I think RedHat should somehow also support gentoo - it is very popular distro now and everyone will benefit if such a huge linux brand as redhat whould help it.
They can merge Fedora and Gentoo, or just dedicate developers to some key gentoo projects. I don't think that a million of a slightly different linux distribution is a good thing - we *must* unite if we want to get more market share.
First of all, nobody *must* unite.
Having said that, I think it is highly unlikely that RedHat adopts anything or will contribute anything publicly and specifically to Gentoo's idea of a distro. They are in the enterprise server/workstation distro and service business, not in the "tweak and compile your distro so that it becomes unmaintainable for the enterprise market" business.
As a company in RedHat's position, I would do everything but associate my products with Gentoo, which in the enterprise market can be viewed as useless. Remember that
time is money and stability everything.
That doesn't mean that I don't like Gentoo, but the community driven distro that comes closest to what you want in the enterprise market, is Debian.
Nuclear energy is a viable option to meet the Kyoto criteria. So why again didn't the USA sign on? Kyoto would be one more lever to brow-beat the opposition to accept new reactors. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
It would be a no-brainer if nuclear power were not excluded from the Kyoto mechanisms (CDM an JI).
This is the same thing the EPA in the US has been doing for years. My father works for a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants make almost no air pollution, so they get air pollution credits which they sell to coal plants so they can *gasp* pollute the air more.
Nuclear energy is _not_ covered by the emissions trading scheme, ie. if you build a nuclear power plant instead of, say, a solar powered plant or a carbon sink, you are not credited.
The people who drafted the Kyoto treaty were not complete fools, you know, unlike some other people who make blunt statements about it...
It was quite disturbing: When I had a site open in one window, which would open new windows through java script, everything worked until I had a second window open (with a couple of tabs). When clicking on a java script link to open a picture, for example, firefox would segfault. This is on Linux, and I couldn't remedy this with a new profile.
Another poster named StarCraft and Diablo. Do I even have to mention Half-Life and Counter-Strike? Isn't that still the most popular online fragfest? Let's not forget Quake III; that's from '99. EverQuest is from '99. Ultima Online is from '96.
[...]
My point is, people don't get new machines to play old games, they get them to play new games. But they don't stop playing their old games.
Very good point indeed, I didn't realise that Half-Life and Counterstrike were that old. Funny how time flies...
If I can't run my copy of *work program from 1998* (read: game) on the latest version of windows, I'd end up not using the latest windows, costing microsoft another sale.
Don't you think that this is a little bit unrealistic? How many people do you know, who still play 1998 games on current hardware and OS? Then, how many of these actually run them on Windows? Have you looked at one of those 1998 games recently and thought: "Gee, this game is amazing!"?
I would say that the number of people who play 1998 games is negligible compared to the number of people who make up for recent hardware and OS sales.
Do you really play DOOM (the first one) on current hardware and a current OS? If yes, what did you get said hardware for? And, please don't tell me you need that for your really sophisticated spreadsheet calculations...;)
And yes, if you can't tell, I just took a marketing class, yes it was a waste of time, and yes I'll be poking fun at it for years.
I used to do the same thing, mainly because I couldn't understand why marketing profs and lecturers (at least all I ever came in contact with) viewed marketing as a standalone science/course within management. Through many discussions with a friend of mine who is a marketing PhD and professional experience I came to realise that marketing is more about philosophy than anything else.
IMHO marketing is about viewing the market from the customer's perspective, getting to know what he really wants. Only then will I be in a position to add value (to the product and/or service I am selling from the customer's POV, and to the customer by achieving satisfaction with my service even though I can charge a premium from my POV).
This of course will only work as long as all other business functions are well tuned and focused on giving the customer what he wants. If he likes the product but needs a lower price, the finance and operations department are moving to the core of my marketing mix. If the product is lousy, market research has to provide R&D with proper input to make sure that the customer gets what he wants.
This is all taught during marketing class, but no one ever tells you what this means in practice: It means that you have to listen carefully to your customer and deliver. If you are in the business of selling customised software and your client tells you that his 19 year old son has trouble deciding which Uni to attend, you have to offer advice if you know a thing or two about this. If his problem has to do with his organisation's internal communication and you know someone who is trained to help in similar situations, you broker a contract between your friend and you client. At first look, this might not be your business, but your customer is your business and it is your job to satisfy him in any way possible for you. It's all about problem solving.
But, I do know your pain regarding marketing class. I had a teacher who thought that checking out what other people buy in a supermarket was market research, while I call this stalking. At one point, the MD of a medium sized, family owned business gave a presentation and basically said that they are not doing much regarding advertising and building a larger client base. My fellow students gave wonderful advice on how he could strategically grow the business. They were all missing the point: The company had a healthy profit and satisfied loyal customers who loved the product. Growing the company (and the market) would have meant attracting larger competitors to their core market which these hadn't touched yet, because they perceived it as too small. Sometimes less is more (not only on the command line).
Re:SP2 - as secure as any linux distro...
on
XP2 Spotted In The Wild
·
· Score: 5, Informative
And designing new programs from a marketing impetus instead of what people want.
You probably don't know it, but marketing is about giving people the product they want. Unfortunately many companies (and Microsoft is one of them) talk about marketing, but what they are really talking about is advertising.
"What if somebody could tell if their machine was secure just by opening a control panel?"
This statement would be a really bad example of marketing: The company and/or its developers and "marketing" experts sit together and brainstorm without ever actually asking the customer. If they were to ask me this exact question, my answer would be:
"Are you really this insane? I don't want a control panel to tell me whether my machine is secure. I want the machine to be secure, plain and simple. Given MS Windows' (whatever incarnation) security track record, I neither would nor could ever trust any application that tells me the security status of the machine from within. It's probably already cracked, infested or whatever anyway by the time I check it. If history tells us anything, it's that any application can be made to tell me that it is secure."
...but it will take at least a year to develop something like this that actually works well enough to be a part of windows.
I couldn't agree less with you. According to developers who are far more experienced with Windows than I am (IANAP), Windows is insecure by design, no fix or additional security layer on top of the current product will ever make it more secure. The only way to fix it, is to dump it and start from scratch.
This is the Microsoft equivalent of Sourceforge Development Status 1. It's a dog and pony panel that will undoubtedly be replaced by something good in the future -- but by that time, most of the industry will have lost all trust in it.
Many people argue that XP is, while more stable than all previous versions, with the notable exception of W2K, is still in development status and many of its design features are so braindead, that many knowledgable people have already lost trust in it.
IMHO, this is yet another stupid toy to make the casual home user and the boss feel more secure without actually delivering on the promises. If you were to ask them, they would all answer that they want a machine that is actually more secure rather than a having a MS tool that tells them they are. Once they told you, you design a product that is actually secure and does what the customer wants. This is marketing from an academic's point of view.
Slow DOWN guys!
You just released FC2 a few months ago. To be honest, it was lackluster. Bugs and problems are rampant. Really guys, fix up FC2, release FC2.1,2.2,etc first. Then move on to FC3.
That's the main problem I have with Fedora.
You guys cannot stay bleeding edge, and noone is expecting you to. [...] Remember, the less problematic a first timer's (n00b, whatever) experience is with Linux, the more likely they will be to sticking around and finding out what this "open source" thing is really all about.
Fedora is advertised as being a bleeding edge distro for techno junkies. I used to be one of them and nowadays find that Fedora just isn't for me anymore. SuSE 9.1 is new enough, while maintaining a very usable system that just works out of the box more or less (for me Debian Stale is too old, Debian Unstable and Testing too unsupported and I really don't understand why one would want to compile a whole system like Gentoo).
I am getting the feeling that the Fedora (RedHat) developers are not interested in providing a decent distro for free (as in beer) to the masses, which is ok, but who is going to do the testing if no one can actually use Fedora Core in a semi-productive environment?
Please, don't misinterpret this as an attempted flame (I still can't get to grips with YaST, but have to say that I dislike the FC/RH config-tools almost as much). I used to love RH6.1-7.3 (apart from the x.0 versions and the braindead idea of supplying different gcc versions with one distro, but I think most agree with me here).
Guys, what was wrong with the old RedHat release cycle? Rawhide installs were often more stable than FC2.
Aaah well, maybe I have just become one of those "Back-In-The -Good-Old-Days"-kinda guys....
Removing IE from Windows ("removing the bloat" in the parlance of the current line of argument) is rather like removing the roll-cage from a Hummer.
By contrast, removing Mozilla, Konquerer, Galeon, or Lynx from a Linux distro is relatively easy -- usually not much more trouble than using the distro's package manager. So "removing the bloat" is a comparatively simple task.
Not all the time, IIRC Fedora Core 1 would uninstall openoffice (and I think a whole lot of other things as well) when removing mozilla with apt-get, which was quite annoying.
My argument may fall apart here in the Konquerer case, as I don't use Konquerer and don't know how tightly it is integrated into KDE.
In SuSE 9.1 you can do that with 'apt-get remove kdeaddons3-konqueror'. Other distros might handle this differently.
My argument may also fall apart in as much as it may be easy to remove the roll-cage from a Hummer.
I guess it all depends on ones definition of "easy." The average Hummer driver (whatever that is) will probably be not be able to remove the roll-cage without serious impact on the car's functionality, while a specialised machanic should be able to do it for a reasonable price (we are talking Hummer here). In essence I think your analogy is quite right.;-)
If we lose a piece of history we may very well lose the piece that will inspire the invention of tommorow.
This reminds me of a program I saw on TV, where they compared current medical tools (pliers, gauze, scalpels etc.) with tools found in ancient Egypt tombs. They were pretty much identical and the author(s) explained that it is quite safe to assume that humanity had to rediscover a vast amount of knowledge after the Alexandrian library was destroyed in a fire.
The people who are most likely to be deterred by these measures are those who have the least to gain by circumventing them: the people who have already purchased the CD. [...] Now your paying customer, who in giving you his money has already indicated his desire to be honest and do the right thing, has an incentive to seek black market sources for the music.
You could in fact argue that this is the whole point of this scheme. Joe Average User now will also break the copy protection mechanism and in the eyes of the industry will be a pirate. This in turn underscores the RIAA's argument for tougher legislation: "See, everybody is ripping us off now, not just a couple of geeks. We need better laws and privacy intrusion without a warrant to save our, errr, millions of jobs in the industry. We have to protect the clones, errr, artists from getting ripped off."
I wrote a 70 page document explaining why we should switch from Windows to Linux. Management wouldn't even start to read it. This is what they get for their ignorance.
This is a very typical mistake. Management, especially senior management does not read 70 page long pamphlets about a topic that they most likely don't understand.
Write a very concise executive summary, comprising no more than two pages, outlining in an easy to understand language why switching to Linux will be beneficial to your organisation. Emphasise on cost and security and explain the interdependencies. Also explain the business freedom your organisation will gain (management decides when to make major changes to your infrastructure, not Microsoft etc.). Preferably get a colleague with an idea of management's language to help you with it.
It's like every business pitch: First you get them hooked with what they really want, then you get the stuff in that you want.
This is a great example of the free market combined with the internet. I'm able to buy goods and services from wherever it suits me.
That's exactly the same argument that can be used for outsourcing IT jobs. You can't have it both ways people! You can't have your cheap consumer economy in the US, and still want your jobs protected. Why not complain about the poor music industry jobs that are being "outsourced" to Russia?
At some point you might want to read something about the concept of Comparative Advantage, which goes back to Adam Smith I believe. You should be able to find some information about this in the context of the current outsourcing debate at The Economist.
The costs of migration are a one-time cost. The costs of licensing are a continuing cost. Sometimes you have to eat it in the short term to meet your long term goals.
This is why Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and Net Present Value (NPV) methods are sometimes a bitch. Yes, it could very well be that staying with MS Office might look more attractive to your company's financial controller, especially in times with high interest rates (the higher the interest rate, the dearer the money saved today is).
When appraising proprietary software against open alternatives (and corresponding migration cost) it might be useful to also value the company's freedom it gains, especially the freedom to take its own business decisions (as opposed to Microsoft's or some other core business logic vendor's).
There's no single way of dealing with peripheral support on linux. There is on windows. MS made sure of that. Who's making sure that people can expect without chance that a driver exists for linux when they get something out of the box?
Problem is, will it work in your environment? We have all seen badly written drivers fail, and if it comes from some lousy cheapo hardware manufacturer somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you are equally fucked with Windows.
I wish linux had the power to achieve half the of the things MS has in the peripherals market.
For many people it has. I have some old scanners which still work for my needs. I can't get them to work with XP because no driver has ever been written for them (other than W95/98/NT4). They work perfectly with Linux.
The problem is with hardware manufacturers and not necessarily Open Source developers or distro vendors. If you have some piece of hardware that the manufacturer doesn't supply drivers or specs for, the community is more or less fucked because it will either be never supported or it will take a long time to reverse engineer.
And yes, Microsoft's power has had an impact on the industry and achieved quite a lot in maintaining a monopoly situation. Power comes with responsibilities and while the courts have ruled that Microsoft doesn't use its power responsibly, the US government decided to let MSFT off the hook. Something I will never understand.
Re:Maybe it is because we are skeptical...
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
BTW I do not agree with your quote as planet Earth has withstood worse things than humans and continued. What might not survive are the humans!
Reminds me of Hoimar von Dittfurth who once said, and I paraphrase, that "mankind shouldn't be so arrogant to believe that it can destroy the earth. The earth will have destroyed us long before that." Like you, I completely agree.
It does raise an interesting question in my mind, though: Are the developers employed by e.g. Mandrake or RedHat properly "Open Source" developers?
I would say so, since they are working on an Open Source project it doesn't matter whether they are doing it for money or pure fun/personal needs. It probably depends on whether you look at it from a philosophical or a technical point. If you are so inclined and view Open Source in terms of "everybody builds what he needs and has fun doing it" ("to better ourselves") then employed developers aren't Open Source.
I stick with the more pragmatic and less dogmatic view, that the nature of the project defines whether it's Open Source , which is one point I think I actually agree with RMS. It's not bad to make money with it.
I am a religious patcher. Hell, I've almost gotten a fired a few times when patches went wrong. Bosses just don't understand that machines don't just "work". They require constant intervention. The computers, that is, not the bosses.
Not true. Bosses really do require intervention, though not necessarily constantly. When your boss goes wrong, find a way to explain the situation to him. With the right negotiating behaviour on your part you can help him make his job better, the same he is supposed to do for you.
Also, remember that many bosses were perfectly happy in their line position and got promoted because their bosses saw something in them or just had a position to fill. Your boss could even be very uncomfortable and/or insecure about the fact that he now has personnel responsibility and become a manager (as opposed to being, say a developer for example, mostly concerned with a certain project or product). In short: Bosses require constant intervention, ie. management. And don't forget the occasional pat on the back.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, nobody *must* unite.
Having said that, I think it is highly unlikely that RedHat adopts anything or will contribute anything publicly and specifically to Gentoo's idea of a distro. They are in the enterprise server/workstation distro and service business, not in the "tweak and compile your distro so that it becomes unmaintainable for the enterprise market" business.
As a company in RedHat's position, I would do everything but associate my products with Gentoo, which in the enterprise market can be viewed as useless. Remember that time is money and stability everything.
That doesn't mean that I don't like Gentoo, but the community driven distro that comes closest to what you want in the enterprise market, is Debian.
It would be a no-brainer if nuclear power were not excluded from the Kyoto mechanisms (CDM an JI).
Nuclear energy is _not_ covered by the emissions trading scheme, ie. if you build a nuclear power plant instead of, say, a solar powered plant or a carbon sink, you are not credited.
The people who drafted the Kyoto treaty were not complete fools, you know, unlike some other people who make blunt statements about it...
This is true for Mozilla 1.7.3 as well. At least for me that is.
It was quite disturbing: When I had a site open in one window, which would open new windows through java script, everything worked until I had a second window open (with a couple of tabs). When clicking on a java script link to open a picture, for example, firefox would segfault. This is on Linux, and I couldn't remedy this with a new profile.
I have been using 0.9.3 since then.
Hopefully they fixed the annoying pop-up bug that riddled that made the last release unusable for me.
...to have Annie "Sprinkle in episodes that tell the same story from the perspective of several different characters of different races." Hmmm....
[...]
My point is, people don't get new machines to play old games, they get them to play new games. But they don't stop playing their old games.
Very good point indeed, I didn't realise that Half-Life and Counterstrike were that old. Funny how time flies...
Don't you think that this is a little bit unrealistic? How many people do you know, who still play 1998 games on current hardware and OS? Then, how many of these actually run them on Windows? Have you looked at one of those 1998 games recently and thought: "Gee, this game is amazing!"?
I would say that the number of people who play 1998 games is negligible compared to the number of people who make up for recent hardware and OS sales.
Do you really play DOOM (the first one) on current hardware and a current OS? If yes, what did you get said hardware for? And, please don't tell me you need that for your really sophisticated spreadsheet calculations... ;)
Not to mention the time it will take the user to enter and maintain the metadata.
I used to do the same thing, mainly because I couldn't understand why marketing profs and lecturers (at least all I ever came in contact with) viewed marketing as a standalone science/course within management. Through many discussions with a friend of mine who is a marketing PhD and professional experience I came to realise that marketing is more about philosophy than anything else.
IMHO marketing is about viewing the market from the customer's perspective, getting to know what he really wants. Only then will I be in a position to add value (to the product and/or service I am selling from the customer's POV, and to the customer by achieving satisfaction with my service even though I can charge a premium from my POV).
This of course will only work as long as all other business functions are well tuned and focused on giving the customer what he wants. If he likes the product but needs a lower price, the finance and operations department are moving to the core of my marketing mix. If the product is lousy, market research has to provide R&D with proper input to make sure that the customer gets what he wants.
This is all taught during marketing class, but no one ever tells you what this means in practice: It means that you have to listen carefully to your customer and deliver. If you are in the business of selling customised software and your client tells you that his 19 year old son has trouble deciding which Uni to attend, you have to offer advice if you know a thing or two about this. If his problem has to do with his organisation's internal communication and you know someone who is trained to help in similar situations, you broker a contract between your friend and you client. At first look, this might not be your business, but your customer is your business and it is your job to satisfy him in any way possible for you. It's all about problem solving.
But, I do know your pain regarding marketing class. I had a teacher who thought that checking out what other people buy in a supermarket was market research, while I call this stalking. At one point, the MD of a medium sized, family owned business gave a presentation and basically said that they are not doing much regarding advertising and building a larger client base. My fellow students gave wonderful advice on how he could strategically grow the business. They were all missing the point: The company had a healthy profit and satisfied loyal customers who loved the product. Growing the company (and the market) would have meant attracting larger competitors to their core market which these hadn't touched yet, because they perceived it as too small. Sometimes less is more (not only on the command line).
You probably don't know it, but marketing is about giving people the product they want. Unfortunately many companies (and Microsoft is one of them) talk about marketing, but what they are really talking about is advertising.
"What if somebody could tell if their machine was secure just by opening a control panel?"
This statement would be a really bad example of marketing: The company and/or its developers and "marketing" experts sit together and brainstorm without ever actually asking the customer. If they were to ask me this exact question, my answer would be:
"Are you really this insane? I don't want a control panel to tell me whether my machine is secure. I want the machine to be secure, plain and simple. Given MS Windows' (whatever incarnation) security track record, I neither would nor could ever trust any application that tells me the security status of the machine from within. It's probably already cracked, infested or whatever anyway by the time I check it. If history tells us anything, it's that any application can be made to tell me that it is secure."
I couldn't agree less with you. According to developers who are far more experienced with Windows than I am (IANAP), Windows is insecure by design, no fix or additional security layer on top of the current product will ever make it more secure. The only way to fix it, is to dump it and start from scratch.
This is the Microsoft equivalent of Sourceforge Development Status 1. It's a dog and pony panel that will undoubtedly be replaced by something good in the future -- but by that time, most of the industry will have lost all trust in it.
Many people argue that XP is, while more stable than all previous versions, with the notable exception of W2K, is still in development status and many of its design features are so braindead, that many knowledgable people have already lost trust in it.
IMHO, this is yet another stupid toy to make the casual home user and the boss feel more secure without actually delivering on the promises. If you were to ask them, they would all answer that they want a machine that is actually more secure rather than a having a MS tool that tells them they are. Once they told you, you design a product that is actually secure and does what the customer wants. This is marketing from an academic's point of view.
That's the main problem I have with Fedora.
You guys cannot stay bleeding edge, and noone is expecting you to. [...] Remember, the less problematic a first timer's (n00b, whatever) experience is with Linux, the more likely they will be to sticking around and finding out what this "open source" thing is really all about.
Fedora is advertised as being a bleeding edge distro for techno junkies. I used to be one of them and nowadays find that Fedora just isn't for me anymore. SuSE 9.1 is new enough, while maintaining a very usable system that just works out of the box more or less (for me Debian Stale is too old, Debian Unstable and Testing too unsupported and I really don't understand why one would want to compile a whole system like Gentoo).
I am getting the feeling that the Fedora (RedHat) developers are not interested in providing a decent distro for free (as in beer) to the masses, which is ok, but who is going to do the testing if no one can actually use Fedora Core in a semi-productive environment?
Please, don't misinterpret this as an attempted flame (I still can't get to grips with YaST, but have to say that I dislike the FC/RH config-tools almost as much). I used to love RH6.1-7.3 (apart from the x.0 versions and the braindead idea of supplying different gcc versions with one distro, but I think most agree with me here).
Guys, what was wrong with the old RedHat release cycle? Rawhide installs were often more stable than FC2.
Aaah well, maybe I have just become one of those "Back-In-The -Good-Old-Days"-kinda guys....
By contrast, removing Mozilla, Konquerer, Galeon, or Lynx from a Linux distro is relatively easy -- usually not much more trouble than using the distro's package manager. So "removing the bloat" is a comparatively simple task.
Not all the time, IIRC Fedora Core 1 would uninstall openoffice (and I think a whole lot of other things as well) when removing mozilla with apt-get, which was quite annoying.
My argument may fall apart here in the Konquerer case, as I don't use Konquerer and don't know how tightly it is integrated into KDE.
In SuSE 9.1 you can do that with 'apt-get remove kdeaddons3-konqueror'. Other distros might handle this differently.
My argument may also fall apart in as much as it may be easy to remove the roll-cage from a Hummer.
I guess it all depends on ones definition of "easy." The average Hummer driver (whatever that is) will probably be not be able to remove the roll-cage without serious impact on the car's functionality, while a specialised machanic should be able to do it for a reasonable price (we are talking Hummer here). In essence I think your analogy is quite right. ;-)
What are you talking about? This works pretty well where I am sitting.
Just priceless. Someone, please get a cluestick quickly and help this poor chap.
I really would like to now what the business part is he is talking about.
This reminds me of a program I saw on TV, where they compared current medical tools (pliers, gauze, scalpels etc.) with tools found in ancient Egypt tombs. They were pretty much identical and the author(s) explained that it is quite safe to assume that humanity had to rediscover a vast amount of knowledge after the Alexandrian library was destroyed in a fire.
You could in fact argue that this is the whole point of this scheme. Joe Average User now will also break the copy protection mechanism and in the eyes of the industry will be a pirate. This in turn underscores the RIAA's argument for tougher legislation: "See, everybody is ripping us off now, not just a couple of geeks. We need better laws and privacy intrusion without a warrant to save our, errr, millions of jobs in the industry. We have to protect the clones, errr, artists from getting ripped off."
This is a very typical mistake. Management, especially senior management does not read 70 page long pamphlets about a topic that they most likely don't understand.
Write a very concise executive summary, comprising no more than two pages, outlining in an easy to understand language why switching to Linux will be beneficial to your organisation. Emphasise on cost and security and explain the interdependencies. Also explain the business freedom your organisation will gain (management decides when to make major changes to your infrastructure, not Microsoft etc.). Preferably get a colleague with an idea of management's language to help you with it.
It's like every business pitch: First you get them hooked with what they really want, then you get the stuff in that you want.
That's exactly the same argument that can be used for outsourcing IT jobs. You can't have it both ways people! You can't have your cheap consumer economy in the US, and still want your jobs protected. Why not complain about the poor music industry jobs that are being "outsourced" to Russia?
At some point you might want to read something about the concept of Comparative Advantage, which goes back to Adam Smith I believe. You should be able to find some information about this in the context of the current outsourcing debate at The Economist.
This is why Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and Net Present Value (NPV) methods are sometimes a bitch. Yes, it could very well be that staying with MS Office might look more attractive to your company's financial controller, especially in times with high interest rates (the higher the interest rate, the dearer the money saved today is).
When appraising proprietary software against open alternatives (and corresponding migration cost) it might be useful to also value the company's freedom it gains, especially the freedom to take its own business decisions (as opposed to Microsoft's or some other core business logic vendor's).
Problem is, will it work in your environment? We have all seen badly written drivers fail, and if it comes from some lousy cheapo hardware manufacturer somewhere in the middle of nowhere, you are equally fucked with Windows.
I wish linux had the power to achieve half the of the things MS has in the peripherals market.
For many people it has. I have some old scanners which still work for my needs. I can't get them to work with XP because no driver has ever been written for them (other than W95/98/NT4). They work perfectly with Linux.
The problem is with hardware manufacturers and not necessarily Open Source developers or distro vendors. If you have some piece of hardware that the manufacturer doesn't supply drivers or specs for, the community is more or less fucked because it will either be never supported or it will take a long time to reverse engineer.
And yes, Microsoft's power has had an impact on the industry and achieved quite a lot in maintaining a monopoly situation. Power comes with responsibilities and while the courts have ruled that Microsoft doesn't use its power responsibly, the US government decided to let MSFT off the hook. Something I will never understand.
Reminds me of Hoimar von Dittfurth who once said, and I paraphrase, that "mankind shouldn't be so arrogant to believe that it can destroy the earth. The earth will have destroyed us long before that." Like you, I completely agree.
I would say so, since they are working on an Open Source project it doesn't matter whether they are doing it for money or pure fun/personal needs. It probably depends on whether you look at it from a philosophical or a technical point. If you are so inclined and view Open Source in terms of "everybody builds what he needs and has fun doing it" ("to better ourselves") then employed developers aren't Open Source.
I stick with the more pragmatic and less dogmatic view, that the nature of the project defines whether it's Open Source , which is one point I think I actually agree with RMS. It's not bad to make money with it.
What do you think?
Not true. Bosses really do require intervention, though not necessarily constantly. When your boss goes wrong, find a way to explain the situation to him. With the right negotiating behaviour on your part you can help him make his job better, the same he is supposed to do for you.
Also, remember that many bosses were perfectly happy in their line position and got promoted because their bosses saw something in them or just had a position to fill. Your boss could even be very uncomfortable and/or insecure about the fact that he now has personnel responsibility and become a manager (as opposed to being, say a developer for example, mostly concerned with a certain project or product). In short: Bosses require constant intervention, ie. management. And don't forget the occasional pat on the back.
Cheers.