get attention.
3) The money issue, which doesn't really concern them, as its not out of their pockets that the money is going, but the administration. But no risk in trying.
4) Fancy stickers and posters of tux etc.
Advantages: :)
1) I have observed students really don't participate much, windows at home, windows at university...so not much curiosity or willingness to play with the software. So by introducing OSS, that might change.
2) Contributions to the OSS world. The interested guys will play around, find bugs, do testing etc.
3)You gain experience, and the happy feeling.
4)Eliminating the redundant issues and the security risks, obviously.
Drawbacks:
1) The learning curve, depending on how well you customize the OSS and provide for some easy-to-understand, straightforward documentation.
2) The inertia factor, obviously. Well, if people start talking about it, undergrads et al, that could take care of it.
3) Availability of software, For eg, we here, have got used to Rational Rose, Maya and such, so providing alternatives (which are as good/user-friendly) for these is definitely an issue.
4) Troubleshooting the problems. Well, you just gotta be there when they arise. Probably training a few friends, undergrads might help too...spreading the information basically.
They wrote really good and simple reviews then, that's for sure. Not like the blatant and stereotypical ones that you get to see these days.
http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Network-How-Own-Continent/dp/1931836051 Well, this got me into Linux and Network Security the way no other source could have. Oh, also came to know about Slashdot.org through this book only. The whole culture, basically. ;)
Seeing the current trends in this field, the competition between the major open source OSes(now) themselves and with Windows, will the *BSD variants get even more sidelined ? Guess someone won't be happy about the news.
Talking about that little rant: Good marketing is not possible in the absolute sense until the GPL/LSB/FSF etc. have guidelines for that too. The number of distributions and the huge number of associated opinions about those won't allow for a central marketing theme (for example, Guideline 1. Don't use cheap phrases like "windows-like" on your main description page at least, advertise about the distribution and not if its windows-like with windows wallpapers! Guideline 2. Make them understand things in an easy way, don't go on talking about that enhanced rth1287986 wireless driver that the dev team got working on the front page....and so on...). But then that's one of the consequences of OSS, it gives you the right to do and say whatever you want to...even if it sends out wrong impression or misconceptions about the system. And good service could be achieved by just providing a link for the forums/discussions/mailing list (which everyone does) but filter out the unnecessary stuff, find out the redundant queries and get rid of them, better forum layouts...things like those.
What more do they need to open, really ? Isn't openSUSE just SUSE minus commercial support ?
Err...where's the DVD "release" ? All I could find was some stuff on *creating* dvds and some discussion shunning the idea of having a dvd release. Nothing on their official site as per a dvd "release" is concerned. And Sherlock, when was the last time you installed a linux distribution ? You got baseless arguments against installation of linux distros ( fuck, you just used a windows analogy to hide the problems caused by freebsd installation.)
...you always have Puppy Linux,a small, fast and fully functional distribution. With a customized kernel, I was able to get a boot up time of around 30 seconds on a 900 MHz Celeron processor, 512 mb RAM. Even with the default kernel, on my machine it takes around 38 seconds.
...cuil ? And after the frenzy , the googl.err.s going wild, the adsense fuckin it up, one will be left asking whatever happened to Mozilla...the fire just went off. *sigh*
What kind of developers will actually want to believe Microsoft ? The good ones are sure to know the embrace-extend-extinguish policy, so they won't. The only-money-oriented developers are probably not to be found in the open-source world anyway. Then there are beginners or amateurs who *might* actually get lured by it. However, the recent talks of Microsoft with Apache does create a feeling of doubt whether even good developers and practitioners are vulnerable to Microsoft's actions and plans.
...there are a lot of distributions, good (not necessarily too popular) ones, apart from ubloatuntu, red hat etc, which are in use and new ones are being developed all the time...how do they expect to keep up with all of these and vice-versa ? Who's complaining anyway ? Everybody's in awe of open source and Linux. Introducing standards , man it sounds evil.
* google sucks * , searched on google - 618000 results. *google sucks *, searched on cuil - 20055 results. We've got a winner !
will that have a positive effect on desktop Linux adoption? No, not until the apple is replaced by tux or OSI, and a help file on why there's a short stupid fat penguin logo and what it means and its history and nix and OSS yadda yadda is made available on the otherwise beautiful desktop.
And let Ballmer do McDonald's.
The tech approach to raise a generation of retards. These institutions rock !