IBM must have SOME entrenched markets left. The only tech job I see advertised as often as "Help Desk Technition" is "AS400 programmer" Must be thirty percent of the newspaper job adverts, and a similiar number of online adverts. Almost enough to make one wish he was an "AS400 programmer".
I think the article specifically targets Linux because it is the most vulnerable form of Unix to this problem. The problems forseen by Garfinkle rely on mass public acceptance of the OS, and Linux is closest to that goal. Users of other Unicies remain largely programers, adminstrators, and various other techo-ppl. Back when I was doing tech support, I had two occations where I had to indstruct a new Linux user on how to make a non-privilaged account so they would not access their machine as root ALL THE TIME (This was not a Linux company BTW, we were just a hardware vendor. I just happened to be the only tech with Linux experience, so I got tranfered all the calls that weren't Windows machines). They had no concept of a seperate admin account. Newer installers are helping (They allow you to make a non-privilaged account during install), but many newbies still have no understanding of Unix security (I know I didn't when I first started. I actually found Practical Unix and Internet Security a big help). He is not saying that the Linux software is inherently any less secure than other Unix's, but rather that Linux is starting to attract a less security conscious user, and that it's popularity is soon going to cause more of an effort to made toward creating "viruses" for it. If anything the article is complementry to the success of Linux, and a prediction of its continued growth.
As to the use of the word "virus", I believe that Mr. Garfinkle was using the Windows world definitionm which from what I can tell is "any malicious piece of code that you accidently get on your computer somehow." Not a correct definition technically, but when writing it is a heck of a lot easier to refer to genreal "viruses" than to have to type out "viruses, trojans, worms, and other malicious code" everytime you want to make a general statement.
Even generaly liberal contracts contain SOME protection clauses for the company. I can do all the side work I want, and I own anyting I write, but if it creates a "Conflict of interest " with the company, they have right to tell me to stop. AOL could argue fairly easilly that this creates such a conflict. I would not agree, but the arguement could be made.
This solution ignores the problem of censorship. Organizations like the MPAA and companies like Sony would not care which of your tiers "their" content was being distrbuted on, they would still want to maintain control of it. Just 'cause it is on the "Communication" tier of the network doesn't make them feel that it is any less theirs. You're just focusing the problem into one tier, and really into the tier that we would least like to have problems on.
That would be a very poor attitude for Red Hat to take if they want to make money. They umm.. Kinda need to sell stuff to do that. They need to convert people not just cater to those who are already converted.
I agree that certification gives companies a no-less-than comparison, which is helpful, but by the same token the "You MUST be certified" attitude needs work. I may not be able to learn as much from a book as I can from your class, but I CAN (and have) gotten certified from one. It wasn't even a very immpressive book. I got my MCP in NT Server by reading NT Server MCSE for Dummies and playing with with a copy. It was not that hard. I have NEVER worked with NT server except on my home network for a week or two,and I never took a class. What does this say about the ceritifcation? Now granted, I am a fairly experienced Unix admin, and I work with NT workstation and Samba regularly, so maybe not anyone could have passed the test from a book, but it is certainly possible.
A big problem is the companies that REQUIRES certification to be considered. I have three years of experience supporting Microsoft systems. I have never taken a class, and my only MCP is in NT Server(which I don't use at work. I confuse myself sometimes). Why? Those bloody tests are expensive, and my current employer doesn't pay for them. I could be an MCSE easily, probably without a single class. I fancy that I know more about the administration of a Windows System than a newly minted MCSE, but there are companies out there that will look at my three years of experience and someone else's shiny new MCSE, and hire them first. The piece of paper has its uses, but at what point did it become more useful than real world experience? Note that I am not REALLY complaining here. I have a good job and I could afford to go get an MCSE if I really wanted to. If I was planning on leaving, I might, just for the resume. But (Ahh! I started a sentence with "but") what if I couldn't? How many companies would pass me up for the lack of letters after my name?
I actually have the reverse problem, When I click on streaming media in my browser, it tries to dowload it. Real turns on, but doesn't play the file, any idea what I am doing wrong? I registered Real to play media files in the Netscape registry thingie...
Mybe I am reading this worng, but aren't those boelean values, an thus completely inappropriate for storing the data listed (Religion = true, huh?). Probably a joke.
If you read the site, you will find that the unencrypted file is over 13 MB (Of mostly text I assume). He has to have some sort of benchmark, no one, or even a small organization could comb through 13 MB of text worth of URL's. 50 is a decent sampling, and.edu's are chosen becase they are more likely to be wrong. The overall accuracy is almost certainly better than 76%, and with the WHOLE sampling of.edu's, the accuracy may improve fractionally, but even if ONLY 60% of ONLY.edu's is wrong, that is a huge amount of information blocked. Since it is information on a.edu site, there is likely to be much that is useful in the list (such as two books of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).
Every country has it's elite class, with money to spare. If you located in a large city (for infrastructure), you might be able to sell access as a status symbol to those with money. You would have to import or train a workforce though, and religious laws could be a problem in some areas. Depends on what you define as third world too. Ethiopia is VERY poor, and you might not even be able to get the elite to buy access. Pakistan is VERY Muslim (At least so I hear. I may be wrong though, I hate to make generalizations about religion) and may have legal hurdles. India on the other hand, while often considered third world, already has a tech infrastructure. I Eastern Europe might be a good place to start, some infrastructure, some elites with money, and a desire to become part of the larger world. Eastern Europe might also have tech workers avaialable. Of course I have never been to any of these places, so I could be way off, but I have talked to people from most of them.
Granted. If you find an unguarded armored personel carrier, you could destroy it. You might even get a few with booby traps fully loaded. The Army has thousands. My point was not that you shold be afraid of the governments armored personel carriers, my point is that you could not successfully rebel against the US governmetn right now. Fifty years from now if the government has become a truely facist state you might be able to get enough support to be successful, but it would require the support of at least part of the military to be anything other than an in effective guerrilla campaign. A milita group might be able to take out a few vehicles, but there are more, and the fighter planes, and the bombers, and the trainig and disipline that makes the men behind those weapons effective. Under normal circumstances you would never have to face and APC or tank though, that is also my point. The government would never send one after you. An indiviual or small group could never face off against the entire US military, but they don't have to. It would take a signifigantly smaller number of people complaining about this law to get it changed then it would to attempt armed restistance.
Your futures all leave out one critical detail, there are still poeple out there who don't own computers and are not connected to the 'net. These people are not going to fade away slowly. It may be decades before physcial media is not required for most of the word to view movies/listen to music. It may be a century. Most people (even geeks) that I know prefer book to reading the same information on a computer screen. Literature may never become totally digital. Physical media exchange of IP has a long life left in it for corps. to make money on. That is part of why traditional media companies are having such a hard time adapting. They still make WAY more money on physical media containing IP then they could hope to make on digital data at this point. They want to make the digital arena like "the real world" because it simplifies everything. The 'net is potential, but companies are shortsighted, they see the money coming in form CD's now, and don't want it to stop. If we make money on CD's, why should we change things and maybe not make as much money on this new way. We know this is profitable. We know that this will continue to be profitable as long as most people aren't wired or don't know what to do with it if they are. We'll just make this electronic thingie an extention of what we know works. Companies don't have to deal with the new unlimited supply paradim yet, and they are trying to arrange things so that they never do.
I find this statement silly. Of course I cna enforce an unjust law on an armed man. Your gun (even a really cool gun) is really no match for an armored police vehicle, much less an M1-A1 or a Bradley. I can say with some certainty (Since I work around Military vehicles all the time) that 99.999% of civilians don't have any weapon that could scratch an armored vehicle. Luckily they don't need to. Our protection is the law, sometimes laws are bad (The DMCA comes to mind), but they will only be repealed through judicial review or later reconsideration, your gun will have no effect what-so-ever. If you wan t to change things, give up posturing with toys and take up law. It is only through legisaltion and judical review that we can be saved. That or civil disobedience. Trust me, the government has WAY more guns than you do.
You can't get AOL or NetZero, they require you to use their client (NetZero because they make all of their money on the ads present in the client, AOL because they are..Umm..AOL). Most national ISP's can be accessed through Linux, you just have to set the PPP connection up yourself. I used Mindspring successfuly for a year before I got DSL. They would not support me though (Not a big deal for me). Few if any ISP's have a Linux version of "their software" (Which is usually just IE or Netscape with a built on DUN connection)
Personally I think the AOL idea is fabualous. They have access everywhere (first priority in this case) and you get to screw them. Think about it. They offer one month's free access with a trillion hours or something. You sign up and cancel after 29 day. It was free. AOL gets nothing, you get the access you want, and at only slightly slower speeds than a real ISP would have given you. You sign on , minimize the window, and use real net tools. Course if you use *nix that won't work (no client), try Earthnet/Mindspring. They are fairly huge.
My understanding of squastting is a bit different. As I understand it, this is a matter of "fair use". It would be wrong of me to buy walmart.com with the expressed purpose of selling it to Walmart for an obscene amout of money. It would not be wrong of me to buy (as has already been done) business.com with the expressed purpose of selling it to someone for (unspecified at the time I purchase the name) an obscene amount of money. It would also not be wrong of me (Although it is currently illegal, I don't think it is wrong) to buy walmart.com for purposes of creating a fan site or a parody site. Under current (and recent) U.S. law the first and third examples are illegal (IANAL though), but if you have a domain name that does not have copyright protection on it, I see no moral reason not to sell it for as much as some sucker is willing to pay.
There is a serious hole in your arguement. This is supposedly a LINUX COMPANY, and they are going public, gettting ready to take some poor daytrader's MONEY. Granted our exemplary daytrader needs to have his/her head examined if they buy stock in this company, but it does not change the fact that this "company" is at least TRYING to take his/her examplary money. Your example shows a customer getting screwed by an immoral mechanic, and you are comparing this to what the transcript does. In reality the transcript exposes the immoral mechanic. This is more like an experienced mechanic going into the shop of another mechanic and exposing the fact that the second guy has been putting mufflers on backward.
Look, The question is a simple one. Do we want the desktop? Everyone keeps talking about Linux taking over the desktop. Is this what we want? If no, then there is no problem. I can figure out how to use it, you can figure out how to use it, we have no problem.
If yes, we have work to do. My father can barely use Windows. He cannot edit text files to bloody get X up. Yes it is faster to type rm -rf somefile, if you know what a bloody rm is, otherwise it is not faster, right-clicking and clicking delete is. It's taken most of a year for me to get reasonably proficent at *nix, and your average user doesn't want to spend that amount of time in training. I did Windows support for a year, these people are not going to read the man page, they are not going to read the HOWTO or the FAQ. If they can figure out what a news group is they MIGHT post to it, but somebody better answer, and it better be the right answer. Some of them are very inteligent... some are very stupid, but all of them want one thing. I take it out of the box, I put it in the machine, I use it. Until we realize this and make allowence for it, Linux will NEVER take the desktop. It is and will be a great OS, but it won't take the desktop.
Red Hat 6.1 installs a very usable Gnome desktop, but ironically that is all it will install. The article is right, and here is my personal "case in point". I installed Red Hat 6.1 (newest, bestest, most user friendliest verison yet). It told me on the box, "Now you can chose between Gnome and KDE", I was happy about this. I like KDE, this is an irrational result of the fact that when I first started using Linux, I found the PPP tool in KDE to be a much easier way to connect to the internet than anything Gnome offered (at the time, Gnome offered nothing). I no longer need the PPP tool to connect to the Internet (both because I figured out other ways to use PPP, and because I now have DSL rendering the point moot), but ever since then I have prefered KDE. So, I install Red Hat 6.1, and one of my first choices is "Gnome workstation", "KDE Workstation", "Server", or "Custom". I chose custom, hoping that that wasn't my only chance to use KDE. I then get to chose my packages, and low and behold, I can chose KDE, Gnome, or both. I chose KDE, and told the installer not even to bother with Gnome. Iget the system installed, chose console (as opposed to graphical) logon, restart and logon. I type startx, and watch as Gnome starts up. What? I did not even install Gnome, how did it start? Hmm.. I start searching through text files (the only way to change your WM of course, you can't do it graphically) and discover the following. Red Hat's installer, completely ignoring your instructions, installs both Gnome and KDE no matter what you do. It then sets up KDE to start with the graphical login in run level 4 (I think, whatever the graphical login run levle is..), and sets up Gnome to run whenever you startx from the console. I had to send twenty minutes figuring out how to make it not use a WM I told it not even to install. If I hadn't been resonably familiar with how X works, I would never have figured it out. Forget easier infaces, how about one that doe what we tell it to?
I have to disagree somewhat (and probably get flamed). Software is not like math. Software principles are like math, but software is like engineered devices, copyrightable (Is that a word?). What you choose to do with software once it is written is up to you, but it belongs to the writer. I would certainly argue that it is preferable to release it under an open licence, but that is only my choice if I write the software. I am also not saying that the writer has the right to enforce any random contract he wants, as these laws imply, but software is not like math or science. it is like engineering, and engineered products can be copyrighted.
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IBM must have SOME entrenched markets left. The only tech job I see advertised as often as "Help Desk Technition" is "AS400 programmer" Must be thirty percent of the newspaper job adverts, and a similiar number of online adverts. Almost enough to make one wish he was an "AS400 programmer".
I think the article specifically targets Linux because it is the most vulnerable form of Unix to this problem. The problems forseen by Garfinkle rely on mass public acceptance of the OS, and Linux is closest to that goal. Users of other Unicies remain largely programers, adminstrators, and various other techo-ppl. Back when I was doing tech support, I had two occations where I had to indstruct a new Linux user on how to make a non-privilaged account so they would not access their machine as root ALL THE TIME (This was not a Linux company BTW, we were just a hardware vendor. I just happened to be the only tech with Linux experience, so I got tranfered all the calls that weren't Windows machines). They had no concept of a seperate admin account. Newer installers are helping (They allow you to make a non-privilaged account during install), but many newbies still have no understanding of Unix security (I know I didn't when I first started. I actually found Practical Unix and Internet Security a big help). He is not saying that the Linux software is inherently any less secure than other Unix's, but rather that Linux is starting to attract a less security conscious user, and that it's popularity is soon going to cause more of an effort to made toward creating "viruses" for it. If anything the article is complementry to the success of Linux, and a prediction of its continued growth.
As to the use of the word "virus", I believe that Mr. Garfinkle was using the Windows world definitionm which from what I can tell is "any malicious piece of code that you accidently get on your computer somehow." Not a correct definition technically, but when writing it is a heck of a lot easier to refer to genreal "viruses" than to have to type out "viruses, trojans, worms, and other malicious code" everytime you want to make a general statement.
Even generaly liberal contracts contain SOME protection clauses for the company. I can do all the side work I want, and I own anyting I write, but if it creates a "Conflict of interest " with the company, they have right to tell me to stop. AOL could argue fairly easilly that this creates such a conflict. I would not agree, but the arguement could be made.
This solution ignores the problem of censorship. Organizations like the MPAA and companies like Sony would not care which of your tiers "their" content was being distrbuted on, they would still want to maintain control of it. Just 'cause it is on the "Communication" tier of the network doesn't make them feel that it is any less theirs. You're just focusing the problem into one tier, and really into the tier that we would least like to have problems on.
That would be a very poor attitude for Red Hat to take if they want to make money. They umm.. Kinda need to sell stuff to do that. They need to convert people not just cater to those who are already converted.
I agree that certification gives companies a no-less-than comparison, which is helpful, but by the same token the "You MUST be certified" attitude needs work. I may not be able to learn as much from a book as I can from your class, but I CAN (and have) gotten certified from one. It wasn't even a very immpressive book. I got my MCP in NT Server by reading NT Server MCSE for Dummies and playing with with a copy. It was not that hard. I have NEVER worked with NT server except on my home network for a week or two,and I never took a class. What does this say about the ceritifcation? Now granted, I am a fairly experienced Unix admin, and I work with NT workstation and Samba regularly, so maybe not anyone could have passed the test from a book, but it is certainly possible.
A big problem is the companies that REQUIRES certification to be considered. I have three years of experience supporting Microsoft systems. I have never taken a class, and my only MCP is in NT Server(which I don't use at work. I confuse myself sometimes). Why? Those bloody tests are expensive, and my current employer doesn't pay for them. I could be an MCSE easily, probably without a single class. I fancy that I know more about the administration of a Windows System than a newly minted MCSE, but there are companies out there that will look at my three years of experience and someone else's shiny new MCSE, and hire them first. The piece of paper has its uses, but at what point did it become more useful than real world experience? Note that I am not REALLY complaining here. I have a good job and I could afford to go get an MCSE if I really wanted to. If I was planning on leaving, I might, just for the resume. But (Ahh! I started a sentence with "but") what if I couldn't? How many companies would pass me up for the lack of letters after my name?
I actually have the reverse problem, When I click on streaming media in my browser, it tries to dowload it. Real turns on, but doesn't play the file, any idea what I am doing wrong? I registered Real to play media files in the Netscape registry thingie...
Mybe I am reading this worng, but aren't those boelean values, an thus completely inappropriate for storing the data listed (Religion = true, huh?). Probably a joke.
If you read the site, you will find that the unencrypted file is over 13 MB (Of mostly text I assume). He has to have some sort of benchmark, no one, or even a small organization could comb through 13 MB of text worth of URL's. 50 is a decent sampling, and .edu's are chosen becase they are more likely to be wrong. The overall accuracy is almost certainly better than 76%, and with the WHOLE sampling of .edu's, the accuracy may improve fractionally, but even if ONLY 60% of ONLY .edu's is wrong, that is a huge amount of information blocked. Since it is information on a .edu site, there is likely to be much that is useful in the list (such as two books of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire).
Every country has it's elite class, with money to spare. If you located in a large city (for infrastructure), you might be able to sell access as a status symbol to those with money. You would have to import or train a workforce though, and religious laws could be a problem in some areas. Depends on what you define as third world too. Ethiopia is VERY poor, and you might not even be able to get the elite to buy access. Pakistan is VERY Muslim (At least so I hear. I may be wrong though, I hate to make generalizations about religion) and may have legal hurdles. India on the other hand, while often considered third world, already has a tech infrastructure. I Eastern Europe might be a good place to start, some infrastructure, some elites with money, and a desire to become part of the larger world. Eastern Europe might also have tech workers avaialable. Of course I have never been to any of these places, so I could be way off, but I have talked to people from most of them.
Granted. If you find an unguarded armored personel carrier, you could destroy it. You might even get a few with booby traps fully loaded. The Army has thousands. My point was not that you shold be afraid of the governments armored personel carriers, my point is that you could not successfully rebel against the US governmetn right now. Fifty years from now if the government has become a truely facist state you might be able to get enough support to be successful, but it would require the support of at least part of the military to be anything other than an in effective guerrilla campaign. A milita group might be able to take out a few vehicles, but there are more, and the fighter planes, and the bombers, and the trainig and disipline that makes the men behind those weapons effective. Under normal circumstances you would never have to face and APC or tank though, that is also my point. The government would never send one after you. An indiviual or small group could never face off against the entire US military, but they don't have to. It would take a signifigantly smaller number of people complaining about this law to get it changed then it would to attempt armed restistance.
Your futures all leave out one critical detail, there are still poeple out there who don't own computers and are not connected to the 'net. These people are not going to fade away slowly. It may be decades before physcial media is not required for most of the word to view movies/listen to music. It may be a century. Most people (even geeks) that I know prefer book to reading the same information on a computer screen. Literature may never become totally digital. Physical media exchange of IP has a long life left in it for corps. to make money on. That is part of why traditional media companies are having such a hard time adapting. They still make WAY more money on physical media containing IP then they could hope to make on digital data at this point. They want to make the digital arena like "the real world" because it simplifies everything. The 'net is potential, but companies are shortsighted, they see the money coming in form CD's now, and don't want it to stop. If we make money on CD's, why should we change things and maybe not make as much money on this new way. We know this is profitable. We know that this will continue to be profitable as long as most people aren't wired or don't know what to do with it if they are. We'll just make this electronic thingie an extention of what we know works. Companies don't have to deal with the new unlimited supply paradim yet, and they are trying to arrange things so that they never do.
I find this statement silly. Of course I cna enforce an unjust law on an armed man. Your gun (even a really cool gun) is really no match for an armored police vehicle, much less an M1-A1 or a Bradley. I can say with some certainty (Since I work around Military vehicles all the time) that 99.999% of civilians don't have any weapon that could scratch an armored vehicle. Luckily they don't need to. Our protection is the law, sometimes laws are bad (The DMCA comes to mind), but they will only be repealed through judicial review or later reconsideration, your gun will have no effect what-so-ever. If you wan t to change things, give up posturing with toys and take up law. It is only through legisaltion and judical review that we can be saved. That or civil disobedience. Trust me, the government has WAY more guns than you do.
For being "Flagrantly inaccurate".
You can't get AOL or NetZero, they require you to use their client (NetZero because they make all of their money on the ads present in the client, AOL because they are ..Umm ..AOL). Most national ISP's can be accessed through Linux, you just have to set the PPP connection up yourself. I used Mindspring successfuly for a year before I got DSL. They would not support me though (Not a big deal for me). Few if any ISP's have a Linux version of "their software" (Which is usually just IE or Netscape with a built on DUN connection)
Personally I think the AOL idea is fabualous. They have access everywhere (first priority in this case) and you get to screw them. Think about it. They offer one month's free access with a trillion hours or something. You sign up and cancel after 29 day. It was free. AOL gets nothing, you get the access you want, and at only slightly slower speeds than a real ISP would have given you. You sign on , minimize the window, and use real net tools. Course if you use *nix that won't work (no client), try Earthnet/Mindspring. They are fairly huge.
My understanding of squastting is a bit different. As I understand it, this is a matter of "fair use". It would be wrong of me to buy walmart.com with the expressed purpose of selling it to Walmart for an obscene amout of money. It would not be wrong of me to buy (as has already been done) business.com with the expressed purpose of selling it to someone for (unspecified at the time I purchase the name) an obscene amount of money. It would also not be wrong of me (Although it is currently illegal, I don't think it is wrong) to buy walmart.com for purposes of creating a fan site or a parody site. Under current (and recent) U.S. law the first and third examples are illegal (IANAL though), but if you have a domain name that does not have copyright protection on it, I see no moral reason not to sell it for as much as some sucker is willing to pay.
I can verify a problem with a ATM backbone in the South East. My DSL service was slow as Hell for a few hours.
Leave it to Yahoo to take their own outage and turn it into headline content.
There is a serious hole in your arguement. This is supposedly a LINUX COMPANY, and they are going public, gettting ready to take some poor daytrader's MONEY. Granted our exemplary daytrader needs to have his/her head examined if they buy stock in this company, but it does not change the fact that this "company" is at least TRYING to take his/her examplary money. Your example shows a customer getting screwed by an immoral mechanic, and you are comparing this to what the transcript does. In reality the transcript exposes the immoral mechanic. This is more like an experienced mechanic going into the shop of another mechanic and exposing the fact that the second guy has been putting mufflers on backward.
Look, The question is a simple one. Do we want the desktop? Everyone keeps talking about Linux taking over the desktop. Is this what we want? If no, then there is no problem. I can figure out how to use it, you can figure out how to use it, we have no problem.
If yes, we have work to do. My father can barely use Windows. He cannot edit text files to bloody get X up. Yes it is faster to type rm -rf somefile, if you know what a bloody rm is, otherwise it is not faster, right-clicking and clicking delete is. It's taken most of a year for me to get reasonably proficent at *nix, and your average user doesn't want to spend that amount of time in training. I did Windows support for a year, these people are not going to read the man page, they are not going to read the HOWTO or the FAQ. If they can figure out what a news group is they MIGHT post to it, but somebody better answer, and it better be the right answer. Some of them are very inteligent... some are very stupid, but all of them want one thing. I take it out of the box, I put it in the machine, I use it. Until we realize this and make allowence for it, Linux will NEVER take the desktop. It is and will be a great OS, but it won't take the desktop.
Red Hat 6.1 installs a very usable Gnome desktop, but ironically that is all it will install. The article is right, and here is my personal "case in point". I installed Red Hat 6.1 (newest, bestest, most user friendliest verison yet). It told me on the box, "Now you can chose between Gnome and KDE", I was happy about this. I like KDE, this is an irrational result of the fact that when I first started using Linux, I found the PPP tool in KDE to be a much easier way to connect to the internet than anything Gnome offered (at the time, Gnome offered nothing). I no longer need the PPP tool to connect to the Internet (both because I figured out other ways to use PPP, and because I now have DSL rendering the point moot), but ever since then I have prefered KDE. So, I install Red Hat 6.1, and one of my first choices is "Gnome workstation", "KDE Workstation", "Server", or "Custom". I chose custom, hoping that that wasn't my only chance to use KDE. I then get to chose my packages, and low and behold, I can chose KDE, Gnome, or both. I chose KDE, and told the installer not even to bother with Gnome. Iget the system installed, chose console (as opposed to graphical) logon, restart and logon. I type startx, and watch as Gnome starts up. What? I did not even install Gnome, how did it start? Hmm.. I start searching through text files (the only way to change your WM of course, you can't do it graphically) and discover the following. Red Hat's installer, completely ignoring your instructions, installs both Gnome and KDE no matter what you do. It then sets up KDE to start with the graphical login in run level 4 (I think, whatever the graphical login run levle is..), and sets up Gnome to run whenever you startx from the console. I had to send twenty minutes figuring out how to make it not use a WM I told it not even to install. If I hadn't been resonably familiar with how X works, I would never have figured it out. Forget easier infaces, how about one that doe what we tell it to?
I have to disagree somewhat (and probably get flamed). Software is not like math. Software principles are like math, but software is like engineered devices, copyrightable (Is that a word?). What you choose to do with software once it is written is up to you, but it belongs to the writer. I would certainly argue that it is preferable to release it under an open licence, but that is only my choice if I write the software. I am also not saying that the writer has the right to enforce any random contract he wants, as these laws imply, but software is not like math or science. it is like engineering, and engineered products can be copyrighted.