(0) I mention the stuff at the top because I'm saying that as someone who isn't really INSIDE (and who has good reasons why) things look pretty paranoid and hostile from the OUTSIDE
(1) the example messages are examples of how hostile corporate entities COULD write FALSE, MISLEADING or otherwise DISHONEST messages that key in on popular Linux community hysteria
(2) to reiterate, those example messages would be posted by people using fake accounts or anons
(3) they are FALSE and are for EXAMPLE PURPOSES ONLY...
I want to talk a little bit about how dangerous and destructive articles like this are.
I AM NOT A LINUX USER, although I have dallied with running Linux on my machine on more than one occasion. I am one of the many x86 Windows users who has at one time or another installed and then uninstalled a Linux distribution. Over the last few years, I've bought two copies of Slackware and two copies of RedHat which translates in the grand Linux headcount to "four users" when in fact I represent zero (I have a single license for Windows 95, thereby contributing 1/4th the number to the Windows headcount that I contribute to Linux's). I don't use Linux for a relatively simple reason: it doesn't work for me. When I think about what I do with my computr I'm systematic.
I read email using Eudora, an excellent email program with a good interface that's easy to use and handles my email volume and have seamlessly integrated PGP. I read netnews using Free Agent from Forte, likewise an excellent program with a good interface. I browse the web with Netscape and Internet Explorer, with Netscape configured with images, Java and Javascript turned off and IE with all of them on so that I can choose "how" to browse just by choosing the tool to browse with. I play games -- lately, "Gruntz" and various arcade game emulators. Lastly, I program, with Cafe or Visual Studio. I primarily program graphics using DirectX and OpenGL.
For these tasks, Linux has little to offer me. Moving to Linux would mean giving up having a good email client, giving up having a good newsreader, giving up all hope of a stable, up-to-date, fast web browser, giving up my favorite games (MAME is available for Linux, but it's generally slower than the DOS and win32 versions), giving up all hope of having a good, rich IDE. Graphics? Give it up entirely. 3d support is practically non-existant on Linux and where it exists it's for last-generation hardware (at best) and poorly supported and even more poorly integrated into the overall system (Mesa on 3dfx is an unacceptable substitute, though perhaps this will change in the long term with some support coming from Matrox for the G200 and Nvidia).
I don't want to have to spend days or weeks getting the system "the way I like it" or even into a usable state (fvwm95 on RH4 was a great example of this: lots of icons pointing to programs that weren't installed, the worst possible GUI interface concept) and I don't want to have to rebuild my kernel just to get sound.
So Linux doesn't work for me and can't be made to work for now. I don't want to use a hacked together tcl/tk based email program where I can manually add a button for PGP and I don't want to have to pretend that EMACS is an acceptable substitute for an IDE with an excellent help system (CW Linux may suffice here, the other Linux alternatives simply don't -- documentation and context-sensitive documentation searches is 50% of making efficient use of an IDE). I like good interfaces and consider ease of use to be the primary reason to use a computer instead of a paper and pen. Nevertheless, I take great interest in alternative operating systems like Linux and in the Linux community in general and sat the above mainly to illustrate that I'm an outsider by necessity. If the above changes, I'll move. I'd love to run a faster, more stable OS.
The point of this message is to give a warning. When I read articles like the one entitled "Linux is not Red Hat" I detect a strain of paranoia that is very familiar to me as a former Amiga user and this concerns me. It reveals that the Linux community is very fragile and that, if one desired, disrupting the commnity would be very easy. Since there are companies that would be served by such disruptions, and these companies are currently being motivated to improve their own products (some of which I use) largely due to Linux, I have a legitimate point of concern.
The Linux community, from the outside, seems distrustful and self-loathing. When a Linux company succeeds and tries to distinguish themselves (as Red Hat is doing), the Linux community tends to have discussions reminiscent of revultionaries questioning the loyalty of their leaders to a cause. This is very, very dangerous.
Consider how easy it would be to use Slashdot's anonymous coward posting to "dead agent" Linux.
"dead agent" --> fictional messages distributed within the ranks to inspire fear, confusion or terror. typical ideas are things like dropping leaflets on troops that you have good intelligence on telling them that you just bombed their families in town such-and-such into a burning oblivion and include what looks like xeroxes of newspaper reports about the tragedy [from papers familiar to the troops in question] along with a marked-up casualties & fatalities list (also looking copied/xeroxed). In the modern day, Scientologists use "dead agenting" to attack critics by spreading stories about their critics social lives, etc.
I offer the following four fictional messages. Imagine if they were posted by employees or agents of companies that would benefit
THE FOLLOWING ARE TOTALLY FALSE!
First, start the havoc with something like:
>> There's a much larger issue at stake with CW. A friend of mine who I will not name used to work on the backend for CW MacOS. He said that on numerous occasions he came across code that was obviously cut and pasted from GPL'd code from GNU (especially gcc and no I am not talking about flex/bison generated parser stuff [which they don't use, btw] or other exempt stuff) or stuff that had obviously started that way and been modified. Whenever he brought it up the manager squashed it ("it's public domain") or said that it wasn't their problem (since it was in a different part of the product). He was warned pretty severely not to make an issue of it and told that if he wanted to talk licenses, legal would be happy to explain to him all sorts of things.
I shrugged off this knowledge because CW was strictly Mac&Windows and Open Source is mostly lipservice in that segment. I'm a linux user, I don't care. I know that sounds lazy, but that's how it is. But to have it happening on Linux and nobody willing or able to do anything about it is a horrifying thought. If we don't defend GPL, it becomes meaningless, but who wants to get involved in a suit with a big ISV (who can afford it?). They (and others) are seeking to drive a wedge between free software and open source. >see bottom>
Add on another message as a reply:
>> Not surprising AT ALL. I heard something similar to this from a buddy of mine who worked at RedHat before he got sick of the place and decided to move on. He said that GPL abuse was considered a non-issue at RedHat in any context involving improving their relations with commercial ISVs. RedHat was talking about putting together engineer-consultants whose job was going to be to go into commercial ISVs and do nothing but get those ISVs onto Linux and Red Hat Linux specifically (if possible). Management even had a term for it -- "fair game" -- that they'd use as a sort of code when referring to focusing ISVs on RHL instead of general Linux. Helping ISVs by throwing code at them was SOP and since the engineers were Linux geeks a lot of the code that went out was modified GPL'd code with the license removed that presumably ends up in products. I think they were working with Metrowerks, too...
Same buddy said that he'd had enough of working for a commercial company that claimed they were interested in "open source" and "free software." He couldn't take the hypocrites at every turn. >see bottom>
That would be more than enough to start a firestorm, but smart players know how to win. Add another post along the lines of:
>> No surprise. GPL is dead if commercial people feel they can ignore it. They'll use whatever resources they can for the least amoutn possible == free! How can we stop this? A boycott would be a start but isn't enough. >see bottom>
The purpose of the above post would be to silence people who would panic -- they see someone else panicing and instead of downplaying the problem or trying to calm people down, they move to the attack. To solidify this (and add feelings of general hopelessness by brining up a well financed and well staffed enemy), you add a fourth message:
>> Ho could you prove it, anyway? Suppose that Metrowerks memset (for example, I have no idea) was ripped off. How could you prove it?... someone should crawl through the C runtime source that MS provides with VC++, too... >see bottom>
And that'd do it. Firestorm.
In this case, the target (Metrowerks) would be burned pretty thoroughly by nothing more than four contrived posts and the use of anti-RedHat paranoia. More than one company has a good reason to burn companies that are considering supporting Linux commercially. They might like to make a few examples as warnings to others.
You can bet that certain companies would call up Metrowerks (if the above posts & resulting firestorm were reality) and say, "Gee, sorry you're having so much trouble there -- isn't it strange that you never have those kind of PR problems on a platform like ours? They're such kooks, god, you have our sympathy working with them. They're probably just using it as an excuse to steal your software, anyway."
Think about who would gain from such practices. Think about the paranoia and conspiracy-minded aspects of the community they'd be using to get there.
Articles like this one (RH != Linux) make these kinds of destructive tactics MORE POSSIBLE.
I think what I'm trying to say here, folks, is that you need to relax a little. If Metrowerks thinks that they can gain by supporting other Linux platforms, they'll support more. If they think that you're just going to bitch and moan or propose totally absurd alternatives (like having volunteers port it "for free!" to other Linux versions), you frustrate and annoy the people who ARE trying to work with you, make others who are considering it rule you out, and fester a virulent strain of paranoia and hostility that could be used (as demonstrated above) to destabilize the community a whole.
In other words, LIGHTEN UP.
RSR
*QUOTED ARTICLES ABOVE AND ALL OF THEIR CONTENTS WERE TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. THEY WERE EXAMPLES OF THE KIND OF DESTRUCTIVE PROPAGANDA THAT ***COULD*** BE WRITTEN. (I feel obligated to say this again or people will read the above and not read the context and just freak...)
Slashdot Mirror
(not to be lame and reply to my own post, but)
(0) I mention the stuff at the top because I'm saying that as someone who isn't really INSIDE (and who has good reasons why) things look pretty paranoid and hostile from the OUTSIDE
(1) the example messages are examples of how hostile corporate entities COULD write FALSE, MISLEADING or otherwise DISHONEST messages that key in on popular Linux community hysteria
(2) to reiterate, those example messages would be posted by people using fake accounts or anons
(3) they are FALSE and are for EXAMPLE PURPOSES ONLY...
A warning to a fragile community...
I want to talk a little bit about how dangerous and destructive articles like this are.
I AM NOT A LINUX USER, although I have dallied with running Linux on my machine on more than one occasion. I am one of the many x86 Windows users who has at one time or another installed and then uninstalled a Linux distribution. Over the last few years, I've bought two copies of Slackware and two copies of RedHat which translates in the grand Linux headcount to "four users" when in fact I represent zero (I have a single license for Windows 95, thereby contributing 1/4th the number to the Windows headcount that I contribute to Linux's). I don't use Linux for a relatively simple reason: it doesn't work for me. When I think about what I do with my computr I'm systematic.
I read email using Eudora, an excellent email program with a good interface that's easy to use and handles my email volume and have seamlessly integrated PGP. I read netnews using Free Agent from Forte, likewise an excellent program with a good interface. I browse the web with Netscape and Internet Explorer, with Netscape configured with images, Java and Javascript turned off and IE with all of them on so that I can choose "how" to browse just by choosing the tool to browse with. I play games -- lately, "Gruntz" and various arcade game emulators. Lastly, I program, with Cafe or Visual Studio. I primarily program graphics using DirectX and OpenGL.
For these tasks, Linux has little to offer me. Moving to Linux would mean giving up having a good email client, giving up having a good newsreader, giving up all hope of a stable, up-to-date, fast web browser, giving up my favorite games (MAME is available for Linux, but it's generally slower than the DOS and win32 versions), giving up all hope of having a good, rich IDE. Graphics? Give it up entirely. 3d support is practically non-existant on Linux and where it exists it's for last-generation hardware (at best) and poorly supported and even more poorly integrated into the overall system (Mesa on 3dfx is an unacceptable substitute, though perhaps this will change in the long term with some support coming from Matrox for the G200 and Nvidia).
I don't want to have to spend days or weeks getting the system "the way I like it" or even into a usable state (fvwm95 on RH4 was a great example of this: lots of icons pointing to programs that weren't installed, the worst possible GUI interface concept) and I don't want to have to rebuild my kernel just to get sound.
So Linux doesn't work for me and can't be made to work for now. I don't want to use a hacked together tcl/tk based email program where I can manually add a button for PGP and I don't want to have to pretend that EMACS is an acceptable substitute for an IDE with an excellent help system (CW Linux may suffice here, the other Linux alternatives simply don't -- documentation and context-sensitive documentation searches is 50% of making efficient use of an IDE). I like good interfaces and consider ease of use to be the primary reason to use a computer instead of a paper and pen.
Nevertheless, I take great interest in alternative operating systems like Linux and in the Linux community in general and sat the above mainly to illustrate that I'm an outsider by necessity. If the above changes, I'll move. I'd love to run a faster, more stable OS.
The point of this message is to give a warning. When I read articles like the one entitled "Linux is not Red Hat" I detect a strain of paranoia that is very familiar to me as a former Amiga user and this concerns me. It reveals that the Linux community is very fragile and that, if one desired, disrupting the commnity would be very easy. Since there are companies that would be served by such disruptions, and these companies are currently being motivated to improve their own products (some of which I use) largely due to Linux, I have a legitimate point of concern.
The Linux community, from the outside, seems distrustful and self-loathing. When a Linux company succeeds and tries to distinguish themselves (as Red Hat is doing), the Linux community tends to have discussions reminiscent of revultionaries questioning the loyalty of their leaders to a cause. This is very, very dangerous.
Consider how easy it would be to use Slashdot's anonymous coward posting to "dead agent" Linux.
"dead agent" --> fictional messages distributed within the ranks to inspire fear, confusion or terror. typical ideas are things like dropping leaflets on troops that you have good intelligence on telling them that you just bombed their families in town such-and-such into a burning oblivion and include what looks like xeroxes of newspaper reports about the tragedy [from papers familiar to the troops in question] along with a marked-up casualties & fatalities list (also looking copied/xeroxed). In the modern day, Scientologists use "dead agenting" to attack critics by spreading stories about their critics social lives, etc.
I offer the following four fictional messages. Imagine if they were posted by employees or agents of companies that would benefit
THE FOLLOWING ARE TOTALLY FALSE!
First, start the havoc with something like:
>>
There's a much larger issue at stake with CW. A friend of mine who I will not name used to work on the backend for CW MacOS. He said that on numerous occasions he came across code that was obviously cut and pasted from GPL'd code from GNU (especially gcc and no I am not talking about flex/bison generated parser stuff [which they don't use, btw] or other exempt stuff) or stuff that had obviously started that way and been modified. Whenever he brought it up the manager squashed it ("it's public domain") or said that it wasn't their problem (since it was in a different part of the product). He was warned pretty severely not to make an issue of it and told that if he wanted to talk licenses, legal would be happy to explain to him all sorts of things.
I shrugged off this knowledge because CW was strictly Mac&Windows and Open Source is mostly lipservice in that segment. I'm a linux user, I don't care. I know that sounds lazy, but that's how it is. But to have it happening on Linux and nobody willing or able to do anything about it is a horrifying thought. If we don't defend GPL, it becomes meaningless, but who wants to get involved in a suit with a big ISV (who can afford it?). They (and others) are seeking to drive a wedge between free software and open source.
>see bottom>
Add on another message as a reply:
>>
Not surprising AT ALL. I heard something similar to this from a buddy of mine who worked at RedHat before he got sick of the place and decided to move on. He said that GPL abuse was considered a non-issue at RedHat in any context involving improving their relations with commercial ISVs. RedHat was talking about putting together engineer-consultants whose job was going to be to go into commercial ISVs and do nothing but get those ISVs onto Linux and Red Hat Linux specifically (if possible). Management even had a term for it -- "fair game" -- that they'd use as a sort of code when referring to focusing ISVs on RHL instead of general Linux. Helping ISVs by throwing code at them was SOP and since the engineers were Linux geeks a lot of the code that went out was modified GPL'd code with the license removed that presumably ends up in products. I think they were working with Metrowerks, too...
Same buddy said that he'd had enough of working for a commercial company that claimed they were interested in "open source" and "free software." He couldn't take the hypocrites at every turn.
>see bottom>
That would be more than enough to start a firestorm, but smart players know how to win. Add another post along the lines of:
>>
No surprise. GPL is dead if commercial people feel they can ignore it. They'll use whatever resources they can for the least amoutn possible == free! How can we stop this? A boycott would be a start but isn't enough.
>see bottom>
The purpose of the above post would be to silence people who would panic -- they see someone else panicing and instead of downplaying the problem or trying to calm people down, they move to the attack. To solidify this (and add feelings of general hopelessness by brining up a well financed and well staffed enemy), you add a fourth message:
>>
Ho could you prove it, anyway? Suppose that Metrowerks memset (for example, I have no idea) was ripped off. How could you prove it?... someone should crawl through the C runtime source that MS provides with VC++, too...
>see bottom>
And that'd do it. Firestorm.
In this case, the target (Metrowerks) would be burned pretty thoroughly by nothing more than four contrived posts and the use of anti-RedHat paranoia. More than one company has a good reason to burn companies that are considering supporting Linux commercially. They might like to make a few examples as warnings to others.
You can bet that certain companies would call up Metrowerks (if the above posts & resulting firestorm were reality) and say, "Gee, sorry you're having so much trouble there -- isn't it strange that you never have those kind of PR problems on a platform like ours? They're such kooks, god, you have our sympathy working with them. They're probably just using it as an excuse to steal your software, anyway."
Think about who would gain from such practices. Think about the paranoia and conspiracy-minded aspects of the community they'd be using to get there.
Articles like this one (RH != Linux) make these kinds of destructive tactics MORE POSSIBLE.
I think what I'm trying to say here, folks, is that you need to relax a little. If Metrowerks thinks that they can gain by supporting other Linux platforms, they'll support more. If they think that you're just going to bitch and moan or propose totally absurd alternatives (like having volunteers port it "for free!" to other Linux versions), you frustrate and annoy the people who ARE trying to work with you, make others who are considering it rule you out, and fester a virulent strain of paranoia and hostility that could be used (as demonstrated above) to destabilize the community a whole.
In other words, LIGHTEN UP.
RSR
*QUOTED ARTICLES ABOVE AND ALL OF THEIR CONTENTS WERE TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. TOTALLY FALSE. THEY WERE EXAMPLES OF THE KIND OF DESTRUCTIVE PROPAGANDA THAT ***COULD*** BE WRITTEN. (I feel obligated to say this again or people will read the above and not read the context and just freak...)